Dear Teen Me, from Author Elisa Ludwig (PRETTY CROOKED)

Posted on September 3, 2011
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Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Me,

Me at age 16, in one of my baggy sweaters, emerging from my bear cave of a room.

People always tell you that you look like your mom, but you just don’t see it. Especially not right now, as her face hangs above yours in the dressing room mirror. You’re miserable in the outfit she just picked out for you—too-small, too preppy, too matchy-matchy. But you’re biting your tongue, afraid to tell her. Hopefully she’ll come to her senses before there’s a tense scene in the checkout line.

It’s a loaded situation. There have been way too many fights here, in the skylit halls of Strawbridge & Clothier. Too many battles over who you think you are and who she wants you to be.

This whole place reminds you of her, actually. It’s not just that they try to spritz you with her perfume (Aromatics Elixir) when you walk through the makeup department. It’s the 1950s architecture, the astro-turfy green carpeting, the cheerful blank-faced mannequins that seem to say you can be the right kind of girl if only you buy the right things. All of it makes you feel a nagging sort of longing, because you wish it you were that easy.

Later, when you go into the Gap and find a cardigan you can both agree on (preppy enough for her, baggy and figure-hiding enough for you) you buy it in two colors: purple and olive green. Who knows when you’ll agree again? Best to stock up. And it will look perfect with the babydoll dresses and Doc Martens she hates.

The thing is, you’re kind of an alien spawn. And you’re apparently a pale alien spawn, because she’s always telling you to wear some rouge. Rouge! Like you would be caught dead in makeup. It’s so anti-feminist. It’s so old-school. It’s so The Beauty Myth. (Though right now you happen to be reading Naomi Wolf and listening to Guns N’ Roses at the same time, and, call thirty-six-year-old me crazy, but I think that’s making for a few mixed messages.)

It’s other things, too. Your mom is upbeat and friendly and she always got along with her parents. She got a college degree but she decided to devote her life to raising you and your sisters. She spends a lot of time cooking and collecting cookbooks, which you find totally boring. She’s got an obsessive way of zeroing in on the schmutz on a restaurant fork, or on your shirt, or in your room if you let her in. She’s the only person who lived through the 1960s and never experimented with drugs. Jews don’t drink, she says. She’s never even smoked a cigarette, for crying out loud.

Well, the smoking is a real problem. You know she’s had cancer already, that the cancer runs through the genes on that side of the family like a poisonous embroidery, but yet you seem determined to do it anyway. Even when she sniffs at you as you walk through the door and cries, pleading with you to quit. Even when you’re alone in your room and the memory of her crumpled-up face makes you cry with shame and self-hatred. You know how she feels about this, and yet it seems important somehow to send that message wrapped in Camel Light-tainted clothes. Which is not that you don’t care. Just that you are you.

But either way, she thinks you don’t care.

This is my sweet sixteen. My mom is on the left and I am on the right.

You’ll continue to baffle and anger her with the smoking—and not only that, but a homemade eyebrow piercing, a steady stream of polyester vintage store finds and a parade of very questionable friends. The icing on the cake will be the time after college when you’re backpacking around Europe. You’re supposed to meet your parents in a hostel in Florence, but silly you, you’ll get the date wrong and they will wait for you, worried sick, for a good twelve hours because there’s nothing else they can do and no one is really using cell phones yet. Until you show up with two random guys, utterly clueless, and ask them what they’re doing there.

Though that’s probably not the last time you’ll disappoint her, it will be a turning point.

Well, guess what, you crazy sullen sixteen-year-old, you? You’re going to grow up and become a LOT like your mom. You’ll inherit her love of cooking and go on to obsess about cookbooks. You’ll develop her laser eye for schmutz. You’ll grow to love the smell of her perfume, which instantly smells like home every time you catch a whiff of it in a crowd. You’ll wish you’d spent more time learning how to apply eye shadow, because later on you won’t think of feminism as all-or-nothing, and you could definitely use the twenty years of practice. You’ll respect her choices, because you’ll see that she had her own kind of power. You’ll come to see all those comparisons as compliments.

My mom was right. I could’ve used some rouge.

You’ll even kind of miss the painful days when you and your mom went shopping together, the idea that someone else was that invested in how you looked. When she was doing her best to guide you, with the only experience she had at her disposal. When she was really only loving you, even when you were not ready to let her.

With much love and affection,
Thirty-six-year-old me

P.S. Save those dresses—Urban Outfitters is selling them for seventy-five bucks this season.

Adult Elisa!

Elisa Ludwig’s debut YA novel, PRETTY CROOKED, will be published in March 2012 (Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins). While her protagonist Willa Fox is not nearly as angsty as she was as a teenager, she knows a little something about mother-daughter relationships. Elisa also works as a freelance writer, with a special interest in all things food-related. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband Jesse and cat Beau a.k.a. Bread. Visit her at www.elisaludwig.com or on Twitter @ElisaLudwigYA.

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