High School Survivor

This Saturday at four o’clock it will be exactly fifty years since I walked across the stage of The Saratoga Performing Arts center as a high school graduate. And this Saturday at exactly four o’clock, there will be a class reunion on Zoom. Of course, I’ve been invited like all my classmates, but I hesitate to sign up for the link because the love/hate relationship I had with high school still clings to me

Zoom, link, these words didn’t exist fifty years ago. That reminds me of something my mom said when my children were young, “There will be ways for your kids to get in trouble as teenagers that you could never imagine.”

My parents were part of the Greatest Generation who fought the Nazi’s in Europe and the Japanese in far off Asia.

I was part of the Woodstock Generation who witnessed the corruption of Watergate, the insanity of the Vietnam War, and the riots that erupted when national guards shot protesting students at Kent State University. Was it any wonder we rebelled and came up with slogans like Make Love Not War, and Question authority?

What was my mom thinking when she made that prediction anyway? Was she remembering the time I came home so drunk from a school dance, my dad asked me if someone had slipped me a Mickey, a term from his era when good girls didn’t drink? Did that make me a bad girl? I’d left the dance with friends and older boys and felt so socially awkward I got drunk for the first time on a coke-size bottle of Ripple.

My dad’s greatest vice was smoking cigars, so how could he imagine I’d ever walk out the back door by the school library to smoke pot at a friend’s house on the other side of the woods.

My mom was valedictorian of her small rural high school and one of the first women admitted to her state college, so how could she imagine I’d rather skip school one sunny June day and ride a tandem bike all the way to Ballston Spa as if my friend and I were the Double Mint twins instead of budding scholars.

My mom was a home economics major and able to make me trendy mini-skirts and maxi coats, so how could she imagine I’d rather wear bell bottom jeans and pea coats from the Army Navy store.

I’m certain neither of my parents ever imagined I’d skip school one bright October morning to try mescaline and witness the forest floor turning into a magnificent, interlocking puzzle.

My parents thought I was happy in high school because I got A’s and B’s. For a season, I was even a cheerleader. I was in a school play. I went on school ski trips. I stayed after school to play field hockey, basketball, and do gymnastics on the trampoline in a harness that made me feel like I was Peter Pan able to flip and fly as if gravity had no hold on me.

All to say, I was a girl in an excellent suburban high school, completely unaware of my privilege, and yet my four years there, made me feel like I was never enough. Not pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough, cool enough, and so I pushed every boundary.

Today, I think of myself more as a high school survivor than graduate, my soul swept up in a social whirlpool that almost drowned me. I suppose that’s why I hesitate to zoom back into that time warp, afraid I’ll be sucked under again by who I was back then, a girl I’m not particularly proud of. I wonder how many others shrink from reconnecting for the same reason.

That said, I realize the love/hate relationship I had was not with high school, but with myself.

So, after fifty years, a senior in a whole new way, I realize my parents probably knew more than I could imagine, and could only pray that their insecure, rebellious daughter wouldn’t make the same mistakes they did.

Thankfully our heavenly father, promises not to remember any of us according to the foolishness of our youth, but according to the unfathomable depths of his mercy.

Therefore, I’ve decided to make peace with my past and link back up with fellow survivors of one of the most perilous episodes of my life, high school.

Anyone identify?

Cover photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash