I'm feeling a bit sad and sorry for myself tonight as the monthly pity party hits. Tomorrow or the next day all will be good with the world again but right now I need to get some stuff off my chest and out of my head., cry a few tears, and try and find centre again.
When I was 11 I read a book called Puberty Blues. A true life account of two girls growing up as surfer chicks in the Sutherland Shire of Sydney in the late 1970s. It is a brutally honest account of sex and sexism, of a time called safer and more innocent, when kids smoked, drank, fucked, sucked, and did what it took to fit in.It is not a hard book to read. Not long, or particularly taxing for the mind or emotions. But it is also not a book suitable for an 11 year old to read. Even more, it is not a book for a kid to read when it is not followed up with an alternative world view.
I clearly remember buying Puberty Blues. I bought it with my own money at the newsagent in Rochester. It was the summer of 1981/1982. A year earlier I have been sexually assaulted by my mother's cousin - something I didn't speak about or even remember for a very long time. Despite that I was naive, innocent. My sister had read Puberty Blues. It was in the high school library. She was 14 at the time. My mother had read the book at my sister's urging. They had always had a good relationship. I bought and read the book with my mother's permission. I don't remember what my dad had to say about it. Probably nothing. So I read the book and that same summer saw the movie with an older friend.
In the book Debbie and Sue, the main characters, were 13, in the movie (because of censorship laws at the time) they were 16. Not so much older than me. The things they did didn't seem to be all that different from what my sister and her girlfriends did. And I knew from reading my sister's diary that she was no innocent. These things were real. Not the feel good sitcoms from the USA, or the stories my mother told of being a teenager in Rabaul, PNG, with houseboys and dances that registered on the earthquake scale of the small volcanic island. And dad never talked of his teen years. Ever.
So I was a sponge sopping up a lot of information that wasn't tempered at home. Nor was it tempered at school. Despite attending an alternative high school where we called teachers by their first names and did a lot of creative and performing arts, it was still, in many ways, stuck in the traditional gender models of the 1980s. I learned that I was supposed to flirt with boys at the Blue Light discos. That I was meant to let them kiss me, and touch me. But it never happened for me. Maybe I was too needy. Or too scared. Whatever. But I felt like a failure because I wasn't doing what I saw as normal. I did meet a boy at a camp, and let him do things to me. Something I was 'encouraged' to do by some people I thought were friends. But providence, or fear, stopped it from going too far. I wasn't even 13 at the time. And at that age I saw myself as a failure.
Puberty Blues wasn't the only book I was allowed to read at too young an age. I also read Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic - a book which contains a scene of the main character trading sex with a group of boys/men in exchange for a bottle of booze. Then there was Go Ask Alice - the published diary of a teenage drug addict, and H (also known as Christianne F), the story of a teenage heroin addict and prostitute. All of these I read before I was 14. I also read Sybil too. All of these books were available in the school library. In fact it was because of me that the school library instituted a policy of requiring parental permission to borrow particular books. You see I would read them and talk about them to my friends. Those friends would then want to read the books, only some parents weren't impressed with what they were reading and complained. Day one of each school year from about year 9 up I would walk into the library with a note from my mum giving me blanket permission to read any book I wanted to. I don't know what my teachers thought about it. Nobody ever said to me that the books weren't suitable. I was a precocious reader and they pandered to that.
At home there was also a lot of things that happened that now, as a parent, make me cringe. I can remember my parents talking openly about watching 'blue movies', and doing so in company of other adults. Porn, in other words, although by today's standards it would be considered very tame (Hey, I was a kid. I knew where the video tapes were kept and I watched them. Frankly they did nothing for me). I can also remember being allowed as a teenager to watch some movies that were highly inappropriate. Two stand out, both of them R rated: The Evil Dead, which was considered THE horror movie of the day. Frankly it was bloody awful and we laughed our way through it. The other movie was Caligula. My mum had borrowed that one for my sister. I don't remember much of it. Just one scene really. A young couple went to Caligula's palace/temple/whatever, to ask his permission to marry. Caligula asked if they were virgins, to which both said yes. He then proceeded to rape both of them. The scene ended with Caligula walking out of the chamber while the coupld both writhed in pain and humiliation at what he had done. Even writing about it makes me feel sick. There is no way that was appropriate for a teenager. There is a reason it was an R rated movie.
So basically I look back and see that I had some pretty fucked influences in my life. Things that should have been tempered by my parents. Or maybe they just should have been restricted. After all, isn't parenting about protecting kids from the things they are too young or immature to understand. Just because a person can read a book doesn't meant they are able to comprehend it.
(This is getting very long, sorry)
So this year a TV series of Puberty Blues has been screening. Only eight episodes but they no longer call that a mini-series. It has triggered me big time. The girls ages are left deliberately non-defined, but they look young. The essence of the book is there, more so than the movie in my opinion. I have watched all seven episodes that have screened. I have done that despite being triggered at some point during every episode. I don't know if I am trying to torture myself, or to prove that it doesn't really have the power to hurt me anymore, or what exactly. But it has made my PTSD something I have had to cope with again, rather than it being a niggly thing I am barely aware of most of the time. And tonight I began to get angry. Not at the TV series, or at the book. Not even at the authors who wrote the book. No, I am angry at my parents. I am angry because they didn't protect me. Not that they didn't protect me from my mum's cousin, of the boy at the camp. Or even from the 24 year old I dated at 16. No I am angry because they didn't protect me from the emotional consequences that books like Puberty Blues can have. I'm angry because they allowed sex to be not normalised but trivialised. I am angry that I was allowed to grow up not thinking that sex was something special to be shared with someone you love, but that it was something to be given to anyone who asked for it, or even just wanted to take it. I am angry that saying no to sex was never discussed at all. How do you grow up not knowing you can say no? So I am angry. Fuming even. Angry for a lost childhood. Angry for a lost normal, healthy sexuality. And angry that I now have to try and teach my own kids these things that I know virtually nothing about.
I know parenting doesn't come with an instruction book. I know that it is easy, as the child, to see how our parents fucked up big time. I know that I will make mistakes with my own kids (but hopefully nothing so damaging). Maybe I will always be an over-protective parent but I also think for my sanity I have to be. And you can be sure that my kids won't be reading Puberty Blues any time soon.
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