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The theme of the trip was “Growing Up,” which, we would soon learn, meant “Puberty.”
Our Girl Scout troop had never done anything like it before; we’d never taken our mothers on a cabin trip. But this was a special time, a time for firsts. We were eleven, and a lot of things were changing.
Our whole troop drove up to the cabin on Saturday afternoon, and after dinner, we spent the evening playing games. All of us played Pictionary together, and we laughed at our mothers’ terrible drawings. Afterward, we girls went across the hall to play Uno while our mothers stayed on the couches, talking about mom things. My mother looked glamorous in comparison to the others. Many of them hid their lumpy bodies with baggy clothing. A couple of the Asian moms who didn’t speak English very well hunched over shyly, as if they didn’t want to be seen. But my mother sat with her back yardstick-straight and commanded the room, looking radiant even in her high-waisted jeans and T-shirt. Her shoulders and arms were muscled from the hours of tennis she played every morning, and a perfectly round perm hovered around her head like a halo. Her voice was strange—high-pitched, warbly, and tinted with a strong Malaysian-British accent. I could hear it splintering across the cabin. But nobody ever seemed to notice, because her voice was often followed by laughter. Men thought she was willful and stubbornly attractive; women found her generous and charming—the kind of person who took new immigrants under her wing and introduced them to kalbi and margaritas and Thanksgiving dinners (though she always bought a turkey and a Peking duck to supplement the dry meat).
Meanwhile, the girls had shifted to talking about ’N Sync. I said, “I like BSB better,” and the troop leader’s daughter snorted and said, “BSB is for babies.” The other girls nodded and turned away from me. I dragged my one friend in the troop to our bunks early so we could talk about our nerdy ghost theories in private, but before I left, I turned to see my mother exchanging numbers and promises with all the other women, the mothers clamoring to write their names on her piece of paper.
The next day we had a full puberty curriculum. Our troop’s leaders had brought pads and tampons, and they did a graphic show-and-tell about how to handle your period. This was followed by trust falls and going around in a circle to share puberty-related feelings…. I’m sure there was more, but everything was so embarrassing that I have blocked out nearly all of it. One cringey memory that persists is when our leaders brought out large rolls of paper, which we spread out on the floor. The girls lay down on the paper, and our mothers traced the outlines of our bodies in marker. Then, together, as mother and daughter, we were supposed to draw the changes we’d expect on our bodies. Breasts on our chests. Armpit and pubic hair. I tried to be funny and made stinky green waves coming out of my armpits and a puka-shell choker around my neck, but there was no evading how abominable this entire exercise was. My future boobs didn’t have nipples. Neither of us could bear to draw nipples. Just big, hulking, grape-scented, purple U’s on my chest.
I kept waiting for my mother to deride this as white-people nonsense, but she played along gamely the entire time, smiling and laughing and teasing me, as if she were just like them.
Afterward, we all stood in a circle and held hands. My troop leader pulled out her guitar, and we swayed together while singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. The lyrics are nostalgic, wondering how a daughter could have blossomed into a woman when yesterday she was just a girl.
As we sang, all the mothers became misty-eyed, stroking their daughters’ hair, kissing the tops of their heads. The other girls leaned into their embraces. My mother did not touch me but stood alone and wept loudly. She cried all the time in the privacy of our home—ugly, bent-in-half sobs—but she never fell apart in public, and the sight alarmed me.
If it hurt her so much for me to grow up, I wouldn’t. That moment determined my actions for the next few years: I did not tell her when I got my period and instead stuffed my underwear with toilet paper and hid my stained clothes in the attic. I bound my chest, wore baggy T-shirts, and hunched to keep my developing breasts from showing—even when she slammed her hand between my shoulder blades and snarled that I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But I would do anything to make sure she was happy, to show her that I would be hers forever. That was all that mattered.
After the song, we hugged our mothers, and they wiped their tears and held us close. Then we went to our bunk beds to grab our duffel bags and go. My mother’s face was still red from crying, but I hoped she wasn’t just upset. I hoped the strange rituals had made her closer to me, somehow.
Unfortunately, the car ride was silent. I fretted and peeled my chapped lips until we were home and we’d unloaded the duffel bags from the car. It was then that she exploded.
“At breakfast this morning, you corrected the way Lindsay was holding her knife. Do you remember that? You told her to cut her ham differently. In front of her mother! Why did you do that?” she snapped. “It’s not your job to teach people that! You looked like an asshole!”
Flummoxed, I replied, “I don’t know—she was holding her knife wrong, like she couldn’t even cut it. I thought I could help?”
“Help! Ha!” she barked. “Oh, a lot of help you were. I was so ashamed of you on that trip I couldn’t even stand it. Do you know how competitive you were during Pictionary? You got upset when other people didn’t know what you were drawing, like a big baby. Everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at you. I wanted to die watching you. I wanted to say, ‘That is not my daughter.’?”
It felt like I’d sat up quickly in a top bunk and thwacked my head on the ceiling. Now? Really? Of all times, after a mother-daughter bonding trip? “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Of course you didn’t realize. Because you don’t think, do you? You just act without thinking all the time even though I keep telling you, ‘Think.’ No wonder all the kids at school hate you.”
“I’m sorry about the Pictionary. And with the knife. I was just like…here, try it this way. I don’t think her mom felt bad. It didn’t seem like she was upset, but…”
“Ooh.” My mother’s lips formed a very thin line, and her eyes narrowed. “You think you know better than I do? Now you’re talking back to me?”
“I’m just trying to apologize! Please! I’m really sorry. I just thought…maybe after that weekend…I thought maybe things would be okay.”