If I were Sweet Sixteen in 2006

I would, of course, have been born in 1990, which is a whole decade away from my real DOB in 1980. How different and yet how unsurprisingly the same my life would be if I were born ten years later. If I were sixteen in 2006, for example, I would not be a supporter of Bush. I wouldn't fully know why - he seems like a nice man who doesn't drink (like I don't, at age sixteen) and who runs a lot (like I try to, at age sixteen) and who professes his faith in God (as I do, quite heartily, as a devoutly Catholic sixteen year-old). For all these things, I admire my president, our president, but I also idolize my father who, albeit a Republican by primary vote, thinks Bush is a bit scary, a bit erratic in wielding his political clout. If I were sixteen, I would tell my father just about everything, particularly about school and my frustrations with certain teachers who don't even use proper grammar, which bothers me more at age sixteen than if, say, a teacher were to share something inherently untrue with the class or publicly endorse President Bush.

I would not be scared about wars overseas in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor the fact that the U.S. is often without alliance. I will not even fear wars between friends, because I would be a principled sixteen year-old in 2006, undaunted by confrontation and the friendships lost at its harsh expense. Yet, I will be terrified by my powerlessness in so many things. I will sit up at night, wondering if my bosslady at Dairy Queen hates me, even though she told me yesterday that I made the Dilly Bars faster and better than anyone else. I will sometimes lay awake until all of my family has gone to bed and I will cry, passively, listening to "Fall Apart Again" by Brandi Carlile. I might even own the Nick Lachey CD and secretly like the song about his break-up w/ Jessica, and I will listen to that, too, wondering if I will ever be pretty. I, of course, at age sixteen, want to be pretty like Summer from "The O.C." or smart and sharp-looking, like a Gilmour Girl. I will cry and wonder if I will ever be noticeably pretty, pretty enough for one of the drivers at Domino's Pizza to ask one of my co-workers if I am attached.

At age sixteen, I will not own any mini skirts (they will not be mini-on me anyway, since I am 4'10"). I will also not own any of those tight pants that say "HOTTIE" in glitterati on the booty. I will stand on a tall soapbox about my fellow sixteen year-olds who wear them, questioning their motives in broadcasting pompous messages on their rear ends. Secretly, though, I will want someone to buy me a pair, ones that say "feministy" to be tongue-in-cheek.

My most favorite moments when I am sixteen will be playing tennis with my girlfriends. We will play at a park near my mother's house because I do not have a car and they will arrive in their Jeep Cherokees and Priuses, and mostly we will chase the ball into other courts but sometimes we will stop to talk about so-and-so who got a lifeguard boyfriend this summer, and did anyone watch MTV's "The Hills" and thank God we are not as "vapid" - our new SAT word - as those girls.

Still, I will spend most of my time reading on the back porch, trying to get the painful summer reading out of the way so that I can read Curtis Sittenfeld's newest:
The Man of My Dreams.

I will harass my sister and ignore my brother and roll my eyes at my mother. I will pray on my rosary beads that there will be peace on earth and that I will swear less under my breath. I will not realize that this will be among the most secure times in my life, that I am fortunate by so many measuring sticks, that I am blessed and cared for by many. Instead, I will long for the time when I can be like Julia Styles in "Ten Things I Hate About You" and get into Sarah Lawrence and write angsty things about my pained life as a sixteen year-old in 2006.

25 Fascinating Facts about My Childhood

1.) As a wee baby Kendra, I loved talking to the babies on the cover of Parents Magazine.

2.) I sucked my right pointer finger until I was in the 6th grade. I only stopped because I had a very painful oral surgery on the roof of my mouth due to the fact that a tooth (!) was starting to break through the roof of my mouth. Dentist friends now tell me that said tooth was probably re-routed to the roof of my mouth because of all of those years of finger-sucking. The irony!

3.) I have a baby blanket which my Auntie Doris crocheted for me which still lives with me. It is known as Blankie. The only time I was without Blankie was in college because I was worried wild fratboys would soak it with beer.

4.) My Catholic confirmation name was Elizabeth because I thought Elizabeth Ann Seton was the most feminist saint.

5.) My middle name used to be Colleen (I changed it post-marriage) which means “girl” in Gaelic.

6.) My family has a whole archive of home videos. Roughly 80% of them feature a heinously bossy version of myself.

7.) I used to watch PGA golfing with my father for hours. After my parents split, I would stay up at night eating Pop Tarts and watching the Golf Channel.

8.) I broke my leg in the 9th grade when I was swinging from a ceiling overhang and fell and landed on a set of stars. I heard a crack. It was disgusting.

9.) I faithfully kept a diary during 3rd and 4th grade. I wrote extensively about a real-life character “T.D.”

10.) I taught my brother how to say his bedtime prayers. My parents never knew until one night my mother tucked him in and he began listing all of the relatives for whom we had been praying.

11.) “Annie” was my favorite movie growing up and I especially liked the character Punjab. Presently, my bosses are Sikhs and they wear Punjab-esque turbins and know how to speak Punjabi.

12.) It typically took me at least an hour to fall asleep when I was in grade school. To pass the wiles of insomnia, I would often play beauty parlor, McDonald’s Drive Thru, and/or pretend that my classmates were hiding in the drawers of my dresser.

13.) My sister TP and I were masochists when it came to watching “Unsolved Mysteries.” We were fascinated by this program, but at the same time knew that we would never fall asleep after watching an episode about hitchhiker abductions.

14.) My first home had a real dark room in the basement. Sometimes I would go in there and wait to see if two red eyes would appear out of the big empty darkness.

15.) One of my favorite snow days during grade school was spent with my sister as tagalongs to my father who left us to chill in a courtroom whilst he talked shop with a judge in his quarters. Sometimes, when I think back to that day, and how my father had not wanted us to be left alone in a snow enbanked suburban home with all of the home videos of my heinous self to watch, and how he instead brought us to a building where the criminal/convict per capita was probably 1:1 so that we could sit unattended in a courtroom whilst he sat in protected quarters with a judge, whereby if we should scream, no one would have heard us as we were scuttled into an elevator shaft and made into prisonfeed at the hands of a crooked probation officer.

16.) I used to love making my mother crack-up uncontrollably. She was mostly a serious mother who dealt with us using much sarcasm – but I knew she had a freak flag to fly! She used to bust up when I rendered my best impression of Jimmy Stewart doing the Campbell’s soup commercial. She would laugh through her nose so hard! Now I make her laugh on the phone all the time, usually at my own expense, but it is totally worth it.

17.) I was deeply afraid of cauliflower. I do not believe that I tried it well on into my late ‘teens.

18.) I had dozens of baby-sitters, many of whom I absolutely despised. One of the kind ones was Mrs. Butts – oh yes, Mrs. Butts. She had many cats and would apply perfume to my wrists before I went to kindergarten so that I would not smell like a feeewine.

19.) I had a very smitten admirer in the 4th grade. His name was Hunter Weatherly-Lydon. He stuffed a bouquet of flowers in my Alf back-pack on the last day of school. I reacted terribly and ended up giving them to the principal because I was too embarrassed to take them home for fear of the mockery of my father; he extrapolated that Hunter and I would sail away on our yacht one day and watch our cares settle on the waves.

20.) The best part of kindergarten was when one of the classroom gerbils escaped. We had to walk across the very expansive kindergarten room on top of chairs.

21.) There isn’t a website big enough to list all of my childhood misconceptions, but one of them involved my neighbors whom I was convinced were brother and sister, yet, they were indeed married.

22.) Both of my siblings and I were mad for corned beef hash as children. You cannot tell me that we were not in touch with our Irish heritage.

23.) Somehow, when teachers made new seating charts, they always placed me next to a boy who a.) ate glue b.) was slow to learn or c.) both.

24.) In order to make me physically eligible to ride the Magnum rollercoaster at Cedar Point, my father stuffed my tennis shoes with newspaper. It worked.

25.) It took me a very long time to learn to read, but once I caught on, I jumped a whole reading group upwards and it took me three more years to jump to the highest level. Some people might resent this kind of caste system, but I say, it taught me to fight with words. Ha Ha. Hahaha. Ha?

Summer Depression

My friend's auntie was trying to get her mind around my winter depression. We were sitting out on the back porch and she was skewing her eyes with concern as I explained the function of my sunlamp. The sunlamp, I explained, triggered some kind of seratonin supply that would otherwise be all hibernating in my central nervous system, sitting in its slippers, playing black jack on the computer and sipping its morning coffee for hours. Enter the sunlamp to yell at it and to tell it to come out and play with the rest of the neurotransmitters. I told her about seasonal affective disorder and how it makes me so so tired during the winter. How I have no desire to leave the house generally, and want to cover everything I eat with hazelnut spread and heavy heavy cheeses. How I have no focus or stamina unless I sit in front of the sunlamp for at least half an hour like its a bank teller. Oh, how I love my sunlamp, I told her, from September to March, it's the best thing that has happened to winter since snowshoes. Or Netflix.

Then she said that she thought she had seasonal affective disorder, too. But only for the summer. She said that the warmer weather always triggered a kind of melancholy in her. It reminded her that she was very much alone, and just thinking about going out and taking a walk around the pond was very depressing, since she had no walking partner. She felt tremendous pressure to partner up during the summer months, and it all culminated in making her just want to hibernate. It was understandable, I said, but then what was the antedote? A dark lamp?

What is it about the turning of seasons that prompts our bodies to want to hibernate? To hope that a particular season will soon pass to give us license to feel *ourselves* again? Are we all a little like plants that are perhaps not meant for certain climates or hemispheres? Or are we all bound to favor certain seasons - to thrive during some and to bumble around inside during others? Furthermore, why is it acceptable to retire to Florida post-65 but, until then, "only practical" to live in one locale for four seasons out of the year.

Maybe I should start my own pre-retirement community somewhere. Bermuda shorts and straw hats perfectly acceptable, even during the winter.