You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession

by Piper Weiss

my own memory, which occupies the same organ responsible for emotional responses and invention.

next: All that keeps you from disappearing is another person who sees you. What happens when they look away?

I will write the word tennis above one black line, and some other words above other lines to suggest I’m a multifaceted person.

In her practice she found that heterosexual men more commonly preferred the subservient role, a relief from the gender expectations foisted upon them from the outside world.

hate being left out of conversations about me. Somewhere inside them lies the truth about who I am, but I’m not allowed to hear it.

It seems such a waste. So many people without beds. So many beds without people.

“I don’t want anything,” I tell her, not because it’s the truth, but because I hate it when she reminds me that she’ll die someday.

When you’re rich, the less fortunate are what frightens you the most.

am shorter than most people my age, and am reminded of that fact often and by everyone. It is a characteristic that defines me. I am someone who didn’t reach the right height, and this strikes people as funny. People lower their elbows onto my head to pretend I’m an armrest.

Behind my parents’ mutual agitation is a romance.

That faith in magic dwindled over time, as competition heightened, parental compliments lost their value, and teachers introduced new scales of measurement, assessing

my abilities as decidedly average, devoid of that special quality. I guess this is their job, to help kids grow up and stop believing in magic, anchoring them instead within the business of hard work.

What’s most insufferable about privilege—whether white, wealthy, physically able, or free from the trauma of abuse—is the denial of its existence. The assumption that we are all the same. That some small emotional bruise you once had is comparable to the jagged head wound another endured, the memory of its stages—watery, crusted and matted, clean and indented but never entirely gone.

Body of Evidence. It had the sound of a grown-up movie, like Final Analysis. Double Impact. Basic Instinct. Fatal Attraction. Always a combination of words that imply both legal proceedings and shadowy bedroom scenes.

When my parents fight, it’s about the dog. She is untrainable and leaves puddles around the apartment when everyone is away. Each one blames the other for her accidents. Someone didn’t walk her enough; someone was too lenient with punishment. My mother hired an animal therapist who said the dog understands what’s right and wrong, but suffers from anxiety. The fear of being bad when she’s left alone.

Worse than knowing you’re unlovable is believing, momentarily, that you are not.

In Edith’s day, a man was given a name. A woman was given a temporary tag to be traded in for the prize of a romantic commitment. Any vestige of her old self was bumped to the middle slot, and any middle name that once filled the slot vanished, as was expected of women’s middle names. Maiden names are only slightly less obsolete—they’re for password verifications and deep genealogy dives. Maiden names are designed like disappearing ink,

dissolving a former identity as easily as a felt brush wipes a blackboard clean of a lesson plan.

“Do you have kids?” the sex therapist who knew Gary Wilensky had asked me during our interview. When I told her I didn’t, she asked if I wanted them. I don’t know, I responded, I guess I was waiting for the decision to be made for me. I’m still waiting, though at thirty-eight, not deciding has become a decision in itself. I had expected motherhood to develop inside me, the way puberty had—without my input, and within the same time frame as others my age. Uncomfortable initially, the alignment with other women experiencing the same stage of maturity at the same pace eased the awkwardness of transition. Motherhood seemed the final step to becoming a woman, and like all the others, mostly required time. But it’s not children that usher in maturity, it’s the ability to make decisions.

Service, I learned, was key to any women’s story. What she can take away from this story on [insert interview with cookbook author], how she can improve from reading about [insert hair trend/diet trend/fashion trend]. We can always be better.

If anything, he was showing us his face,

and what a face looks like when the person who wears it disappears. It looks like a mask.

THERE IS A STUDY THAT CLAIMS the teenage brain develops at the rate of a baby’s brain—which is to say, the fastest rate it will ever grow. The difference the second time around is that you are both physically mobile and mentally more aware. You know that something is happening within you but not within your control. This is your new body, you’re told, but don’t touch it. Don’t use it yet. It’s dangerous. It’s not finished cooking.

The explanation that “girls crave attention” has been used for almost every broken

taboo adults can’t or don’t want to understand. If anything, many girls at that age feel too scrutinized and search for ways to counterbalance the attention they’re receiving.

Our early lives are spent learning the rules, and our adolescent years are spent questioning the validity of such rules.

I thought it best to be transparent, to call out what I imagined they hated about me as much as I did—not just the physical disparities, but the mental ones.

the notion of love and the link between loving another and loving one’s self.

We tiptoed around each other and still set off bombs, because each of us had laid them inside the other when we thought we were just fucking.

This need, still so vital, to chase male rejection as if it were the answer to the riddle of me. A film negative of what I’m not rather than what I am, which can be used to see the perceived deficiencies clearly and adjust accordingly.

The notion of self-improvement is particular to girls and women. That perfection myth that begins with our bodies in adolescence continues to rear its head through adulthood, even when reframed as empowerment.

Adults sometimes do this. You think you know their tolerance level, what sets them off, and exactly when it will. You know when to back off, or when, if you don’t, you will get what’s coming to you. And these unspoken boundaries, which vary from adult to adult, are comforting. They establish the you you are when you’re with them. But sometimes, unpredictably, they snap. They target an unassuming student—not even the known troublemaker—and punish them viciously, publicly, scaring everyone else into silence.

I should cry when my mother comes over to hug me, but I don’t. That’s not the feeling. The feeling is more like a geometry problem, not an impossible one, but the kind where you have to take a shape and turn it around, and apply logic, arithmetic, and the laws—what are they? They are written on chalkboards and copied in notepads, to be used when such a problem presents itself. Somewhere I have it written down.

Adult outrage is so hard to understand.

put a curse on her. “I wish daughters on you,” she would say, and now my mother understands what she meant.

“I love you,” my grandmother mouthed. “I know,” said my mother. This is the line of women that has led to me. Each one with her own struggles and resentment, which she tried to correct with the next generation. Each time creating new struggles and resentment. “I love you,” says my mother before we hang up the phone, which means be careful and good night and I’m sorry. “I love you, too,” I say, which means I know.

But love is not obsession. Love is survival.

At thirty-eight, I am single and childless, not by choice, but by instinct. The fourteen-year-old in me would consider this condition a point of shame and frantically try to root it out. I am not who I thought I would be, but that is what happens when you look ahead. All you see are the possibilities for change. When you look back, you see what you’ve held on to, what was stronger than outside influence, what you carried with you all these years. Maybe it’s something you need.