WRATH

You are thirteen.  Hormones have been swarming about your body and stinging you like hornets in the last year or so.  At unpredictable and embarrassing times.   If you are male, your voice won’t pick a pitch and stay there.  If you are female, your boobs grew to tiny lumps and then stayed there while everyone else on the planet developed actual cleavage.  Whatever your gender, your once smooth skin resembles a plague area and today you woke up with a brand new nose, right on top of your real nose that takes up at least half of your body weight.  If you are male your feet make up the other half.  If you are female, it’s anyone’s guess-- butt, frizzy hair, big ears, thick waist--we have to wait for the media to tell us what our new cross is to bear.

Your mother or your father or your step or whatever your family consists of used to be great.  They held you tight and told you what to do and it all felt so safe and good.  Now, they won’t leave you alone for a single minute.  They suffocate, they nag, they harp on every little thing.  Look, it’s Friday, the paper isn’t due until Tuesday, give me a break here.  I haven’t been on the phone for an hour--it, well, so what, it’s not like I was doing drugs for pete’s sake.  I wasn’t surfing the net for porn.

And if it’s not my parents it’s my teachers.  So my grades aren’t perfect.  I’m not applying myself?  What does that mean?  You apply make up.  There’s too many things to think about.  Did Dina really break up with Scott?  Will anybody ever kiss me with this four foot zit on my nose that seems to have taken up permanent residence?  Just how is learning about some guy coming over the mountains in an entire other country on elephants going help me get a job?  Or get kissed?

And let’s talk about my so called friends.  If Dina did break up with Scott, she’ll want me to tell her that she did the right thing.  She’ll want me to join her in the Bash Scott game.  Call him all the bad names in the book.  Remember every rotten thing he ever did.  Then in two days she’ll be back with him and guess who she’ll be mad at?  Because I said such horrible things about her wonderful boyfriend.  Then she’ll tell Scott and he’ll be mad at me.  And he’ll tell his friends what a witch I am and then I’ll never get kissed even if this six foot zit finally goes away and my two inch boobs grow to double Ds.  Then Macy will side with Dina and I’ll be left to stuff my face with pizza while I watch Loser Reality TV alone.

And my mother wonders why when she puts my plate in front of me I scream, “I’m sick of Lemon Chicken.  Don’t you know how to make anything else?  Burst into tears, leave the table and slam the door to my room.

I hate everything and everyone in my life.  I want to break things, and shout at people and talk back to teachers and slam doors and fight with anyone that disagrees with me or annoys me and that’s just about everyone.

I’m too old to be a child and too young to be an adult so who am I?  I guess I’ll just punch at walls until I find out.

And that folks is the day of a normal middle school girl, one without a dysfunctional family to stir the pot.  One that doesn’t go home to beatings, or emotional abuse, or drug or alcohol dependent adults or to care for a sick or dying parent or sibling, or to extreme poverty or neglect.

Anger rules the teen years.  It’s normal and in my opinion it’s important.  Some teens can climb the steep hill from childhood to adulthood with grace, dignity and poise.  My best friend did.  I certainly did not.  I chewed and stomped and clawed and knuckled my way through every single minute.  Most do not have the sophistication or savvy to glide up the rocky road to maturity. 

To become an adult we must no longer be a child and leaving the child and our childhoods behind is difficult.  Some never make it.  They are grown up children.  And I think they stayed emotionally stunted for one of two reasons:  they didn’t have enough anger to fuel their journey or they enjoyed the anger too much and didn’t use it to go forward but stopped along on the way, forever being the angry teen.

To leave one home and make another as an adult, most of us have to divorce our parents for a while. Sometimes that divorce is ugly.  The teen feels the arms that enfold begin to suffocate, the hand that hold theirs becomes a leash, the guidance becomes a barrier to independence.  And so the teen rails and rages.  He oversteps the boundaries, daring the parent, he talks back, he lets his grades slide, he picks unacceptable friends, he changes his look, his politics, religious beliefs--anything to challenge. The teen has to be a furious rebel whose cause is anything his parents disapproves.  Bleeding Hearts Democrats will spawn a teen Wing Nut.  Meat eaters house Vegans, Fundamentalists are sure to have an Agnostic at the table.  There is no discourse, there is only argument, punctuated by the slam of doors.  “You never listen,” is a mantra.

It’s burgeoning anger.  And the tug of war begins.   

I honestly think, the warfare with parents is essential as long as it is played out constructively.  It’s like boot camp.  It toughens you up, readies you for the real war ahead.  When teens act out and are punished or receive some kind of consequence there is an understanding that the adult world is not always a place of safety and it does not always afford loving arms to protect them. 

Growing pains means more that the aches that some people think rapid growth of the skeletal system provokes.  I think it’s the mental confusion of learning that your parents aren’t always right. They can and do make mistakes. That your father might not be or never was a hero.  That your mother isn’t an angel wearing fuzzy house slippers.

There’s a sense of betrayal we all go through when we become a teen.  We find we’ve been lied to about a lot of things.  Santa, the Tooth Fairy, ‘this won’t hurt,’ ‘ anyone can be number one if you try hard enough,’ ‘ if you do that too often, you’ll go blind.’

Who is there to trust?  The anger escalates in dysfunctional families;  in the household where there’s really something to get mad about.  A child either doesn’t understand mental and physical abuse or forgives it or both.  But a teen does understand it.  Abandonment issues, physical abuse, mental abuse, drug problems in the family result in teen rage.  Boys historically act out their rage away from the home, they take it to the street, to the school but they rarely place it at the source.  Girls, until recently have kept anger close to the vest, acting out against themselves.  Promiscuity, physically hurting themselves, fighting close friends or even the killing of parents.  The rise of girl violence out of the immediate and personal circle is, however, on the rise.

But the crux of the matter is the teen is externalizing the fact that he is angry that he is being kept close when what he wants and needs is to get farther away.  He can’t truly find himself if everyone else is telling him who he is.

In SHATTERING GLASS, Young deliberately changes his schedule covertly to a writing class when his father has demanded that he take advanced biology.  He does not want to be yet another generation that bears the title of Dr.

In DEAD GIRL’S DON’T WRITE LETTERS, Sunny’s anger is everywhere.  She’s angry at Jazz for being manipulative and pretty and popular and most of all for being loved.  She’s angry at her parents for not only not loving her enough but for not even seeing her.  They don’t see her when Jazz is alive and they see her even less when she is dead.  In PLAYING IN TRAFFIC, we don’t know why Skye is angry, and we wouldn’t know when to believe which story she tells, but I think she’s angry at herself, but in the end, it’s Matt that feels the fury enough to tell her to turn the gun on herself.  In WHAT HAPPENED TO CASS MCBRIDE, I’m not sure who isn’t angry.  Kyle buries a girl.  Cass uses anger and the art of the sale to stay alive.  Kyle’s mother has been angry all her life.  And in my new book RIGHT BEHIND YOU, anger ruins the life of two boys.  One dies and the other no longer knows how to live.

In Nancy Werlin’s RULES OF SURVIVAL, her main character finally understands that his mother is a danger to himself and his siblings.  His anger at her drug use drives him to take control and protect himself and his siblings from her.  He always had fear, but anger puts him into action.

Yet anger is dangerous.  The last thing to develop in a young person is the understanding of consequence.  That is why the arbitrary ages of 18 and 21 are placed on many things.  You can give up your life for your country at 18, but you can’t drink a beer until you are 21.  Yes, I find this ridiculous that we find these consequences so different but we won’t go there today.  The point is, teens use the anger without understanding the consequences so there must be some guidance.  Guidance from teachers, parents and literature.

Sometimes the guidance from literature should be relief from the anger.  Give that teen a funny book.  Let him know the world is not out to get him 24/7.  Just laugh.  Give her something frothy and fun and full of pretty, flirty people.  Gossip Girls can take a young girl away from the pressures of tests or two friends that have banded against her and her eight foot zit and let her live vicariously for a bit.  Give someone a good old weeper and let them exhaust their emotions with a crying jag.  Or scare them with a dark, edgy novel that takes them to the abyss of anger and danger and let’s see the consequences.  Or just scares them for the thrill of it.

    Give them a book that takes them away to a fantasy world.  Annette Kurtis Clause can keep that anger at bay with werewovles and vampires and creatures of the night.

Give them a book by Jack Gantos and let them see people that have annoyed them understand what makes them tick as in the Joey Pigza books or introduce them to the flat out weird and make them comprehensible in Rumbaughs.

Give them Virginia Euwer Wolff and show them that being angry is great fuel for overcoming hardship and societal imposed limitations.

Tim Wynne Jones will address the anger that a teen’s world could change, or even disappear at any time.  And Elizabeth Partridge can tell teens of famous people that have met and mastered challenges before.

But while anger is dangerous and teens need a break from it occasionally and must learn to use it effectively, it is critical that it be there.  Anger turned inward is depression.  Read the book Speak by Laurie Halse Andersen who shows that to near perfection.  Depression leads you to the abyss not forward, not toward growth.  Anger used as fuel to make that hard journey is good.  The anger must be directed at the fact that journey is hard, long and difficult.  That it takes a toll.  The anger must not be directed at others or back upon the journeyer. 

There is anger in every human being and it most often comes to the surface, like those hormones, during adolescence.  It should be used so it can be purged.  When the teen reaches the top of the steep hill, is now an adult, the glaze of anger should be cleared, the fury should be eased and his adult life ready to be enjoyed.  His/her emotions should be as even as his now mature complexion.  Far fewer, much milder eruptions.

If in our YA literature we ignore this teen rage, ignore the adolescent darkness of the heart we tell the traveller that he’s alone.  He is the only one that feels this way, and he can’t understand that he must suffer Shakespeare’s slings and arrows.  Some books need be his companion, his fellow traveller.

  A story has a reader.  The reader will seek the story he needs when he needs it.  And the literature of wrath says, your feelings are valid.  I have felt them too.  Read on.  This is what happened to me.