Do we ever really let go of our teenage selves?
On first kisses, rites of passage and feeling old at a Bat Mitzvah party
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On the way out one Sunday last month, I drove under a footbridge across the A41 where I’d had my first kiss with my first proper boyfriend when I was 15 years old. I’d had a fair few kisses before this: there was a boy who’d inadvertently passed a half-dissolved crisp from his mouth into mine (I remember this soggy lump, the way I felt obligated to swallow it down, more than I remember anything else about this person); another boy who had kissed me then honked my breasts like they were a pair of clown horns; and then there had been a kiss sweet and soft, which I will always associate with the song Wonderwall. But this kiss over the five-lane thrum of vehicles making their way between my north London suburb and the centre of the city was one of my first truly romantic experiences. That it was the most unromantic of settings – grey, polluted, deeply unbeautiful – made it even more epic, our elevation above the traffic mirroring the way I already felt like I was floating.
Anyway, perhaps it was because I’d passed that bridge and also because I was en route to a relative’s Bat Mitzvah party (a traditional coming-of-age celebration for a Jewish girl aged 12 or 13), but I was already dwelling on youth – the shadow of my younger self conjured in the passenger’s seat beside me. So when I arrived at the party and bumped into two men who I’d not seen since we were sixteen years old, I felt myself unravel and stretch over almost three decades – a heady cocktail of the past and present muddled together like the Mojito I held in my hands.
‘How have you been?’ the first one asked. ‘What have you been up to?’
I thought, how can I possibly explain a whole life in a few minutes of chat?
He pointed across the room. ‘Look who else is here.’
This other man, I wasn’t even friends with on Facebook. We had evaporated from each other’s lives. But when I saw him – his skin tinged with the purple light so popular at these types of events – fuzzy memories assembled. Then he spoke and laughed, and the person he was became clear.
We had all met on a three-week youth-group trip to Israel the summer after our GCSEs. It feels like another lifetime ago and it was certainly another century, given it was 1998. This adventure without parents is something of a rite-of-passage for a significant number of Jewish kids in the UK, whose backgrounds span the spectrum of religious observance and political ideology, from the most devout to the completely indifferent.
It’s one of those trips that can take a mythic place in the map of your life. A formative experience of freedom, independence, crushes and heartbreak. A trip that can emphasis your standing in the social centre, or your feelings of being outside of it. It can leave an impression, is what I’m saying.
As the first man excused himself to join his wife on the dance floor, the other man and I talked about who we still knew from that summer. I mentioned five girls who became lifelong friends. (A fact I find remarkable given how friendships shift and slip with time and place.) He mentioned his ‘boys’. I told him how I’d had such a crush on one of them. How another girl had kissed this person and how much it had hurt.
As I relayed this story, I started laughing, because I realised – with some embarrassment – that this scar tugged slightly. It wasn’t that my feelings for this person had lasted much beyond that summer, but the sense of rejection had. That pervasive feeling of not being good enough/thin enough/cool enough to be desired.
How strange, I thought, that these old emotions can still smart.
How our teenage selves lie dormant in our soul and don’t really ever leave.
How vulnerability grows deep roots, especially when it blooms early.
Even though this man and I had not been in touch, news of our group had over the years travelled through the various social channels – this one was a pilot, another an activist, there was a singer, a fashion designer, an artist, lawyers, doctors, some who had moved abroad. We shared details as if they were clay, adding texture to the teenagers who’d been shaped that summer.
Then a pause.
‘Do you remember N-?’ I said.
This man nodded solemnly. He knew what I was about to say.
Around us, adolescent girls wearing miniskirts and white trainers with glitter on their faces were rushing past, whooping at music by bands too new for me to know, while adults enjoyed the free bar and chatted and danced and fawned over the five-month-old baby snoozing in a pram in the corner. But for a moment, all of that blurred, like lights in long exposure, and this old friend and I were stilled. Because although we had been charting how our lives had panned out, one life had been stopped short eight years ago.
We were quiet. Silenced by the enduring incomprehensibility of loss.
After a moment, I said:
‘Remember that night we all swapped clothes?’
I pictured N how he was back then – his bleached hair, his skater trousers – then the images flashed to the impressive adult he became, the one I’d bumped into on the Victoria Line one sweaty commute years later, the one I kept bumping into; his wedding I wasn’t able to attend; the funeral I was.
The horrible unfairness of it all.
How lucky I was to be stood there right now.
I looked around the room.
Grown-ups dressed in sequins and sparkle filled the dance floor and jumped around to a medley of hits. Flashing flower crowns were nestled on heads – some hair greying, some receding; my own sweet dad doing his legendary one-step-two-step moves, a big smile on his face.
Melancholy needled into my happiness. It had been lovely to see those two men, but I had arrived unprepared for this trip down memory lane. I had not packed the right provisions.
Attending a Bat (or Bar for a boy) Mitzvah as an adult can often provoke reflection, particularly if you’ve had one yourself, and especially if you’re sentimental like me. I remember my own vividly: a simple tea in the garden, my friends running up to my bedroom, messing with my stuff. I wore a silvery striped dress with a black jacket, my curly hair was plump and dark, my teeth lined with the glinting metal of train-track braces. I didn’t have a photo booth or temporary tattoo station or glow sticks like so many celebrations these days. And I don’t remember feeling like I was an adult – but that’s because I wasn’t, not really, only religiously. In fact, being 13 was likely my last true year of innocence. Everything seemed to get so much more complicated after that.
A Bat Mitzvah is a community celebration where family and friends gather to share the joy. And I love that. But I remember when I had my own, or would go to the parties of my peers – I always thought the adults were so irrelevant. So old. I never understood why the grown-ups were having fun. This was meant to be a kids’ thing, after all; even if sometimes we were dressed like tiny adults in black-tie attire, sat around long tables in fancy halls.
And yet, here I now was – the older one. Celebrating young people with so much ahead of them, entertained by their exuberance, moved by their naivety, proud of their kindness, and aware with razor-sharp clarity of all that had passed in my own life – and how much would pass for them too. What could I have done differently? Did I have regrets? Had I left some dreams too late to chase?
As the night went on, the adults grew more wild than the kids. Caring less, increasingly unselfconscious, pleased to let loose and dance and drink a little bit like teenagers. Bon Jovi pumped out from the speakers and I dived into a crowd bouncing up and down. I found my family and joined in – my 11-year-old niece looked alarmed by my dance-floor antics but I didn’t care, because in that moment I felt excited and free. Because while our bodies might grow old, so much of who we are remains the same as when we were young – we may be wiser, yes, more sensible, sometimes, but often only because responsibility forces us to be.
‘Take my hand, we’ll make it, I swear – Whoa-ohhhh-’ I sang-shouted around my niece. She looked utterly mortified and I gave her a squeeze.
***
It was close to midnight when I got back. My husband was still awake, finishing the clean-up of the weekend’s debris. I gently kissed him, my greatest love, and showed him photos of the night.
‘I had fun,’ I said.
‘I can see.’
I still had a flower crown on my head, my hair entwined around it. I untangled myself and lay it on the kitchen table – I knew my four-year-old son would be excited to see it when he came down in the morning. I imagined him finding the crown. I looked forward to seeing him try it on. Its colourful buds blooming, the bright lights glowing around his eyes.
Tiny thought:
I have never been one to jump on a zeitgeist and I have certainly never been organised enough to plan my writing around the entertainment schedule of a streaming service, but after I wrote this piece, I discovered Adam Sandler has a movie coming out on 25 August called You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah. Go figure. Who knew Jewish coming-of-age stories were suddenly so on trend?
Anyway, please do share your thoughts in the usual space below. Thanks for reading.
“That it was the most unromantic of settings – grey, polluted, deeply unbeautiful – made it even more epic, our elevation above the traffic mirroring the way I already felt like I was floating.”
Just... beautiful writing there Amy. It captures the feels so perfectly. Took me back to my first real kiss. And no, I don’t think we do forget our teenage selves ❤️
I love this. I’ve just recently been able to turn around and selectively pick up some pieces of my teenage/twenties self. It’s astonishing what you lose track of, for whatever reason, as you grow older. And it’s invigorating to take some of it back.