Unexpected Valley Girl Time Capsule
And the Summer that Changed my Life
I dropped cross-legged on the hardwood floor by my front door and opened a FedEx box I was tracking all day. I was excited to sort through the loose black and white, sepia and faded color family photos, thrown together by my aunt’s attorney after her passing.
A homemade envelope, sealed with fluorescent tape, caught my eye. My return address, to a condo I’d been ashamed of, was written on the back. After Mom divorced Dad, she moved us from my happy yellow house on a cul de sac to a rundown condo off the freeway.
Aunt Judy’s Chicago address and “Please Mr. Postman don’t be slow. Take this letter and go, go, go!” was written on the front.
My eyes grew round as I studied the cheerful teenage handwriting. I’d penned this surprising blast from the past with care, during my young, unrushed, non-digital world. And yet, I had no recollection of ever corresponding with dad’s sister via mail.
The postal carriers en route from California to Illinois must’ve gotten a kick out of my rhyming acknowledgement, believing its author an innocent girl. My heart raced as I pulled out a folded square piece of graph paper. Rows of purple-ink filled both sides.
An hour earlier my enthusiastic teen explained how the dean at her exclusive all girls private school asked the 8th graders to scribe a letter to themselves. She was to include her hopes and dreams for college and beyond. She’d open it days before high school graduation, while on a class trip to Hawaii to celebrate the culmination of countless hours of intense college preparatory work.
My husband and I affectionately call our beautiful athlete a nerd since she loves math, science and coding. Because she has a stable and loving family, an incredible work ethic, intellectual curiosity, high intelligence, and most importantly, because she’s kind with a wicked sense of humor, my money is on her she’ll reach her lofty goals. (Yeah, I’m that bragging mom now.)
The irony is, instead of worrying about her being out who knows where and partying like an idiot, like I did at her age, I fret over the amount of time she spends studying and the amount of time she spends on her devices.
I shook my head to consider how different her life at fourteen was to mine. I’d been promiscuous, on a crash course headed for teen pregnancy and drug addiction. I was following in my yet-to-be-diagnosed bipolar Mom’s footsteps, too young to realize Mom self-medicated her mania with Vicodin and her depression with cocaine. I was too young to know Mom never got over the trauma of discovering her mother’s suicide when she was just fourteen.
I snorted as I read to myself, “I went to Sax and bought the cutest jacket: It’s so original! I wore it to school and everyone flipped. It’s like a jean jacket with patches and fabrics. It’s really bitchin. You know I have good taste!!” And then I cringed, because I’d been a Madonna-wanna-be, who believed living in a material world was what would make me happy.
With the benefit of life experience and hindsight, it was as if invisible ink developed, shining a bright light on my crassness I thought masked my wounds. I couldn’t remember ever speaking so crude so young, and I couldn’t imagine my daughters texting their aunt, who they were very close to and joked with all the time, with such vulgarity.
I’d left the part out about Mom’s younger, freeloading boyfriend moving in with us. Or how my little brother was suspended for fighting. I didn’t mention how Grandpa was done bailing his daughter out financially. Or how Mom was living paycheck-to-paycheck, and waking up crying.
My tween peered over my shoulder, dying to read what was making my cheeks flush red. I shifted to block her view and read, “I’m sick in fucken tired of calling you!!” and “How’s the red head $ guy and your shrink?”
I put my hand down to steady myself. I’d just time traveled backward, to the most formative time in my life; big hair-sprayed hair, shoulder pads and all. I sounded like Frank Zappa’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Moon Unit, in the pop song “Valley Girl.”
My teenage egocentric mindset was too immature to look beyond my bubble and see the ridiculous parody I was living through. I was at the center of the zeitgeist, a full blown 80s Valley Girl hanging out at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. My live playground was the backdrop for the infamous movies “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Valley Girl.”
My eyes landed back to my letter in hand, where supposedly a manicurist, and her unnamed boyfriend, were taking my twelve-year-old brother and me out of town. I had no recollection of befriending a woman named Tammy, let alone waterskiing with her. Had the weed I’d already tried, made my memory foggy? I made a mental note to re-remind my daughters about the research on marijuana and developing brains.
Mom likely agreed to the travel arrangements, since it would give her alone time with her Rick Springfield look-alike boyfriend. He ate fast food on a tray table stoned, while watching VHS recordings of “General Hospital” in the middle of what should’ve been a workday. I shuddered recalling Mom discussing how they were the perfect age for one another. “He’s got the stamina, and I’ve got the drive,” she’d say, with manic inappropriateness.
Before I turned the square graph paper over I shooed the girls away again, and read, “I can’t wait for school to end. I’m not looking forward to going to Switzerland, as much as I should be, but in a few weeks I’ll be hyped!!”
It was May, 1985, weeks before Grandpa was sending me to a summer camp in Switzerland; a year before he jumped to his death. For close to three decades I wondered if Grandpa blamed Mom’s mania on his precious granddaughter’s spiral downward. Or had Mom and I both metaphorically pushed him over the edge?
At fourteen, I should’ve been thrilled to go to an international camp in Switzerland and escape the smoggy Valley during the hot summer. But I’d been expected to learn French, a language I couldn’t master from a workbook. And Montreux felt foreign and far.
At fourteen I wasn’t ready to see what Grandpa wanted to show me, a granddaughter he had faith in, there was more to life than my lackluster public school. The international finishing school, I was so privileged to be sent to, was meant to teach me I could aspire to more than just owning a rad jacket, or being with a boy.
With the mention of Switzerland, I was transported back to St. George’s Ecole, where the impressive Alps jutted up in the backdrop. The stunning and sparkling Lake Geneva was in the foreground, and not one piece of trash was ever to be seen. The skies were cornflower blue and the air was fresh and crisp; cut grass mixed with glaciers.
When I first saw the wooden chateau I would stay in, I had to blink to make sure it wasn’t fake. It looked like where a fairy princess would live in the Disneyland woods. Flowers grew in garden boxes and in the surrounding gardens. Stone fountains and a natural pond overlooked a large swimming pool, overlooking the lake. I counted seven red clay tennis courts. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.
I’d wanted to be excited about my arrival in this foreign wonderland, but I was unsure how to act, or what to say. Grandpa was counting on me to act like a polite young lady, a princess who got to live in a real castle. But when my roommates from Bahrain and Austria heard me speak, they giggled.
With my International friends by my side, we were taken on excursions all over Switzerland in a Mercedes touring van. A hike up to a glacier, windsurfing lessons on Lake Geneva and a private tour of the United Nations were some of the daily outings. I fell in love with buying cheeses from a refrigerated display, and choosing a freshly baked baguette, to have a picnic in one of the cute towns we visited. A French chef taught us how to turn a tomato, picked from the camp’s garden, into a rose with a paring knife.
Over afternoon high teas, my usual snack of Diet Coke and Doritos was replaced with milky tea with two sugar cubes, and fresh pastries with fruit. The greasy pizza I usually ate for dinner on a paper plate in front of TV was replaced with proper European table manners and the art of conversation. I bit my sailor tongue.
When I landed back in Los Angeles, my haricot vert and grass fed steak au poivre was replaced with microwaved Top Ramen. The British English I learned from my counselors only lasted a few days, as my native Valspeak, “Like, really Mommm,” replaced “Mum.”
I came home just in time to start eighth grade at an overcrowded and under stimulating junior high that expected nothing of me. I told myself I was better than my concrete surroundings, and that one day I’d live with beauty all around me, like my friends from Europe. I just had to figure out how.
When I came to the end of my letter, and read, “Well hun, I’m gonna do my homework now,” a cackle escaped me. Despite everything going on in my tumultuous teenage life, underneath it all, I wanted to be good, and I liked school.
My teen and tween watched me raise my eyes from my letter with a contorted smile. “Please,” they begged. I nodded I would, but decided to keep the background details to myself.
As I read my Valspeak out loud to my girls, it sounded extra preposterous coming from me, their middle-aged mom. We shared in long belly laughs, tripling the time it should’ve taken me.
My teen’s eyebrows kept rising. She was genuinely surprised by how rebellious I sounded. By the look on her face, and the way she studied me, I suddenly became cool in her eyes; something happening less and less as she pushed towards her budding womanhood independence.
After the girls lost interest, I called Mom. She moved three and half hours north to a cute house near Central Coast Wine Country. In retrospect, her manic depressive disorder was glaringly obvious, but only recently was she properly diagnosed. Mom looked at her mental illness straight on and tackled it with proper mood stabilizers and therapy. Considering her granddaughters absolutely worship her, finding their Grammy fun and hilarious, I was grateful to not have to distance myself, like I’d threatened on more than one occasion. I’m thrilled to report we’ve never been closer or more open with one another.
“You’re never going to believe what came in the box from Aunt Judy,” I said. Mom gasped and giggled as I read the letter I’d written to her ex-sister-in-law all those years earlier.
“Were you high when you wrote it?” Mom joked. Tears of laughter came to my eyes, because we knew it could’ve been possible. Mom said, “I don’t ever remember you being as funny.” Mom prided herself on her sense of humor, and thought my brother was funny, but not me. Mom went on to say, “I remember that jacket. In those days we went to Sax.”
“We did?” I asked, recalling Mom bartering clothes at the swap meet using broken Spanish. After clarification, she realized Sax wasn’t the discount store she remembered. Mom turned serious, marveling how much time had passed, and how proud she was of me and how my life turned out. I told her I was proud of her for tackling her mental illness and finding happiness and peace in her life.
“Isn’t it strange that on the same day (the teen) was assigned to write herself a letter at fourteen, I received one I’d written when I was fourteen?” I asked.
“Nowadays girls don’t think about boys like we did. You and I were little whores,” Mom said.
“Thanks Mom,” I said, cackling and shuddering, wondering if St. George’s Ecole had a finishing school for inappropriate Grammys.
****
Wishing you love, happiness, laughter and good mental health.
Unexpected Valley Girl Time Capsule
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