There is no room for Margaret Ann Simon in 2023.This became clear over the weekend, as Gen X and millennial women returned to movie theaters across the country to see the adaptation of one of our childhood librarys' most dog-eared, passed-around, broken-spined books: "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret."I was one of them, going with a friend who also navigated puberty with the help of Judy Blume's field guide to American adolescence.And I went with a little bit of sadness. I always assumed that one day, I'd pass it along to a daughter and we would bond over the rite of motherhood. Nope - two boys for me. My sons got Blume's boy version, "Then Again, Maybe I Won't."So I thought that maybe I should gather a posse of boy moms to go see the movie, so we could bond over the nostalgia of our own journeys into womanhood. But the boy moms were busy. (Baseball season, of course.)So I went with another friend who's always up for an adventure and has children of both genders. On our way there, I asked her the most influential thing she remembered from a book written in 1970."The grandmother, she was so much fun," said my friend. "Nothing like our family."For most American women, this book was all about puberty - the frank talk about menstruation, armpits, training bras and spin-the-bottle.But for the children of immigrants like me and my friend, whose parents are Indian-born, it had the added bonus of giving us a seat at the American family dinner table. We learned about frilly bedspreads and white bedroom sets; birthday parties in the rec room; fun grandparents, roast beef for dinner and department-store shopping; the YMCA and the JCC, and the diversity and complexity of religion in America.It was Sandy Stokes - the sandpaper-voiced empty nester who had white shag carpet in her California living room and an uncanny empathy for the Czechoslovakian immigrants next door - who gave me the book. She was my American auntie.My friend was like many of us, she read the book at her local library, which did not get swept up in the 1980s book bans that yanked it off so many shelves."Did you give the book to your daughter?" I asked her. "So she didn't have to sneak it around in the library?""Ha! She wasn't interested," my friend said. "She was so far beyond Judy Blume at that point."Margaret Ann Simon couldn't really exist today.In her 1970 world, tweens were obsessed with the hunt for knowledge about what growing up entails. All a kid today needs is five minutes alone on a computer or mobile phone and they will see it all. Information, no matter how much the political censors grandstand upon feigned morality, cannot be contained.Nostalgists argue they can recapture Margaret's innocence by trying to keep kids in the dark, by banning books or restricting age-appropriate discussions about gender and sexuality in classrooms. "Are you there, God?" has been the target of book bans since it was published in 1970. Blume gave her kids' school library three copies of the book, but the male principal decided it wasn't appropriate. It never made it onto a shelf there - "never mind how many fifth and sixth grade girls already had their periods," Blume wrote in the foreword of an anthology by censored writers.That went on for years, making Margaret one of America's frequently banned characters. Now, 53 years later, the Florida state legislature considered a bill banning any talk of menstruation or reproductive health in elementary schools.Yet, whipping up political divides over books is easier than dealing with real problems, like the teen mental health epidemic, detailed in a jaw-dropping report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they've considered suicide. That's a 60 percent rise in the past decade and twice the number of boys who reported the same thoughts. Almost 14 percent of American girls surveyed had been forced to have sex. And about 57 percent of girls said they feel "persistently sad or hopeless," according to the February report.This isn't because they're reading books about their periods or learning that gay people exist.Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd told The Washington Post that this is about pain. And "girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression," masking their depression.It's not hard to find pain in teens' lives, which have been amplified beyond anything we imagined in 1970.Since 1999, when the shooting at Columbine High School changed American schools forever, there have been 377 school shootings. More than 339,000 American kids have experienced gun violence, according to The Post's database.Today, Margaret would be playacting her own massacre in active shooter drills at school. Her club, The PTS's (Pre Teen Sensations), wouldn't have meetings on private, giggly afternoons in someone's bedroom sharing Oreos - it would have a group chat. Instead of running under sprinklers, she'd spend her afternoons drilling for county championships with her travel soccer team. A rumor circulated among the kids of Room 18 could be an online post that goes viral. And rather than one glimpse of dad's Playboy to inform her of impossible beauty standards, she'd be awash in cartoonish beauty on social media.Yes, Margaret Ann Simon couldn't exist today. But our nostalgia for her is a powerful call to action: to see that our youths are still seeking something, and that it's on us to help them find it.
