High school, high drama

I used to say my daughter was born smiling. As a baby she grinned around her thumb. As a toddler she laughed and smiled at us even when she stumbled and fell. She smiled when she learned to ride a bike and to play soccer.

She smiled bravely when a move, and then a school rezoning, forced her to be the new girl at two elementary schools, and even in the bizarre world of middle school, she was happy.

But last week, when she walked into the high school as a freshman, she wasn’t smiling. She was tense and wary, uncomfortably aware of her shortcomings, and pretty sure that everyone else was aware of them as well.

When she came home that afternoon, she confronted me with a question, “Why does everyone say high school is great?” she asked, “I don’t get it.”

I didn’t know what to say. After all, my own experience was far from ideal. I spent four years as a chameleon, crawling down the hallway, hoping to disappear into the institutional green paint on the walls, afraid to stand out in any way. I was a senior before I showed any color.

For most people, high school is great. But like the so-called “reality” shows on television, there is very little reality in high school. It’s just a drama-filled step toward a real life, a baby step on a very long path toward adulthood.

Years ago, it was the last step for many people, especially women. High school sweethearts turned into commitments that had to last a lifetime. June weddings, just after graduation, were common, and a baby by the age of 20 was the next milestone.

That isn’t the case anymore. College is an option, even the expectation, for most high-school students. As is the opportunity for graduate school, a career and years of freedom to nibble at life before you take a big bite.

But, sadly, there are still people who look back at high school with longing.

I saw it firsthand at a fifteen-year reunion. The group who had ruled my high school — by then adults in their 30s — gathered on the dance floor, linked arms and put their heads on one another’s shoulders.

They seemed relieved to be back together, secure in their own number. Here was proof that they had been kings and queens back in the day, leaders of cliques and clubs, quarterbacks and half-time stars; the trendsetters and style setters in the small world in which we lived.

As “grown-ups” — husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, successful businessmen and women — they adjusted to life as ordinary fish in a much bigger lake. But reunited under a disco ball in a rented hall, washed in ‘70s music, they clung to one another. Life had peaked when they were 18 and had never again been as good.

My daughter made it through the first full week of high school. She knows where her classes are, and she’s learning to navigate though the crowded hallways, and the complicated social straights.

She’s more comfortable, secure in the company of a couple of true-blue friends and the burgeoning suspicion that real life — the struggle to find a warm place among a lot of cold shoulders — is, at it’s best, nothing like high school, and, at it’s worst, a lot like high school.

And she’s smiling again.