The Turkey Age

“You’re just in la edad del pavo  (the turkey age),” my mother would say when I complained about my acne, hairy legs, and general adolescent unattractiveness. “But don’t worry. It won’t last forever.”  I don’t know where the Spanish synonym for adolescence came from—perhaps it alludes to the gawkiness of young turkeys—but I remember precisely the moment when I entered the turkey age. It wasn’t when I got my period, though I remember that well too. No, the day when I truly entered la edad del pavo I was in my bedroom in Quito, standing before the mirror as I got ready for school.

I looked at my face and in a flash the thought came to me, “this is what I have to live with for the rest of my life.” And in that instant I went from assuming that I was fully deserving of love and adoration to feeling that I was imprisoned inside a face and body that would make all humanity, with the possible exception of my parents and grandparents, recoil from me in horror.

How has mankind managed to survive adolescence? What possible evolutionary advantage can there be to making the innocent young pass through this gauntlet of runaway hormones, clumsy limbs, baby fat, erupting breasts, acne, orthodontia, and moods that gyrate from elation to despair and back again?

My mirror revelation was followed by half a decade of mostly misery. Although at school I hid behind an exuberant exterior, I reserved the full expression of my anguish for my long-suffering mother. My feelings of awkwardness were complicated by our move to the U.S. How I envied the American girls in my ninth-grade class, impossibly sophisticated in their red lipstick, pencil skirts, and bobby sox, chattering and giggling in a language that I couldn’t understand. So yes, I felt foreign and at a loss, but isn’t foreignness at the root of all adolescent angst? The face, the body, the mind, the emotions—everything feels foreign to the child still lurking under the teenager’s pimply skin.

Those were years when I wished desperately that there was a tunnel between my house and school so that I could creep back and forth unseen, like a mole. Years when I sat in church with the missal on my lap, hunched over it so that nobody would see my (to me, disgracefully fat) torso.  Years of longing to be anything or anybody but me, because this was the only way I would ever be accepted by my classmates or  invited by some boy to the Queen of Hearts dance.

Janis Ian, in “At Seventeen,” one of the saddest songs to ever make it to the top of the charts, gets it exactly right:

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth…

And those of us with ravaged faces
Lacking in the social graces
Desperately remained at home
Inventing lovers on the phone…

Mind you, this was an era when we middle-class girls were relatively guarded and protected, free from harassment, at least in school, and free from the soul-killing horrors of social media. True, we worried about zits and dates and braces, but there was so much that we were spared, compared with what the young go through today.

Fortunately, I had it a bit easier than Janis Ian. By age seventeen I no longer wished to tunnel my way to school, and by eighteen I had somehow grown into myself. I had wended my way through the perils of the turkey age and come out unscathed, just as my mother had foretold. But was I, were any of us really unscathed?  If there is an adult, especially an adult woman, who sailed comfortably through those years, I would like to know her story. What does that half decade of misery do to its survivors? Does it mark us forever with feelings of inferiority? Does it make us stronger? Possibly. The best I can hope for is that the turkey age makes us more compassionate.

Now that I am entering that other awkward age, the one at the end of life that reverses the developments of the first, I once again take comfort in my mother’s words, “Don’t worry. It won’t last forever.”