‘When I Was a Teenager’

Photographer Lily Starling Eldridge

When I Was a Teenager

with wild hair curling and frizzing

Bonnie Bell lip gloss

vintage lacy shirts 

from patchouli-scented Cambridge shops

half-assed homework and sleepovers 

telephone conversations winding 

cord pulled tight

under basement door

for privacy for gossip for not caring 

about anything 

skipped classes

cigarette and another cigarette

- hot coffee with heaps of sugar and cream.

2.

I started to have seizures.

I cried; 

I cried and I shook.

It was an internal earthquake

but I never passed out, 

I never fell down or convulsed

 - it was awful but not terrible, right?

I grasped on to the table in front of me 

or anything in front of me

-two hands -

because I had the sensation of falling 

backward, fast,

and it scared me, deeply, 

a whole-body nightmare 

during the day.

My hands and arms and legs vibrated, 

as if they belonged 

to someone else.

It was like a horror movie – Carrie with a tremor,

creepy and wrong

- and with a strength that exhausted me.

My mother took care of me then.

Even though I was 15 years old and

she had dishes and driving

and three other kids 

and two dogs and a cat

and dead gerbils

and a husband. 

She shuttled us to private schools

in Cambridge and Boston.

She picked me up, drove me home, 

and she stayed with me,

devoted, perpetual,

as persistent as a breaking ocean wave 

on a sky-spitting gray day.

She even took me herself 

to every unpleasant chemical-scented appointment 

questioning medical professionals -

pushing to get answers and treatment.

A technician tried to shove 

an electrode up my nose.

He told me to relax 

and he sprayed something into my nostrils.

I couldn’t bear the burning

so he did the EEG without it

and the strobe light made a seizure start.

It seemed I was destined 

to be a tragic figure:

my brother said I was a hero

and some of my teachers tried to say 

I was exaggerating or manipulating

or I should try harder at school despite 

my illness.

I kind of agreed, 

secretly, but

I felt alone in my chaotic head,

vivid nightmares clinging on the periphery,

leaving an odor that only I could smell;

but they told me that was another aura,

another brain glitch 

fuzzying up my awareness.

One night, lying fetal on the couch 

under a scratchy blanket,

I dreamed that I was in a log cabin 

near a series of skinny-legged wooden docks

poking out of the blue-brown water.

A little devil, silver and shiny,

with flashing mercurichrome red eyes strobing,

caused me to have a seizure.

In the dream it was somehow revealed 

that my parents were deliberately 

making those lights flash -

 a stark betrayal.

As I woke, tumbling 

forth into reality,

the revelation of my parents’ scheme 

webbed into my awareness.

The idea that they had made me sick clung

like twisty wet sheets in the laundry,

me trying to straighten out my thinking, 

still sleepy.

But my mother’s high-pitched voice, 

calling from the kitchen 

- a happy-familiar tune -

defused the vague horror 

of the nightmare.

I realized that she might feel responsible 

for my illness,

guilty somehow, 

or genetically implicated,

when actually she was helping me

to get better.

I felt brave, vaguely, 

as if being sick gave me some sort of badge

like a kid on an ‘After-School Special’

and my father bought me a carton of Marlboros,

letting me smoke them 

in front of the television,

my older brother aghast.  

Now I look back on the seizures, 

and me, then a young girl, interested

mostly in friends and sex. 

Those episodes vaporized over time,

as if they were just a part of adolescence,

a passageway I had to enter to reach

the foyer of my adult existence.

3.

Now I have a different illness 

that has lodged in my brain 

and made me a perpetual patient 

and weirdly, an optimist, 

too, like my mother always was: 

”If you don’t have anything nice to say

 don’t say anything at all.” 

I keep my spirits up: 

contorting my limbs and calming my mind  in yoga, 

listening to playlists from my daughter 

- Chappell Roan belting it out -

eating avocado on toasted English muffin 

with sweet and spicy jalapenos,

and ‘one day at a time,’

and ‘radical acceptance’

and writing in a journal with a fine-point pen.

But an old bitterness sometimes seeps out,

the acrid relic of my skeptical nature 

because so far nothing really helps 

very much,

and I do want the nausea of 

an ocean churning  

inside my head

to drain out with each wave 

so that finally I will be clear.

4

And here is my mother,

an old woman now,

with neurological troubles of her own,

thanking me for ordering her groceries.

She tells me what a good daughter

I am.

Still I remember that awful feeling

of falling backward, fast,

as if pushed off a cliff

and the tremor all over

and knowing, deeply,

that she was there, her spirit taking mine

by the hand, an internal connection.

It’s not just DNA.

It’s the hours and hours we had 

in waiting rooms,

it’s the medicines running out,

the side effects,

the pharmacy calls.

And all of it embedded in me

so that now I am ready 

to be steadfast.

I am here for her 

perpetually, spiritually,

as she manages her losses, 

the indignities,

the empty ocean bottom, 

a desolate cavern,

beckoning in to old age, 

loss, and loneliness.

Every day now she and my father sit 

next to one another,

in big chairs, his a recliner,

facing the wall where the tv set is mounted,

wires dangling below.

She falls asleep in her wing chair,

still upright, her head gently propped,

eyes lightly closed behind her glasses.

As she wakes she is saying

“This is my chair,” 

as if someone might take it from her,

and she looks at each of us,

my father and me.

I explain that she must have been dreaming, 

and she smiles,

nods, and stays very still,

maybe wishing to pass through this stage

in which she is lightly aware that something is amiss:

she loses keys, clothing, her phone;

but it is also her confidence that’s becoming thinner,

like smoke dissipating 

but leaving a faintly burned scent 

that only she can smell.

Nostalgia, memories;

Endings.

Emily Alston-Follansbee wrote her first poem, entitled “Love,” on a tiny piece of paper, in 1972. She was an elementary and preschool teacher for many years, and she raised two children who grew up to be lovely adults. In 2020 Emily became ill with a disabling neurological disorder. She spends her good moments on writing and rewriting, mostly poetry. Emily lives in Maynard, Massachusetts with her cheery husband and two goofy dogs.

Lily Starling Eldridge is a 17 year old girl from Northern Virginia. She is currently a junior at The Madeira School. She enjoys photography, art, creative writing, video games, and hanging out with friends.