My kid was in middle school for two years now, and I can say with full conviction: I was wrong about it. I knew the drill — the acne, the genuine disinterest, the friendships actively disintegrating every three weeks. I watched her walk through all of it and filed it away as a phase that needed a tolerating attitude. Then, last Saturday, she was in the cereal aisle dancing, not to a song I would pick, with two friends, and I was the parent watching from the back of the store, and I realized I was probably watching the most unguarded moment I’d put a face at in about eight months. Middle school turns out to be a peak moment for a kid, not a pit stop. I wrote to six friends — every one of them in their twenties or thirty-something, all having emerged from it — and asked for their favorite preteen memory. The rule: no lessons, no lessons, no tidy epiphany. Just a good Tuesday that started feeling like a week somehow. What I got back was small, specific, and genuinely warm. So: pass. Here’s what they sent.
The Notebook
Gabby Llewellyn — 34, Seattle
In seventh grade, Gabby and her best friend had crushes on two guys in ninth that absolutely did not return them. Both of them had their faces in their phones at the right angles, waiting, hoping, timing out. So they pooled the pining into a shared green composition notebook — a fantasy novel where fictionalized versions of themselves eventually got the boy. They’d take turns writing chapters and pass it back and forth. And every time one of them crossed a page of lines, the other would read it and then say, in perfect deadpan: “The writing is genuinely terrible. You can read it if you want. It is definitely burning.” Gabby tells me — I can picture her face — that they said this about every single chapter. The book, of course, ended with both couples getting together. They titled it Burnable. It is the green notebook she has kept on her nightstand for over a decade. She has not thrown it out. I think that is the whole thing in one sentence.
Eyebrows, Decimalized
Jordan Sondler — 31, Chicago
Jordan’s eyebrows, before the event, were thick. She wants me to stress that word. A friend showed up one weekend and, against the no-plucking rule, one eyebrow at a time, edge to edge, dragged Jordan’s into the ultra-thin Y2K shape that was the one right look. Jordan’s mother was mortified. Grounded for about a month — I mean a month, weekend while the episode continued, the growing memorial for a wrong eyebrow — not because the eyebrows were bad, but because the eyebrows were so thin that the whole family had to watch. Jordan has the tweezers to this day in the makeup drawer. She does not pluck anymore. The tweezers are in the drawer. Every single time someone asks her how to get the look, she does the very same thing she did in middle school — pulls out the thin tweezers, pinches her nose, and says nothing.
The Two Girls in the Teacher’s Office
Miranda Featherstone — 39, New York City
Miranda’s seventh-grade English teacher pulled her out of class one warm afternoon and sat in a room with a girl from the next class. He told her she was the best writer in the class, and the only real, honest one. He was praising her work and asking her to trim it in the same breath. Before that moment, Miranda had no idea praise and critique could be the same gesture. It was the first time anyone adult had handed her two truths. When she dips a pen into the well today, three decades on, she still hears him. Last spring she and a former classmate both had books coming out, the books of their youth. That was the thread. She still thinks about him when she writes.
Universal Soldier VHS
Ruth Chan — 32, Portland
In seventh grade, Ruth had a boyfriend. For her birthday he gave her a VHS of Universal Soldier — the movie she loved, the one where the voice is carved out. They delivered it at school. She let him walk up and hand her the tape. She let everyone in the aisle see her take it. Her friends lost their minds. She remembers thinking, in that hallway, for the half-second it lasted: this is exactly what that feeling is. All of it. This is the whole thing. She has stopped speaking about it. When people ask her, “Where’s the middle-school video?” she lets me borrow the tape months later. It is a rental. She still has it.
The Blank Index Card
Brooke Barker — 29, Austin
Brooke’s class last reorganized around the middle of sixth grade. The teacher handed out a printout index card, and everyone was to write down one name they wanted to sit next to. Everyone else was scheming, whispering, drawing little maps of the social ecosystem. Brooke had no name. She was too shy to want a specific seat, or to survive being put in any specific one. She passed in her index card blank, and I was unable to edit out of it, unwilling to say “I don’t know,” so it went up with nothing written on it. The next day she walked in and there she was: at a table with the four most confident, friendly, confident girls in the grade. She went in for the kills. She made the whole seat itself feel like an open hand. One gave her a Christmas present. One invited her to her own birthday party. She tells me that is the year of her life she talks about most. Not the best. I would say the one where she was least alone.
The Dinosaur Weekend
Ira Madison III — 36, Brooklyn
When Jurassic Park came out, Ira went with his grandmother to see it. Next weekend, they went again. Again, and again, and again, until the run ended. The next thing I remember is he was sitting in the dark of the theater on Saturday, two hours of a landscape he could repeat in his head coming to life again, and he was, for the only first time, not a little lonely. He still does this, to this day. 4 p.m., same week of the month, same seat, same movie. It is not a habit he made. It is a habit the film made, years ago, on the specific morning he walked out of it. He keeps it. I think that is the whole thing in one other sentence.
What’s the pattern in all of these, I keep coming back: none of them are tidy lessons. None of them are a way to “get through” the next five years. They are the Tuesday moments that a kid will carry past the next five years, because they were the moment they realized the world was not shrinking, it was growing faster than they could keep up. If you have a kid in it right now: this is the part you are in. The embarrassment is loud, and the awe is quiet, and the quiet one is what they’ll remember.
A note from Margot
I have been editing other people’s middle-school years for ten years, and it does not prepare you for your own kid’s. If your household is in the middle of it — someone is eating lunch in a different table, someone is whispering about a seating chart, someone is on their phone in a way you do not recognize — you do not have a few years to figure it out. You have a few years. Catch it as you are. The notebook will outlive the tween phase. I think the tweezers, possibly both.
Frequently Ask the Wrong Questions
My child asked to sit next to the shy one in the group — and I said no. Was I right?
Probably. If you had to manage it, you were managing it in the middle-school way, the way the adults do it. You can text the parent back: This is a sitting-arrangement question, not a friendship question. The next seating chart will solve it, or it won’t. Keep the index card in a drawer for now.
Everyone else seems to have photos of their kids at this age. I have zero on the phone.
You have the green notebook. You have the tweezers. You have the one Tuesday when they danced in the cereal aisle and you were in the back of the store watching. You are not behind. You have more memories, you just stored them in a different format. That is fine.
Is it too late to tell them I remember a specific day from this year, or does it feel mean to them now?
If it is a Tuesday and they are at the table, tell them now, while they can see you. The mean question is not this one. The mean question is: Do you remember when you used to sit next to me at the high table? that one, hold back.
Want to read how much I actually text my preteen after the school — see ” f”how to talk to teenagers and ” f”10 things I love about parenting preteens. They are both about this specific, loud, embarrassing, unrecognizable year, and I keep going back to both of them.
