How Baby

Momo’s entered seventh grade this year, which in my neck of the woods means she’s in her last year of elementary school, and people in her grade are 12-13 years old. This school year, a lot of the kids she’s played in the dirt with came back… older. Nicer clothes, straighter hair, more interested in an invisible layer of the social world that, at least for kids like me and Momo, seems absolutely irrational and unfathomable.

When I look at Momo, I see a child. When I look at her peers… I see people ready to be called teenagers. I’m not sure if this is the bias of mom-vision, or if she’s missing some crucial thing I should have taught her, or if this is just another neurodivergent thing.

I remember this time of my own life so clearly. It was as if everyone had attended a meeting about how they were going to dress and act and talk, and I had just… not been invited. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, and even with my rational adult brain I cannot wrap my head around the… social dynamics at play. Who decides who sets the fashion, the tone? Why? Doesn’t anyone else see that it’s so silly? Thank goodness Momo seems as disinterested in following the crowd as I was, because I’m as clueless about how tween girls are ‘supposed’ to act now as I was then.

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TRANSCRIPT

Panel 1 (Lindsay and Momo walk past a trio of fashionable tween girls, labelled ‘newly-minted seventh graders’)
Panel 2 (Extreme close up of Lindsay, looking down at Momo, who has big child-like eyes and is suddenly wearing a spinny hat and holding a large lollipop.