Read Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume for Free Online

husband anymore, and that she didn’t have any idea what she should do to help him. She tried everything. I watched her try everything. Her friends’ lives were so organized and simple. Ours was a mess. How could she possibly tell anyone the truth? My sister and I became her best friends. We all knew that we would soon find ourselves alone, and I missed my father long before he left our house. I had no idea what my mother would do without him. She seemed lost. I had no idea how I could possibly save her.
    A few months ago, when I was asked to contribute to this anthology, I stumbled upon It’s Not the End of the World. Of all the Judy Blume books I’d read, somehow I’d missed this one. The one that got away. The one that finally clicked. Had I been twelve when I read it, I would have, of course, called Judy Blume immediately. I would have told her that she was the first person who ever made me realize that I wasn’t the only twelve-year-old girl in the world who already felt like a woman—a woman who already knew how it felt to be left by a man I thought was mine forever.
    I would have told her that Karen Newman was me, and I would have asked her how she could have possibly known that I, too, spent hours devising imaginary near-death scenarios that I was sure would bring my parents back together.
    There I am, on the edge of a cliff, hanging by a twig, while my mother and father desperately climb up the mountain to save me; but at the last second, just as my mom is about to grab me by my striped Danskin twinset, the twig snaps and I fall against the rocks, tumbling and flailing like a rubber doll, until I hit the ground and bounce up and down a few times, before splitting into five neat little pieces.
    And there they are.
    Clinging to each other by the side of the mountain, crying in each other’s arms, looking down at their dead daughter, each one of her limbs lying just a few inches away from her torso—although, surprisingly, there is very little blood. But then, miraculously, I stand up, and they realize it was just an optical illusion and all I have are a few scrapes and a mild concussion. We climb our way back to one another, link arms, and walk back to the car shaking our heads.
    Or the one where I’m in the hospital, badly in need of a kidney transplant. And there they are, fighting over who will be the donor, until they fall into each other’s arms laughing about all the other stuff they used to fight about before I woke up with a missing kidney.
    Needless to say, I wanted to kick myself when I read about Karen Newman’s plan to have herself kidnapped. I wish I’d been able to come up with something more along those lines. I liked the idea of involving the police. But just the thought that someone else was desperate like me was enough to make me wonder if, in fact, I wasn’t such an oddball after all. And was it a coincidence that Karen had an Uncle Dan who was six-foot-five and I had an Uncle Billy who was also that height? Not to mention that my family was living in Short Hills, New Jersey, at the time, and Karen lived only a few towns away. It was almost as if Judy Blume knew me.
    If only I had known there were millions of girls out there who were trying to pass themselves off as happy-go-lucky, run-of-the-mill kids while their families were falling apart. If only I had known it was normal for me to want to tell my friends that everything they talked about was boring and stupid and nothing compared to what I was going through. And it was normal that they all seemed childish to me and that I resented them for being allowed to be so immature, because my childhood was being taken away from me and I wasn’t nearly ready or able to let it go.
    Eventually, enough time passed that I gave up the idea of my parents ever getting back together. Once my father got his first black leather couch and my mom was taking courses at the New School, it was clearly over. Had I