Yeah, I made it up. 
 

fluorescence: the emission by a substance of electromagnetic radiation especially in the form of visible light as the immediate result of and only during the absorption of radiation from some other source; also: the property of emitting such radiation

adolescence: the state or process of growing up
 

What I want to ask is if we can hold this radiant heat and also kick back in time to February, just a week or so after the trees in Austin were cracking under ice, taking power lines down with them, which is when Ballet Austin last dutifully performed Serenade. (Both performing and attending Serenade is a ritual for Americans in ballet, kind of like doing pliés in the kitchen and also going to the dentist and maybe rereading the Bill of Rights.)

This time, I was thrilled to notice that Serenade is full of teen vibes. The twenty-eight dancers are at first obedient, to some outside force. Then they’re lethargic, lying on the floor. They experiment with manipulation, twisting one another as though seeking limits but in no hurry to find them. They rebel, letting their hair down. Bathed in twilight blue, they are a society of liminality. Left to themselves, they play games, entwining and unraveling, passing the time as they plod toward their mysterious but inevitable futures.  

When Balanchine made Serenade in 1934, he had to work with teenagers—his early School of American Ballet students—because he didn’t yet have a company of professional dancers. But even today, for better and worse, his dances rely on raw and fearless attack, some degree of puppy paws and fawn legs splaying through transitions between the steps. The mussed loose hair and the mercury, all things possible, all things true. 

***

The last public school event I attended before the pandemic shutdown, in early March 2020, was a middle-school dance showcase. This kind of event means group after group of kids fan-kicking in over-sequined outfits and opaque fleshtone tights. It’s not boring, if you’re attuned to the gifts of this age group—the varying emergence of self-consciousness and -confidence, the last vestiges of willingness to obey and please, the brazenness of experimental undergarments lumping and catching beneath the sequins. And just as in Serenade, the society is the thing. In middle school, performing is often not yet about solos; it's about the experience of being buoyed by the collective. 

In the weeks after that performance, our older child, then in the seventh grade, lost that buoyancy entirely. The collective went away and we didn’t know what to do. Things went quite wrong. She’s recovered, marvelously and tentatively, having learned alongside her parents what’s essential and at stake when it comes to embodied teenage life.  

This hard-earned knowledge is behind how our family perceived this year, the first full year of at-school school completed by our 16-year-old since she was 13, and the seventh-grade year of our youngest (the same grade interrupted in 2020 for our oldest). In 2022-23, we perceived enough as enough, good enough as perfectly OK. Even more than before, we revered the adults who keep the kids in sequins and jazz shoes—or, as in our youngest’s case, dented rental instruments and band arrangements that extract maximum drama from the simplest notes. We said yes to every embodied thing the kids wanted to do—dance class, skate park, meetup; rides, coordination, money. We let our youngest wander a little too far, as long as they—the 12- and 13-year-olds—remained together. 

We, the adult stewards of teenagers today, are hopelessly ineffectual, and the kids know it. We wrote DYETI on the roofs of shelters and windows of cars, and kids were still bombed. We put no-firearms signs at the entrances to their schools, and they were still shot. We champion social-emotional and culturally sensitive education, and yet the school-to-prison pipeline persists. We knew that Zoom classrooms and digital “learning” apps and the dearth of strategy gluing it all together were inadequate and harmful, and yet we left most kids with no better option for months and months. We know that psychiatric disorders among adolescents are on the rise as a result of their digitally mediated experiences, and still these experiences are designed, from hardware to games to algorithms, to be addictive, disembodying, self-spiraling. 

So many adults have abandoned the most basic of social pacts—protect the young—in favor of dystopian agendas that so predictably boil down to power and money. 

bruh, says the text from my kid. 

These children that you spit on 

as they try to change the world

are immune to your consultations 

they’re quite aware what they’re going through

said Bowie. 

As parents, we have limited immediate power over our adolescent children. It’s their literal job to shake us off, so we have no choice but to let them set out into this world that seems, with many individual exceptions but collectively, hopelessly, never to help. We send them out the door with blessings and prayers from religions we don’t have. The kids, of course, as they walk out the door, shake these right off, like sensibly warm coats that stand no chance against the novelty and sheer sensation of the cold lacing around their arms, the wind threatening their necks. 

***

The writer Tavi Gevinson, at seventeen in 2013, referred to the height of adolescence as Forever:  

Forever is when you have the height and width of a miniature person with the density of an alpha-person. Forever is when you’re a human cartoon with every vein and skin cell as exaggerated as Minnie Mouse’s gloves. Forever is when you experience all kinds of things for the first time, as do your hormones, which will never again be this crazed, never again experience things as either so bleak or so Technicolor. Forever is when your brain is still developing, so everything sticks, like a lot. 

Perceiving my children’s Forever secondhand is both marvelous and confounding. Their directions and interests are broad and mercurial. Friendships are both constant and fleeting. Adults are just foils to develop one’s critical prowess against. 

As a teenager, I was miles less self-aware than Gevinson, or my kids, so perhaps my awe is also a little bit of living vicariously through their Forevers. Yet this spring, sparked by a reunion with a dear friend I met in a summer ballet intensive when we were fourteen, I noticed how my Forever actually became forever. Foundationally, I am the same person I was then, or I have circled and returned. That Forever is forever drives home the fact that our kids’ Forevers have the undeniable scars of the pandemic, or how we handled it, or anything else. The iron is quickly cooling. 

***

A few weeks ago, as research for a design project, I observed a family in a phone store. The mother wanted a new phone for the teenage child, who was soon going on a trip abroad. The mother brandished a performative swagger, and the two kids, about the same ages as mine, hung back, expressionless. After an hour of back and forth between the mother and the salesperson, and painful extracting of decisions only to be forgotten or questioned, it became apparent that the mother didn’t have the money to pay for the new phone and the various costs associated with it. She lashed out at the store employees, who eventually had little choice but to ask her and her children to leave. 

They left without a new phone, a phone I could feel the mother’s hopes and dreams and the looming of the child’s forever were tied up into a false need for, a phone that in fact the child will probably be better off without. Though the mother acted terribly, I empathize with her: brushing up against so much Forever all the time makes for a hotness of experience that distorts the significance of things. We want so much to make up for our, and everyone’s, past wrongs, in the little time we have left before they shed their jackets for good. 
 

And yet kids are living at home into their 20s and 30s now? So maybe we should all just chill? idk!  

***

Happy summer, ya’ll!

I’m working on thinking about a new thing. A small thing, a tighter thing, an outward-looking thing. What I hope to be able to do soon is ask for your mailing address.