My Awkward Phase

Every girl on the planet knows about this.
That adolescent period in their life, during the transition between childhood & adulthood,
where they felt (and sometimes looked) like the ugly duckling instead of the swan.
My awkward phase lasted about 17 years.

No, wait, how old am I?
Let's say it started when I was 12, so *removes shoes for counting* I'm !@# years old now,
subtract that time in my 30's when I was a fox.
*count count count*

That means my awkward phase lasted for more years than BS has been alive,
and, I think, continues to this day.

Don't believe me?
Let me offer the following evidence.

When we were young, my mother took slides.
Hundreds of slides.
And I recently purchased a scanner to transfer them to digital files.

We have had great fun seeing all those old pictures again,
but they pointed out a stark fact to me.
The women in my family are lovely.
My mother & my 2 sisters came from the sparkling waters of the gene pool.

My beautiful mother


My beautiful oldest sister Nana


My beautiful middle sister Sista G


And, uh . . .





. . . me . . .








I had every plague of young girlhood:

• curly red hair (frizz-head, stuck-your-finger-in-a-socket, carrot-top) - ✓
• freckles (hey - did you stand behind a cow when it farted?) - ✓
  
• horn-rimmed glasses, the only kind available at the time (four-eyes) - ✓
• braces on my teeth (metal-mouth, tin-grin) - ✓
  

(that cow fart comment was from my sister's boyfriend, now brother-in-law)

Sigh.

My mother will hate this.
She has to think I was beautiful. She's my mother.
It's in the handbook.

My sisters will hate this
because I didn't show you their awkward phases.
Although they will smile a little when they look at their pictures
and show them to their friends, saying "Look! That's me!"

But, pictures don't lie, ya know?
I'm just sayin'.