1/12/00

B-b-b-b-boyfriends?!

Boys are yucky. But now I understand what it is that girls see in them.

    When the triplets were still babies, each new day we figured the worst was behind us: they were that much older, that much closer to maturity. Things would only become easier.
    So we thought.
    Sometime around our 13,000th diaper change, someone scoffed: "You think this is tough? Hah! Wait till they're teenagers." She did not know what she was talking about. After all, she didn't have baby triplets.
    Then came the Terrible Twos (which lasted about five years), and things were definitely not easier, and by now lots of people were saying "This is nothing. Wait till they're teenagers."
    That came to mind last month, a few days after their 10th birthday. Nomi was throwing a whale of a fit, but it wasn't a tantrum of childish frustration: it was a flailing, stomping, shrieking, ugly mood. The rest of us watched, astonished. Then Donna, trying to make sense of the spectacle, asked: "Daddy -- is Nomi a teenager?"
    I gulped. "Yes."
    What I'd like to know is, if kids these days start the Terrible Teens this young, do they also finish earlier? I don't think I started being a really miserable teenager until I was about 15, which should mean my children's teenhood should blow over by about that same age. Can anyone confirm this?
    The alternative is that they carry on for twice as long.
    Three girls entering the maelstrom of preteenhood at the same time -- in addition to the special relationship challenges of identical triplets -- is scary.
    But funny.

IT ALL started innocently enough, as social revolutions usually do. "Daddy, can I borrow your deodorant?" a small child asked.
    I jolted. Deodorant? Well, well, the little 'uns are growing up.
    Oh, sure, they said, everyone in grade five uses it -- or doesn't, but should.
    "One girl even wears lipstick; she really glops it on."
    Lipstick! We all agreed she's much too young.
    "And a boy puts on men's perfume, all over his body."
    Much too young, we said.
    A full report emerged: who needs a bra, who has a boyfriend, who has pimples...
    Waitaminute: Bras? Boyfriends?!  
    (I should mention, this is a religious school.)
    I was floored. "What do 10-year-old girls do with boys?!"
    "Some of them hold hands, but some won't."
    "You don't have boyfriends, do you?" I asked, commanded, and pleaded all in one.
    "Nah. We're too young," Donna reassured me.
    That was the first sex-education lesson they gave me. I checked in again with Donna a couple of weeks later.
    They aged about six years in those two weeks.
    "I broke off with Avi because he wanted to play kissing games, but Nomi is still with Yoni, which is good, because when Avi finished with me he started up with her, and Odelia decided to go with Shimon, but she gave him rules."
    "But --"
    "I don't even like Avi but he was going with Liron, and she dumped him, and she's the queen of the class, a snobit, so that's why I said he could be my boyfriend, and also because he knows karate, so he can protect me from other boys, and because I thought he would buy me things, like earrings, but he didn't."
    Interesting. These are the age-old reasons why women seek out men. Must be like some intuitive-survival animal instinct. 
    "Liron says if you don't have a boyfriend you're nothing, but now I have hers. He has to have a girlfriend all the time, and even when he has one he tries with other girls too."
   Nomi cut in. "The same day I started with Yoni, Nomi broke up with Avi, so Avi called me and asked, 'Did you break up with Yoni yet? You want to be my girlfriend?' But when we were new in the school he told me he thought Donna was the most beautiful girl in the whole world."
    Which is odd, I pointed out, because Nomi and Donna are identical.
    "My opinion is," added Odelia, "For one and a half years, he was working on a plan to win Donna."
    Donna: "Yeah, I was new in grade three, and after three days he asked Ofra to ask Odelia to ask me if I want to be his girlfriend."
    You can already see what sort of adult this Avi's going to be.
    Thus far: Avi, heartlessly rejected by his childhood sweetheart, hits up on her identical sister mere hours after she starts dating Yoni, who happens to be his cousin, which would have made double-dating messy ("No, we're too young to double-date"), because who can be sure which girl is which, and who is whose?
    Don't even ask about Anat and Nomi. Odelia explained:
    "Nomi's got Anat's boyfriend after Anat and Yoni had a huge fight. All the kids were talking about it. Yoni's a good boyfriend, he buys his girlfriends earrings and artikim and even says we don't have to pay him back, and says we don't have to kiss or hold hands. And Yoni's smart, because, y'know, me and Nomi always exchange necklaces and hair clips and clothes and even names, and I pretended to be Nomi, but it didn't fool him. He knew I was me."
    Aha. This is what everyone finds intriguing about identical triplet girls. Do they play tricks on their boyfriends?
    "Sure," Donna said. "Like when Shimon called for Odelia. Odelia didn't want to talk to him, so I told him just a minute, she's coming, and I made walking noises and then held the phone away and said in a low voice, 'Odelia, it's Shimon,' and then I talked to him like I was Odelia, and she didn't even know, so when he asked if we could go to the mall and hold hands I said sure, but we'll talk about it tomorrow, and the next day he talked to her about it and she didn't know what he was saying." She giggled.
    "She did that," Odelia explained, "because we just had a fight and we were mad at each other."
    We were interrupted by a phone call. It was for Odelia. It was Shimon.
    She twittered at him something about behaving like a man and cooling his ardor, then hung up. I don't think he even got a word in. (I think I know who she learned this from.) "Shimon keeps calling to ask if I'm his girlfriend," she explained, rolling her eyes. "So I told him OK, I'll put you on trial for a week."
    "Uh, you mean, 'give a trial period for a week.'" 
    "Right. So when the week was over, I gave him a trial for another week. The time is up, and I told him I don't know yet, maybe in a week. As long as he doesn't try any love things, which he always tells me I'm old enough, I'll keep giving him another week."
    Being a guy, I told her, I thought this was brilliant. So what do they do together?
    "We're just friends. We play. We talk. No, we don't talk, we just play. We ride our scooters and pass notes to each other."
    "Odelia went to Yasmin, and says she's having problems with boyfriends," Donna said. Odelia picks it up. "I said I wanted advice, but only to see what she would say, so we could laugh about it later. And Yasmin said, 'Listen, Odelia, I have a lot of experience with this. One: go to him and say you'd like to go to a movie. After the movie, he asks you to eat a hamburger and chips and Coke. You talk to each other, and walk around the canion, then he buys you earrings, then you go home, then he kisses you on the cheek.' "
    How much kissing is going on?
    Donna: "Well, there's kissing games, like spin the bottle, but only the boys play. And some of the girls."
    Nomi: "But we don't. We'll never kiss. Never. I told my boyfriend I'll never kiss any boy except my daddy."
    Odelia: "It's a problem when there's kissing games and they try to force me to play. But they leave me alone because what I do is, I pretend I have to vomit."

A COUPLE of days later I checked in again.
    "I broke off with Yoni," Nomi said without a trace of brokenheartedness.
    Donna, seeker of truth (and a shot at oneupgirlship) quickly corrected her: "But Yoni told me that he broke off with you."
    "He said that? What chutzpah!" Nomi spat. "And anyway, now, none of us have boyfriends."
    "Better that way," the others agreed.
    They just turned 10, and already they're past the boyfriend stage. Too old, I guess.