And So the Dance of Adolescence Commences

They are sitting at our dining room table--my daughter and her friend--drinking hot chocolate and recalling the school dance the night before.

Their first boy-girl party . . . no parents allowed. Just teachers as chaperones and a DJ cool enough to play slow songs.

I putter around, trying to unobtrusively overhear. But they scarcely notice me . . . or maybe they just don’t care if I’m there.

And what I hear makes me feel, first, worried, then reassured.

It’s about boys, of course . . . boys with acne and spiky hair, whose voices break when they ask for a dance, whose heads barely reach the girls’ shoulders as they clutch them stiffly on the slow-dance songs.

I smile, recalling my own first dance in the junior high gym. Some things haven’t changed . . . like the clumsy way the boys shuffle their feet, out of step with the music, as they try to decide what to do with their hands.

And some things have . . . like the way those decisions can make a girl feel.

“He kept squeezing me really tight and trying to slide his hands down my back,” my daughter’s friend says, recalling her dance with a boy she liked.

And I catch my breath, remembering boys like that; recalling the panic that seized my friends and me as we gracefully tried to disentangle ourselves, to shimmy free without offending boys who seemed not to know that our hips were off limits.

At 12, my daughter and her friends are now old enough to be groped by those same nice boys they’d partnered with on science projects the week before. How had I not seen that coming? Why had I not warned her what to expect?

My daughter’s eyes widened as her friend told the story. “Eeeiiiuuu, that’s disgusting,” she said. “ . . . What’d you do?”

Her friend stood up and grabbed my daughter’s hands, sliding them up onto her shoulders to demonstrate. “I told him, ‘Uh-uh . . . Northern hemisphere, buddy, northern hemisphere,” she said.

The girls dissolved in giggles. And I felt my fear give way to pride and relief.

And I realized that while I cannot prepare her for all the dilemmas adolescence will bring, I can take comfort from knowing that a life spent confronting boys on her own terms has armed her with more confidence and panache than her mother ever had.

We can’t help but worry about them sometimes, hurtling so fast toward adolescence that we wonder whether they’re out of control.

One minute they are babies . . . playing dress-up, tottering around in Mommy’s high heels.

The next, they’re crowding with their friends around the bathroom mirror, swapping lipstick and eye shadow and stories of dances and romance gone wrong.

And when I’m not feeling frightened and bewildered--caught off guard and unprepared for the change--I get caught up in the magic and awe of it all.

How sweet it is to mother a girl old enough to understand the science of sperm and egg, yet young enough to believe in the magic of Santa Claus. A girl who wears lip gloss and mascara to school but still sleeps with a teddy bear and the light on at night.

A girl who can beat the boys on the track and hold her own on the basketball court . . . and does, without worrying about how they will feel.

It’s hard to feel cowed by the demands of a boy when you’ve snatched a rebound from him or beaten him in a math competition. It’s hard to feel second class when you’re surrounded by women who have succeeded in projects and professions considered off limits a generation ago.

And while our girls are being challenged in ways we never dreamed, they’re also prospering in ways we couldn’t have envisioned from the freedom they have to be what they are--in the classroom, on the sports field and, yes, on the dance floor--without worrying about what boys might think.

Tonight’s another middle school dance for my daughter and her friends. And, fellows, if you’re thinking about letting your hands slide south, you might consider this:

That girl you’re dancing with could probably hold her own in a dance floor fight. And she’s not afraid to try.

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* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.