You cannot imagine what a queen of the earth I was when I was 12 years old…Ah! how you would have loved me, and how I miss myself!—Colette

I’ve heard that whenever a woman feels indecisive or depressed, she should recall who she was when she was 12. At 12, you’re in touch with the truest parts of yourself. The idea of adapting yourself to please someone else is fairly alien.

I believed I was a witch when I was 12. My friend Suzy Clayton (who went on to marry a minister) and I told fortunes and doused with a crystal pendant necklace I purchased at our church’s rummage sale. My friend Debbie Kopp and I spent hours that same year making tiny pieces of doll furniture out of mud, twigs and grass for our four-inch-high, tree-dwelling imaginary friends we named Violet and Rose. At 12, we were old enough to ride around the Chicago suburbs on our bikes, but still young enough to fully exalt in the wild imaginings of childhood.

Do today’s girls partake in a true girlhood? Given the previous post on early puberty, how do you think the lives of girls are changing? I have ideas, and some sense of foreboding, but I honestly don’t know. So much depends on the home environment. What do you think?