Revising Childhood

This semester I am taking Developmentally Responsive Curriculum and Instruction for Adolescents (type that five times fast). I got a huge kick out of the fact that one of my assignments is to read Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret for class. Of course, I've read it. Like a million times. In fact, since I read three grade levels above my own, I read it when I was 7 or 8 and thought they'd made that thing up about periods. Surely it wasn't normal to bleed every month? Ew! Tough luck for me that we didn't get that health class talk until the fourth grade, and I was left mystified until then. Anyway, I just finished the book, and imegine my surprise to discover that it had been edited-- Margaret's pink sanitary belt (which I totally didn't get, in the late 80's when I read it, because they didn't have them anymore even then) is now an adhesive pad that sticks to her underwear! Shocking? Or my own bad memory?

Naturally, I Googled. Sure enough, the newer editions of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret have been revised to remove the dated references to the sanitary belt. Apparently, it caused a bit of controversy among women of my generation and the one above me. I sympathized with this author's take (watch the ad and you get to read the article for free).

Really, it's like how I feel about the Star Wars special editions. When we crave nostalgia for nostalgia's sake, it is quite jarring to find that something's been changed. How many years has it been since I read Are You There, God? It's got to be at least eight or ten years. My copy at home is purple, and the spine is so worn you can't read the title. I do remember that it's purple. But I knew instantly that those lines had been changed. In the first scene, where she and Janie go in the drugstore and buy the pads, I thought, "Wait, she stuck the pad on her underwear? Didn't she have some old-fashioned belt contraption? I guess that might have been in a different book." But then on the last page where she gets her period, the weird feeling kicked back in again, and I thought, "No way, there WAS a medieval belt thing! What did they do?"

I know it's for the purposes of education-- for many girls like me, this book is their first detailed glimpse into the world of puberty, and why confuse them more than they are probably already confused? I guess all's well, and too bad for the rest of us children of the '70's and '80's who expect things to be exactly as they were when we first read them. We aren't the audience anymore, are we? So I suppose our opinion counts for less.