My Mother points to this story when she’s explaining how I’ve always been overly concerned with other people’s feelings. It was 1990, New Kids on the Block just dropped Step By Step (ooh baybaaay). I was 9 years old and that album and my hamster Dusty were the most important things in my life that summer. I was a ridiculously huge fan, my room was plastered in posters and collages I had cut out from Tiger Beat and other such bubblegum publications. I had stickers and t-shirts and even my bed sheets that were graced by the faces of NKOTB. Initially I had a crush on Joey Mac, that baby face, those icy blues, his prepubescent swoon-inducing songbird vocals on “Please Don’t Go Girl”…. 9 year old me was like “THIS IS SAFE AND I FEEL SQUIRMY”. But then I matured a little, as you do, and it was all about Jordan. His smile, and the way he sang “Baby I believe in us…..”. Ohhh and the way he danced, I was lost in daydreams of marrying him and doing things I couldn’t quite imagine as he sang to me.
Later on that year something inside of me shifted. I started listening to other albums that had just come out, fucking Rhythm Nation by Janet Jackson,
Pummmmp Up the Jam (pump it up) by Technotronic, Love Shack by the B52′s. I heard Just a Friend by Biz Markie at the roller rink in my shitty neighbourhood. It just hit me. New Kids were shit. It was crappy formulaic pop music and it just kind of… sucked. I mean they were hot and sure they could sing but like, that’s not fucking satisfying me like Nothing Compares (2U) by Sinead O’Conner was. Hallelujah right?
Except at this point being a New Kids super fan was a huge part of my identity and I fretted over how to let my parents know I was undergoing such a big change. Looking back I’m not sure what I was afraid of, that they might be upset with me for suddenly taking down all of my posters and various shrines? That they might criticize me for being so fickle? Either way I was nervous about breaking it to them. Which is fucking adorable right? 9-and-three-quarters me sat my parents down with my most sombre tone and dropped the bomb, “I just wanted you to know, I don’t like the New Kids anymore.” I exhaled a deep breath, my anxiety cresting like a wave now that I’d gotten this off of my chest…
Now this is funnier if you know my parents, who are bonafide hippies and put on such supportive faces while they cringed through *3 albums* at that point of my obsessive pop-tart dance-routine-making hair-brush-microphone livingroom concerts. (My Mama loved Donny Osmond as a kiddo so she understood.) But the bottom line is they didn’t give a fuck! Of course, as parents, they knew my teeny-bop admiration was just a phase. I guess in retrospect I was worried they might not accept me as I grew and changed my mind.
They stifled giggles and assured my furrowed brow that it was okay to change my tastes, and that my tastes would change a hundred more times before I was through.
I remember fighting back tears of relief, because it was okay.
It’s taken a lot of years and a lot of work for me to not feel I have to ask permission to change. To be flexible with myself and my desires. To find partners and friends who can transition through different phases of life with me and appreciate that evolution. To really understand that growth and change and ebb and flow are the only real things you can count on. Nothing lasts forever, thank god.
Art: Romantic Anatomy by Lisa Perrin
Words by Heart
