This is Part 3 of an interview series by Jen at Stay-At-Home Motherdom.
If you missed it, you can read Part 1 here or Part 2 here.

(3) What age (or time period) was the most difficult for you and why?

It may be clichè to say, but like the vast majority of the world, the most difficult time period for me was (drum roll, please) junior high school (surprised?). If I had to choose a year, it would be seventh grade, which just flat out sucked. In fact, even after I found out about my husband's sex addiction, as I was walking around for days in sunglasses to hide my puffy, red, bawled-to-hell eyes and considering the many ways in which I might castrate him and how much prison time away from my children this might involve, even then, I would think to myself, "At least this is not as bad as junior high school."

It wasn't that particularly bad things happened, although some undoubtedly did, it was that I was particularly ill-equipped to handle them. In junior high school, I felt alone and didn't even have myself to comfort me yet; I wasn't fully formed yet. In junior high school you're at the weird cusp of being a teenager, you're a child growing (awkwardly and in all the wrong places) into an adult. (If you are a woman, and your body developed like mine, this involves passing through a distinctly pear-shaped phase, during which you have hips, but no breasts.) But it isn't just the body that is growing and changing, it is the mind and the sense of self. Nothing now can ever be as bad as junior high school, because it's not possible to unknow what I now know about myself, to unlearn the skills I've learned in the years since.

By seventh grade, I had drifted away from the girl who had been my best friend, and essentially my only friend for years. I was the nerdy kid, and she was the one whose family problems caused her to turn to cigarettes and alcohol at a young age. We tracked off into different classes and different crowds. I wasn't, couldn't be, didn't want to be, part of her crowd, but the geeks and the nerds hadn't yet taken me in as one of their own. I was cliqueless, and best-friendless. I was socially, musically and fashionably clueless. I was left to face the spitballs on my own in my Sears Surplus jeans and second-hand John Denver t-shirt.

There was this one guy in particular, who was in every one of my classes, and since his last name started with the same letter as mine, and since every freaking teacher in the school seated people alphabetically, he was always sitting right in front of me. We always ended up seated at the very back of the room, safe from the teacher's view. He'd tear up my notebooks, steal my pens and take them apart and then use the possessions he had destroyed to shoot spitballs at me from very close range. He'd snatch back the papers he was supposed to be handing me just before I grabbed them. He'd copy my work. He'd refuse to pass my work forward. He'd mock my clothes and my hair and absolutely anything I said. He'd dance around the classroom before the teacher got there mocking me by singing Adam Ant's "Goody Two Shoes." One day he was talking about a party he had been to and turned to me and asked, "Do you drink?" And I knew I was trapped: if I said yes, he'd mock me, if I said no, he'd mock me. But yes seemed like the more socially acceptable answer, so I gave it. Then he pranced around the room and said in a high-pitched, snotty-sounding voice, "Oh, yes. I drink water occasionally." I can't think of a pseudonym to fit him and that horrible feeling he gave me.

At some point in high school, I heard he found God. I ran into him at a party, and he tried to apologize to me for having been a jerk in junior high. I didn't know whether he was sincere or if he was just mocking me again: ready to pounce on me when I granted my forgiveness and say "ha, ha," like Nelson in the Simpsons. I didn't say anything. Apology not accepted. I have often wondered what has happened to him in since. In recent years, I've wished I could see him again, and lay a hand on his head, like Jesus, and not just forgive him, but heal his brokenness and hurt.

By the eighth grade, I had found a new group of friends, a new best friend. There was the girl who became my best friend (another smart perfectionist) and the group of smart girls she introduced me to. But there was someone more important: me. And the group I surrounded myself with: the characters out of the books on my shelves. I would lie in my bed at night, away from the spitball throwing bully and the crazy old lady, away from the teachers who didn't protect me and the former friend who was smoking in the woods around the school, and I would be an elven queen helping Frodo and Sam on their way, or I'd be a detective helping Hercule Poirot solve his latest mystery, or I'd be a castaway roaming the beach with the Robinson family. And as I played through different roles, I'd suspect things would get better someday.