The Pivotal Messages from "Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret"

Practically every woman I know who came of age in the seventies and eighties read Judy Blume. And I’m pretty sure we all hid her books under our pillows. The new movie Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret reopened those experiences for me as though it were yesterday.

The most significant memory I had of the book was of Margaret dealing with her changing body and of her interest in boys as a sixth grader. Reading her books as a tween, I was struck even then by Blume’s almost psychic ability to get into the mind of a kid our age. How did she know? How could she really, really remember what it was like to be us? Because here’s what it was like: awkward and self-conscious, with a painfully intense curiosity about all things related to bodies and sexuality.

Nobody knew that better than Judy Blume. Now as an adult, I wonder this: why weren’t more authors helping us navigate the troubled waters? I still find myself sifting through life with the medium of fiction, and I think the reason is partly because it’s so hard to talk about real things with real people, and especially, as tweens and teens, to our very own parents.

No matter how loving and open I am with my kids, there are certain things they don’t want to talk to me about. That’s why I have to do my best to let them know that there’s nothing they can’t talk to me about.

As a parent now, I know that no matter how loving, how chill, how utterly open I am with my kids, there are certain things they simply do not want to talk to me about. And that’s exactly why I have to do my best to try, to leave the door open, and to imprint in their heads that there’s nothing off the table, nothing they can’t talk to me about.

How grateful I was to have those books, to make me feel normal, and also to have a mother that I could tell just about anything to (even if, as one scene in the movie depicts, I had to squish my eyes closed and just blurt it out before I lost my nerve). As a parent, I have to confess to feeling relieved when my kids clam up on these issues – but I also know that my invitations to talk might be utilized only years later. That’s okay.

As I tell my kids, half of adulthood is pretending awkward things aren’t awkward. Talking to our kids about their bodies, their passions, their desires, is possibly the awkwardest thing of all, yet we must push through and do it. Our kids are getting a lot of information – way more than I got in the 80s, even from Judy Blume. They need us to make sense of it all, and to hand down our values along with the information.

Friendship Insecurity

The movie also brought back the insecurity of middle school friendships. I went to a relatively small Jewish day school. There were 20 girls in my class, and we had actual diagrams to make sense of the friend groups. Now looking back, it’s easy to spot where the toxicities were and how urgent it seemed to fit in, to mark our territory. At first I was rooting for Margaret to be accepted and included with the popular kids, but as the movie progressed, I wished she could see that she didn’t need the “class queen” to rule over her.

Nina Badzin is a blogger and podcaster who focuses on female adult friendship. There’s such a need for her platform, because the dirty little secret is this: while the deep insecurity of middle school abates somewhat, many of us carry the same issues with us to our adult friendships. Why do we care what the most popular person in the room has to say? Why do we feel the need to do the things they want us to? What’s the price of fitting in?

There isn’t such a big difference between the essential need to fit in when we are 11 or when we’re 40.

Even Margaret’s mom is trying to fit in with the powerful moms in the school, until she finally gets the guts to turn down an invitation to join committees by saying, “I'd really love to…. but I don’t want to!” I’d forgotten about a lot of the friend issues from the book, but I’m glad I didn’t reread it before watching because I wanted it to be fresh. And here’s what struck me: there isn’t such a big difference between the essential need to fit in when we are 11 or when we’re 40. The question is, have we worked on ourselves to determine our own self-worth, as established by our own choices and moral compasses? Or are we still essentially sixth-graders, allowing our personhood to be dictated by the most popular person in the class?

God Was in the Title

Finally, I remember, viscerally, how pleasantly shocked I was that God was a part of Margaret’s story. He was even in the title! Margaret talked to God! Just like me! It was always exciting to find Jewish kids represented in the many books I read as a kid (it still is, depending on how they’re portrayed) but rarely did you find a kid talking to God in a book. Margaret turns to God as her diary, sharing her ups and downs with Him as well as begging Him for everything she wants.

In a sense I remember feeling that Margaret had a better relationship with God than I did. She talked to Him all the time, while I usually talked to Him only when I needed something. I did not remember anything else about Margaret’s religious struggles – I certainly did not recall that she had one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish one – but this God piece, the talking to God, searching for God, wondering about God, was a profoundly normalizing feature of the book.

It’s interesting to consider that now, as adults, sex and religion are two of the most taboo topics to discuss, yet Blume took them on with aplomb. And in so doing, she reassured me, and all of us, that being simply human was okay, that if you’re wondering about something, so are a lot of other people. This is the gift of writing, the gift that I, too, pray to give to others when I write.