Contributor’s Marginalia: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach on “The Girls I Grew Up with Were Hard” by Karyna McGlynn

& hard & harder & so hard that hardness turns soft, & that softness is even more painful. Karyna McGlynn’s anti-nostalgic lyric sends me right back to sitting alone in the corner of my high school cafeteria, slurping my cup-of-noodle soup & watching the girls I could never sit with lick their fingers from the grease of freshly cut fries as they stayed slim in their tight jeans & oversized sweaters, “top-heavy with God.” God, what an incredible description of girls starting to look like the women they aren’t ready to be. Though I too was “top-heavy,” I stayed chubby & alone, with girls pointing to me in gym class, giggling, “Look at them jiggle” as I ran by.

Because the girls I grew up with were hard too & maybe all girls grow up surrounded by hard girls. Maybe that’s their way of keeping themselves safe, even if that safety is at the expense of others. Like the speaker of this poem, I too felt “I was soft & easily outdone,” but rather than flinging myself at the crowd, I hid my softness in an outcast’s shell & kept my distance. I embraced—after hours of crying—being voted “most likely to be uncovered as an alien” in the end-of-year superlative & wore my hair in crazy buns with a pom-pom hat to be the alien they saw me as for the yearbook picture. Only years later did I realize their true hardness, that the joke was even more cruel than I thought. They didn’t just want to remind me I was the weird girl, but that I was an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. They wanted to make sure I knew that to them, no matter what I did, I’d always be alien.

Reading this poem, it is impossible not to taste its bitter world of adolescence, from the girl’s “copper skillet” skin to the unappreciated “lemon cupcakes” tinged with “Love’s Baby Soft,” impossible not to become immersed in the cinematic, almost Mean Girls-like quality of the hardness that accumulates & accumulates, driven by the ampersands & “They didn’t stop—even though I smiled, / even though I said Please.”

I want to sit with this girl and hold her hand. I want to tell her it gets easier, even if it doesn’t. I want to tell her the girls won’t get softer, but you can learn how to take their hardness. I want to tell her softness is strength too. They can’t name or unname you, I want to tell her. I guess I want to tell myself all this & it’s just as necessary to hear now as it would have been all those years ago & I’m grateful to this poem, to Karyna McGlynn, for reminding me.