Excerpts
MY SPACE
I creep up and look over his shoulder. Now he’s on his MySpace page, where no doubt he is being stalked by dozens of perverts. I remind myself silently that I Am A Terrible Mother.
In the personal profile section of his MySpace entry, he has written that he is 22 years old. Next to “favorite books,” he has written, “I hate books.” (Terrible Mother, Terrible Mother, TERRIBLE MOTHER!)
For a photo of his alleged 22-year-old self, he has posted a picture taken at Six Flags, in which he is standing next to Bugs Bunny. Music pulses softly from the computer speaker; apparently he has figured out how to stitch some hip-hop into his MySpace page.
I hear a thug-like voice chanting:
This is why I’m HOT
This is why I’m HOT.
Suddenly the IMs are flying.
“WASSUP” reads a message.
“NM,” he types in. “JC.”
A few months back, I would have been trying to figure out why “New Mexico” and “Junior Cadets” were the appropriate responses to the question “What’s up?” But by now I had done enough spying to know that “NM, JC” stands for “Nothin’ much, just chillin.’”
UNJUMPABLE SON
One night, as he heads out the door to get pizza with some friends, I remind him to be careful.
“Mom,” he says, “I’m not stupid!”
“I know you’re not stupid,” I say. “Just be careful.”
“Mom,” he says, “I’m un-JUMP-able.”
That’s a new word for me. But as he pulls up the hood of his oversized sweatshirt (reminding me of another word, “hoodlum”), I suddenly see him and his friends the way someone else would. They are hulking. Rowdy. Horsing around. Cursing, high-fiving, laughing about some private joke. If I was walking toward them, I would probably cross the street.
They really do look … unjumpable.
“See you later, Mom. I love you!”
What?
He said “I love you” to his mother in front of his friends? I’m stunned.
As they file out, one kid knocks the dog’s water dish over, another steps on the cat’s tail. They’re pushing and shouting and singing snatches of a rap song, one of them chanting, “I love it when you call me…” and all the others chiming in, “Big POP-pa!”
FAMILY VACATION
We had driven all the way to Bryce Canyon, Utah, to go stargazing. What a great family outing, especially for two city boys like mine, to get to see the stars in all their awe-inspiring glory. I was sure it would be a wonderful memory for all of us.
“I’m not going.”
Who said that? Did I hear right?
It was Taz.
We’d driven 2,500 miles to this godforsaken place to see the freaking Big Dipper and God knows what else up there in the Goddamn night sky and he has the nerve to tell us that he’s not going stargazing?
“What?” my husband said. He had that crazed look on his face, the same one he gets when Taz’s cell phone bill arrives, a cross between incredulity, as in, “I cannot believe this is happening!” and fury, as in, “I’m going to kill someone!”
“I’m not going,” Taz said flatly. “I don’t want to go stargazing.”
“Why?” I said. Or maybe even screamed.
“I already know what the stars look like.”
“But it’s not like there’s anything else to do here in the motel room,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “You might as well just get in the car and come with us. What are you going to do here by yourself?”
“I’m watching the MTV Video Music Awards,” he said calmly and with determination, reaching for the remote. “…They’re in Miami, and P. Diddy’s hosting.”
TEEN FASHION
When I was a kid in the ‘70s, the most humiliating thing that could happen to you was having pants that were too short. I’m 5-foot-9 and I grew a lot in junior high, so my pants were never long enough because I was constantly outgrowing them, and constantly getting teased about them. “Highwater, highwater, where’s the flood?” was the taunt in fifth and sixth grades. In seventh and eighth, the other kids were too cool to actually say anything to put me down, but all it took was a two-second glance at my ankles - which, if I were dressed properly, should not have been visible - followed by a one-second glance at my face to make it clear that I was utterly pathetic.
…At the time, of course, I swore to myself that when I grew up and had kids, I would remember how awful it was to feel like a social reject because of your clothes and I would make sure my kids dressed OK.
Now that I am a mother, though, other considerations come into play. For example, I worry that reasonable people will think I’m a bad parent for giving into the materialism that is the curse of my son’s generation. And I realized one day that part of the problem here is that Taz and I want to impress people in precisely opposite ways.
I want people to think that I’m frugal, and sensible, that my kid doesn’t run the show, and that I’ve brought him up with good values. He wants sneakers that cost a hundred dollars or more, so that people will think he’s stylish and doesn’t worry about petty things like pricetags, and that he can pretty much get his parents to do anything he wants.
MUSIC
Here I was, thinking Taz and his friend were singing some uplifting youth anthem like, I don’t know, Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore, and come to find out that they’d been reciting the lyrics to a song about booze and drugs.
…If I thought about it for too long, I could get completely hysterical about this, and that he admires people like 50 Cent, aka Fiddy, a guy who’s been shot nine times.
But I try to put these things in perspective. I may be A Terrible Mother, but I try not to be a hypocrite. I grew up listening to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Let’s Spend the Night Together in an era when rockers died from drug overdoses practically everyday. I know from experience that Singing a Song with Degenerate Lyrics does not necessarily Turn You into a Degenerate.
…So I think I’ll just save my outrage for more important issues. Like why, for example, elementary school class picnics are always scheduled for smack in the middle of the day, when I’m at work.
ADOLESCENT BEAUTY
I try not to be outraged by what I perceive to be the unfair disappearance of the ugly-duckling stage of adolescence. (Unfair because I had to suffer through it, so why shouldn’t everyone?) It used to be that most kids were downright funny-looking until they were about sixteen. They had braces and pimples and little-kid haircuts, and they were so embarrassed by their height and their bumps and everything else that they slouched in an effort to hide.
But all of that is no more. Now orthodonture starts with nine-year-olds, before the teeth that need correcting have even finished growing in. I suppose there are sound dental theories behind this, but one of the results is that the “metal mouth” stage is already well behind them by the time they hit thirteen.
And maybe I’m imagining this, but it seems to me like most teenagers don’t even have pimples any more. Do they all have personal dermatologists? Are they all getting facials? Or do they just know more about buying acne cream and cleansers than we did?
Not only that, but kids now all seem to have Perfect Posture. When I was a teenager, our mothers and aunts and grandmas were always yelling at us to stand up straight. But when was the last time you heard someone tell a kid to stand up straight? We slouched and dressed in lumps and layers and sacks of clothes because we didn’t want anyone to see how awful we looked. As far as I can tell, teenagers these days have nothing to hide. Instead they are all about “LOOK AT ME!” They want the world to admire them.
And why shouldn’t they? They look like movie stars, with fabulous smiles, fabulous clothes and fabulous hair. Sometimes when I see a group of adolescent girls hanging out somewhere I almost can’t stand it. How did they get so perfect-looking?
THE SOPRANOS
My husband and I have had some wonderful parental bonding moments watching Tony and Carmela argue about their children. In fact, I would count The Sopranos among my sources for child-rearing information - if only as a reality check on my own life.
One of my favorite episodes was when Meadow and a bunch of other teenagers threw a party with booze and drugs in her grandmother’s house, trashing the place. Tony fetched Meadow and brought her home, and Carmela asked him what he said to their daughter.
TONY: I don’t know. I yelled. What the fuck else am I going to do?
CARMELA: There have to be consequences. What kind of parents would we be if we let her get away with it?
TONY: Typical.
CARMELA: Plenty of parents still crack the whip.
TONY: Yeah. That’s what they tell ya.
At this point in the show, Elon and I looked at each other. That’s exactly what Taz says! He’s always claiming that nobody else’s parents really punish them - they just say they punish them to save face in front of other parents!
Later, as Tony and Carmela tried to figure out some way to make Meadow pay for her crimes, Tony told Carmela: “If she finds out we’re powerless, we’re fucked.”
It was delicious to see that Tony, who could whack people without a second thought, who was swift and unmerciful when it came to punishing anyone who challenged him, was completely hamstrung by his teenage child.
KINDERGARTEN
When Taz was in kindergarten, I got a call from school one day saying that he had simply up and left the building.
Fortunately, a passerby found him on a nearby street corner, apparently headed home, and returned him to the school just as his teacher was realizing he’d disappeared.
“What were you thinking?” I said when I picked him up that day.
“School is too boring, Mommy,” he explained. “I didn’t want to stay there anymore.”
I smothered an impulse to say, “Welcome to the real world, buddy! Everything in life feels that way sometimes, but you just gotta do your time.” After all, he was only five. I didn’t want to break it to him yet that his best years were already behind him.
CONFRONTATION
I stopped and let Taz have it, at the top of my lungs, right there on the street.
“I knew something bad was going to happen! I knew it! I begged you to do the right thing, I told you to behave yourself, and you had to go break the rules! What is wrong with you? How could you do this? Do you know how embarrassing this is, not just for me but for your whole family? From the time you were born I’ve given you nothing but love, and this is the thanks I get - you get kicked out of your prom! There is no excuse for you, Taz! Other kids have a tough life and they turn out just fine, but you, you’ve had everything you ever wanted and all you can do is screw up! I am so ashamed of you, and I hope you have the decency to be ashamed of yourself!”
Taz looked like he was about to cry. He hung his head beneath his baseball cap and shuffled along in his perfect white Jordans. I realized a half-dozen people up and down the block had stopped in their tracks to stare at us, trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly I had visions of someone calling 911 to report child abuse. Two guys in their late twenties standing directly across the street from us had paused their conversation to stare and watch the show.
“What’s the matter with you?” I screamed at them. “Weren’t you ever a teenager? Didn’t you ever make your mother so mad that she started yelling at you in the street? Mind your own business!”
They looked at each other, somewhat terrified, and resumed walking without saying a word back. I realized at that moment that I had crossed over from being A Terrible Mother to being A Lunatic Mother.
SPORTS
Like a lot of girls I knew growing up, I pretty much never caught or threw a ball, or watched an organized ball game, until my own kids started playing sports. I’m still mystified by the definition of a double-play, and inevitably I am chatting with another mom or reading the paper when a Really Important Thing Happens in the game.
Which always leads my husband to come running over to loudly cross-examine me.
“Did you see what your son just did?” he’ll demand after our younger son, Sport - who is a very good athlete - has done something amazing. “Did you? You weren’t paying attention, were you? Your son scored the winning goal” - or shot, or hit, or run, or pitch, or whatever they call it in whatever sport was being played - “and as usual, you missed it.”
I’m so pathetic, most of the time I can’t even tell which team is winning, or whether our score is being tallied under “Home” or “Guest.” I’ll try to fake it, try to sound halfway intelligent and attentive by saying things at half-time or between innings like, “So, how are we doing? Are we still - I mean, is the score, uh, still, you know, two to … uh, what is it now? I think I might have missed that last play when I had a sneezing fit. You know, I think I must be allergic to something out here in the field!”
Inevitably my ploy only makes me sound more idiotic than ever. The score is never two to anything; it is always some improbable set of numbers that I couldn’t begin to guess at, like 15-0, or 6-6 for the past 45 minutes.
GENDER DIFFERENCES
So ignorant was I in the ways of boys that I naively thought, when Taz was little, that all gender differences were culturally imposed rather than inborn. I even got him a doll when he was about 3, thinking, idealistically, that probably boys would love to play with dolls if only they had the chance. I showed him how to cuddle the dolly, hold it, rock it, and pretend to feed it.
“It’s like your baby,” I explained.
He immediately informed me that it wasn’t a baby, it was a passenger on a train. He lined the dining room chairs up and smashed the dolly down on a chair, then pretended to be the conductor, taking imaginary tickets and announcing imaginary stops.
Next, he went and got his little toy doctor kit and told me the dolly was sick. He proceeded to give it injections, take its temperature, wrap its leg up in a cloth bandage and give it an operation. I’m fairly certain he was planning an amputation, but I managed to save dolly before any limbs were severed.
All in all, he had a great time with that dolly, but he did things to it that I never would have dreamed of doing to a doll when I was little.