13 Is the New 18 Page 17

  When they're little, we try not to talk about the fact that the dog won't live forever. And when they get big, they try not to let the parents realize that all the effort we've put into child rearing has basically been a failure. They hide, as best they can, the fact that they're breaking all the rules we set; they're trying to save us from disappointment.

  That— and they don't want to get grounded for the rest of the decade, have their allowance stopped, and their cell phone contract cancelled.

  There were a few times in high school when my parents went away. They left money for pizza and said I could have a slumber party so that I wouldn't be lonely. (I have to pause here for a minute to underscore the naïveté of parents who leave a teenager alone for the weekend, and their big concern is that their kid might be lonely!)

  Of course, I immediately went down to the corner liquor store with the pizza money and bought gin. The drinking age then was only eighteen, so it wasn't such a big deal to sell alcohol to teenagers. Then my friends came over for the slumber party, and we all got drunk.

  One of my parents’ only worries about the sleepover was that we might stay up all night and not be rested enough for school on Monday.

  You'll be relieved to hear that we did not stay up all night. We just drank until we passed out, one by one.

  Fortunately, I didn't really know any boys to invite, going to an all- girl school, so there was only so much trouble we could get into. Throwing up in the toilet after drinking too much gin mixed with Hawaiian Punch was about the worst of it, and while cleaning up the resulting mess wasn't a lot of fun, especially with a hangover, it was the least I could do to keep my parents from having a nervous breakdown when they got back.

  Foolishly, I somehow thought that my own youthful transgressions would make it easier for me once I was the mother of a teenager. I figured parents of my generation couldn't be shocked at anything our kids did. After all, there wasn't a whole lot we hadn't already seen or done ourselves.

  Now I see how naive I was to think that. It's true that I'm not easily offended; I use plenty of four- letter words, I lived with my spouse for years before we were married, and I went to Grateful Dead concerts with the best of 'em. I am neither an old- fashioned pill with outmoded standards nor a control freak.

  But in some ways it's even worse for me than it was for my mother. She had no idea what went on at concerts. But I do! She had no idea what went on at frat parties. But I do! And she had no idea what went on in people's homes when parents were away. But I do! And even though I understand at some level that teenagers have to break some rules to grow up, I realize now that parents have to make the rules anyway.

  I've always hated the policeman part of being a mother. I much preferred the part where you decorated cupcakes and taught them how to doggie paddle. But those skills are irrelevant by the time your kid is thirteen. I never saw myself as one of those über neurotic controlling mothers, but how can I remain calm or be OK about any behavior that suggests my son might be headed for delinquency? The stakes are way too high.

  When my kids were babies and then toddlers and then preschoolers, caring for them was physically exhausting and frequently mind- numbing. “It gets easier,” said a friend whose son was much older. “And then it gets harder.” Now I know what she means. I'm not up at 2 a.m. soothing a screaming infant, but I have had fights at midnight with a kid who's as tall as I am about turning off the computer, the cell phone, and the television. And I can definitely keep myself awake for hours worrying about what kind of decisions Taz will make when I'm not there to scold or shame him into doing the right thing.

  Every few months on the ordinarily sedate block where I live now, a Saturday night will explode with raucous laughter, shouts, and a gaggle of teenagers staggering down the street. They'll pound on parked cars, make out under streetlamps, upend garbage cans, throw up in the gutter, and sometimes engage in a fistfight or two.

  The first time this happened, shortly after we'd moved to the area, I had no idea what was going on. I was so worried that I actually asked one of my neighbors whether we should be calling 911. I didn't know if it was an incipient riot out there or what. My neighbor explained that one of the families on the block had a country house that they went to, and sometimes their teenager stayed home while the parents were gone and had some friends over.

  “Oh, I get it,” I said. “No need to call the cops in that case.”

  Indeed, I could only imagine the parents’ preparations: money left for takeout, emergency phone numbers, reminders to walk the dog and take in the paper, don't leave the windows open if you go out, and sure, invite a couple of friends over to watch a movie.

  Ha! You'd think none of these parents had ever been teenagers. Even if they were so nerdy that they never pulled a trick like this when they were kids, haven't they ever seen Risky Business or one of those TV shows where the kids throw wild parties the minute the parents drive away? That's why I've made it very clear to Taz and Sport that their father and I won't be going away for the weekend without them until they are thirty- six and thirty-one, respectively.

  But I don't begin to pretend that it keeps my son out of trouble for me to sit home every night. He's off at other kids’ houses, he's in the park, he's hanging out on the avenue with the pack of kids Elon and I refer to as CONY— Cream of Neighborhood Youth.

  They huddle outside the local pizzeria and sit in the shadows of the elementary school playground, clouds of smoke forming overhead, the occasional loud snicker punctuating their murmured secrets. They're almost ganglike, the way they congregate and spar, bursts of “FUCK no!” and other intelligent expressions rising every now and then into the quiet night air from their huddles. One kid might break into the dance steps to “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” while another crows a few lyrics from some nasty song like “I was gonna go to schoo- ool, until I got hi- igh!” that makes the rest of them crack up.

  It's a little intimidating to be an adult walking past the pack, ashamed of the jeans that I bought for twelve bucks at a closeout sale and totally unhip New Balance sneakers. But they mostly don't notice me. I'm invisible to them, and it's just as well. It allows me to discreetly observe. I fancy myself a sort of Margaret Mead, trying to figure out the coming- of- age rituals of middle- class American kids in the early twenty- first century.

  I see that it's the odd one who doesn't have a cell phone, and that at least half of them are smoking cigarettes. Some boys have long hippie hair, some have buzz cuts, and some have spiky Mohawks, lohawks, faux-hawks, or frohawks—all shorter, less-in-your-face versions of the original.

  (I should note here that at the tender age of nine, Sport wanted to get a Mohawk and I was dead set against it, but Elon said that maybe if we let him do it, it wouldn't seem so alluring. Well, we let him get it, and he looked like a bald guy with a squirrel on his scalp. Two weeks later, he asked to go back to the barber to have it shaved off. I had to hand it to Elon; it was a good lesson that sometimes if you can stand to let your kid do a stupid thing, he'll come to his senses faster than if you fight with him about it.)

  The girls I see on the street are mostly long- haired, and most of them manage to show cleavage. I didn't even know I had cleavage until I was pregnant and spilling out of my clothes unintentionally, but it seems to be the norm now, thanks to bras that squish your boobs together and shirts that have necklines nowhere near your neck.

  Most of the teenagers I see in the neighborhood from a distance look scary, intimidating, or, in the case of girls, dressed way too sexy for my standards. But once I get up close enough, I realize I've known half of them since they were four years old and riding their tricycles around the block. It's just that now they're all taller than I am.

  The ones who give me hope are the ones who actually make eye contact and say hi when they realize that the unsightly grown- up slinking past on the way to pick up a quart of milk on a Saturday night is actually the mother of their old friend Taz from second grade.

  Th
e ones who frighten me are the ones who glance at me long enough to recognize me but who don't dare acknowledge that they know me, for fear of appearing uncool in front of their peers.

  But these days you don't have to actually see teenagers in the flesh to observe their ways. I know more than one mother who uses the Internet to keep tabs (also known as spying) and even entrap. One friend of mine hacks into her son's e- mail to read the exchanges between him and his girlfriend. So far she hasn't found anything that's required intervention, but I wonder what she would do if she did.

  Another friend took on a fake identity, created a MySpace page and an IM name, and tried to make friends with her own daughter online, just to see what she was up to.

  Smart kid; she never responded.

  But I have to wonder: Was the girl really avoiding strangers?

  Or had she somehow figured out that her mother was the stranger?

  know a lot of old- timers say it was better when parents didn't get down on the floor and play with their children, but, for the most part, I actually enjoyed playing with my boys when they were little. For me, being a mother was a way of reliving some of the fun things from my own childhood.

  I got to read them all my favorite children's books, like Eloise and One Morning in Maine and Curious George and Caps for Sale. I got to play Red Light, Green Light, One, Two, Three and Giant Step. And I got to go to all my favorite places— parks, zoos, the circus, country fairs— and enjoy them all over again in the company of my kids.

  I loved doing arts and crafts, too, though my boys got sick of Play-Doh and painting with glitter long before I did. I also got to play with all the toys that I didn't have when I was a child— like Erector sets, trains, and cars, which weren't considered suitable toys for little girls way back in the last century, but which are really a lot of fun.

  When the boys outgrew toys, we moved on to games. I didn't play many board games when I was a child, but as a mother, I learned Trouble, Sorry!, Scrabble, and Stratego— and I even won sometimes. The kids tried to teach me chess, but I proved too stupid to learn it. We've played a lot of Monopoly over the years, too, though I don't love it— the games just go on too long— but I am always happy to engage in a gin rummy marathon.

  Part of the shock of having a teenager, though, is that all of a sudden your kid doesn't want to play games with you anymore. He doesn't want to go places and do things with you, or even be seen with you.

  On the one hand, I understand that it's normal for kids to push their parents away as they grow up. On the other hand, I wasn't willing to accept being cut off this way from my own son just because he had turned thirteen. I actually missed spending time with Taz. I was starting to feel like I didn't know who he was. One day I realized I couldn't even remember the last time we'd done something simple and fun together.

  I decided we needed some mother- son quality time. I offered to take him to the beach, the pool, the bowling alley, the mall. I'd play cards, or even the dreaded Monopoly. How about a bike ride, or maybe a jog in the park?

  “Nah, that's OK,” he'd say, no matter what I offered to do. “I got some people I gotta hang out with today.”

  I sometimes heard other parents describe what sounded like idyllic family outings to museums, historic sites, and other attractions. It made me wonder what was wrong with me that I couldn't get Taz to go places with me.

  Then, one day, I dropped in on a friend who'd recently renovated her home. She wanted me to see the new cabinets, tiles, and paint colors. But when I got there, I witnessed firsthand just what these allegedly idyllic family outings I've been jealous of are really all about.

  It was 11 a.m. on a Sunday and her thirteen- year- old had just been awakened by his little sister. He was not happy about it, because, apparently, he believed he was entitled to sleep all day.

  Not so, said his mother. They were heading out to a museum to see a spectacular exhibit about the evolution of modern architecture, and she wanted to leave within twenty minutes. It was a beautiful day, so they were also going to be picnicking in a park en route. She had a lovely basket all prepared, with his favorite ham-and- cheese sandwiches. As a special treat for him, she had even gone to the trouble of purchasing sour cream and onion potato chips.

  Well, all that might work on an eight- year- old, but, apparently, it wasn't enough to get an adolescent out of bed on a Sunday morning.

  “I'm not hungry,” he moaned. “I don't care. I just want to sleep.”

  “Well, that's not happening,” said the mother matter-of- factly. “You need to get up, brush your teeth, and get dressed so that we can go.”

  “I'm not GOING!” the kid screamed. “I TOLD you, I don't WANT to go!”

  “Well, it's NOT UP TO YOU!” the mother screamed back. “This is what we're doing today, and YOU'RE coming whether you like it or NOT!”

  “I HATE you!” came the response. “I hate EVERYONE in this FAMILY!”

  I fervently wished at that moment that I could have shrunk myself to the size of a dust ball (not that she had any, her house seemed spotless) and rolled away on the still-glossy, just-polyurethaned wood floors to hide under the tastefully reupholstered sofa. Should I have just turned around and let myself out, or would that have been too rude? On the other hand, I didn't exactly want to interfere in this little conflagration to bid my good- byes. I didn't want to further embarrass my friend by reminding her that she had a witness to this outburst, but I also didn't have the slightest bit of curiosity about how it was going to turn out. I'd been there, I really had, and the endings to these episodes were never pretty.

  At some point in the argument, she sighed and turned to me, bit her lip, and shook her head.

  “I sympathize with you,” I said. “I really do. We have the exact same thing happening in our house all the time. Speaking of which, I'm gonna run. Good luck! See ya.”

  I turned tail and dashed out the door, and realized, somewhat guiltily, that actually we hadn't had this same exact problem in our house lately because when Taz said no, he didn't want to do something, I never argued. I guess this makes me a wimp. Or maybe just a Terrible Mother.

  As further evidence that my own child was becoming a stranger to me, one day another mother told me that the photo on Taz's Facebook page was a good one.

  I was embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about. Terrible Mother that I am, I had not kept tabs on my son's Facebook page; I wasn't even sure what a Facebook page was. Turned out my friend's son had a Facebook page, too, and my son was a Face-book friend of her son's, so that's how she knew about the photo on Taz's page.

  Not that I understood any of this. Clearly, I needed to get on board with this Facebook thing. So I went to the Facebook website and supplied my e- mail address to register.

  Moments later, I got a message informing me that I had just invited forty- three people to be my Facebook friends! Some of them were people I hadn't heard from in years, including assorted cousins, high school classmates I hadn't kept in touch with, and others from various phases of my life, like a student from a college class I taught four years earlier and a political consultant I had once quoted for a news story I wrote during the 2000 election campaign.

  I wasn't sure what I'd clicked or done to get this list of people, but the whole thing was mortifying. People I hadn't spoken to in eight years were getting invitations to be my Facebook friend? How embarrassing!

  Suddenly e- mails started popping up in my in- box. A couple of relatives were the first to respond. Yes, they did want to be my Facebook friends. Hurray! I was touched by this, and pleased. Then I reminded myself not to get too carried away— these people were my cousins, after all. If they won't be my Facebook friends, who will?

  But as the minutes wore on, I wondered why so few of the rest of the forty- three invitees were responding. Had they gotten the invitation and thought, “UGH! I don't want HER to be my Facebook friend!” Or were they simply wondering, “Who the hell is this?” since they hadn't hea
rd from me in years and quite possibly had forgotten who I was. I was starting to feel paranoid, and not a little bit depressed.

  Then I got another e- mail from someone wanting to be my Facebook friend, only it was someone whose name was utterly unknown to me. I was certain this person was not on my original list of potential Face-book friends. I went to his Facebook page to check him out, and he definitely did not look familiar. His profile described him as a graduate student from Wyoming. I wracked my brain. Did I know this person? How could this person know me? It was all maddening, like something out of Minority Report or The Matrix. Maybe I knew him in my OTHER life, with my OTHER brain?

  It was like my e- mail address was living some secret life without me, just like when I tie my dog up outside a store to run a quick errand, and I come out and people I don't know are talking to the dog by name. “Hi, Buddy! How are you?” some strange guy is crooning at her. I mean, excuse me, but how the hell does my dog have human friends whom I don't know? When I'm brave enough to ask, there's always some logical explanation— “Oh, I work at the dog boarding place, and I remember the time Buddy stayed with us for a few days,” or something like that— but it's still rather disorienting to think that your pet knows more people in the neighborhood than you do.

  This Facebook thing was a little bit like that. I wanted to e- mail this guy and say, “But who are you? Why do you want to be my Facebook friend when I've never heard of you?” But I was too embarrassed. I mean, what if I did know him, somehow, through work, or some class I'd taken long ago or something, and I just didn't remember. Or maybe he was one of those Internet stalkers the FBI is always busting, and he somehow thinks I'm a teenager from Alabama who will meet him at a bus station, instead of a forty- something mother of two who has a lot of bad hair days.

  I reminded myself that I'd started out on Facebook just wanting to see my own son's photo, but now, somehow, I was spending all this time obsessing over who was and wasn't friending me.