But sound was only part of it; the rest was the legend, the questioning, feeling persona of the rebel, Tupac. The rapper had already been dead for four years, but his musical legend—along with his tragic rise and fall—was very much alive. Maybe Shakur’s world, so different on the surface from Dylan’s own, held more of the sharp contrasts, the highs and the lows, he was feeling in himself and didn’t see reflected around him anywhere else. At the time, I couldn’t see why my son would identify with a rapper who talked about tough times on city streets, but elements of the attraction became clear as time went on. I remember Dylan said he didn’t like the “sugar coating” of reality. For him, the real was rough and ragged. I believe he sensed that intuitively because that’s how he was starting to experience it in his preteen years. In fact, Dylan was drawn to bold stories of meteoric rises and spectacular falls wherever they occurred. He was particularly struck by the film Blow, the story of a Los Angeles cocaine mogul who built an empire, then took too many risks and lost it all. Alarmed by some of Dylan’s “tunings-in” via internet, I set the parental controls and tried to steer him toward what I considered more edifying cultural events, like plays or musicals at the university theatre. But he would only get restless in the middle of them, and we would have to leave. He couldn’t sit still long enough, or maybe they just weren’t gripping enough to hold his attention. Things had to pack a punch, or he wasn’t feeling it at all. At the same time, he loved hilarious comedies, the kind that would set him off laughing until he was doubled up in spasms on the couch. Clearly, I needed to redesign the house complete with gym equipment, punching bags, pool table, and giant trampoline outside for teen energy release. But even that would only have worked for a while.
As for any parent of a rebellious teen, there were plenty of comic moments amid the fray. Among the myriad phone calls from girls asking for Dylan, I picked up the phone early one Saturday evening to hear a concerned male voice: someone’s dad. “Did you know that your son crawled through a window of my house into my daughter’s bedroom?” the father asked calmly. “Please come by and pick him up.” That was a new one. I found out that Dylan had been invited by the girl to do so, but that certainly didn’t make it OK—especially not for her dad. Apparently, she was grounded at the time and decided it would make the time pass faster if she had a young male visitor. Her father handled it masterfully: he remained calm, all the while looking my son in the eye and telling him he would be welcome to knock at the front door like any other visitor but not to sneak through any windows. It made him look like a cat burglar. He also explained that this was his house and he needed to know who was there. Toward the end of our visit, the dad invited his daughter out to say hello. Then it was time for Dylan and me to take our leave. The dad shook our hands and made sure we crossed back over the threshold. To my knowledge, there were no further illicit visitations by my son—not to that house, anyway.
I remember back in my own teen days a parental male voice would come on the TV: “It’s 10 p.m.; do you know where your child is?” Yes, a good question, and how about we add 2 a.m. or 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. as well? I have to admit that, as my son grew older, I couldn’t always answer that question with complete accuracy. It’s not that I was oblivious. But my philosophy of parenting was that young people didn’t have to be locked into a strict after-school schedule, with parents chauffeuring them about from special lessons to sports games to friends’ houses. I believed they needed more creative freedom than that. Nonetheless, I made sure Dylan would call me to check in, as I knew other parents did. I knew who his friends were and kept in touch with their parents, too. Dylan was home before dark on school days and went out with a friend—and a curfew—on weekends. Yes, my son was growing up fast, but even though we were moving into a new era for both of us, I was pretty sure we could work things out.
CHAPTER 14: OFF TRACK
In the years after Mike left, I found out that it was one thing to be a single parent when the going was smooth; it was another when we hit the rough spots. One day, Dylan was racing on a brand-new BMX track in our town. He loved being able to practice on it so close to home. But on this day, there were way too many racers lined up on the hill for the start. Even from the stands, you could see that the track downhill and over the first rollers was barely wide enough to accommodate the field of contestants that came charging down, each one trying to get ahead as they gained full momentum for the course ahead. Sure enough, an accident occurred on the first set of rollers. Two or three bikes were down, one of them Dylan’s. My heart sank for him. Among the spectators on the far side of the track, I watched to see how quickly the riders would get up, if anyone was hurt. Usually, they were only shaken and bruised, but real injury in this sport was always a possibility. I held my breath. This time, it was clear that Dylan was in pain. His knee. He was helped from the course so he could sit on the sidelines, feeling not only the pain of the injury but also angry and defeated.
My first impulse was to go down immediately to talk to him and see how he was doing. I could commiserate with him, check out the knee, tell him things would be OK. But at the same time, something else was stopping me. I couldn’t be sure of Dylan’s reaction. Would he accept my attempts to talk to him quietly? Or would his anger and frustration erupt and make a scene? Probably some angry explosion at home or in the car with him earlier that week made me fear the same thing could happen right here, now, in front of all these people. I flashed back to scenes throughout his childhood, going all the way back to his earliest years, how it could happen that my attempts to help him when he was upset could backfire. Not always, but often enough. From what I knew of my son, I could just as well become a lightning rod for all his pain in that moment. What good would that do? My courage left me. I wanted his dad to be there; he would know how to handle this situation. Reluctantly, I waited. My fear of an emotional blow-up was equal to my own self-disgust at staying riveted to my seat, as if I were a mere bystander, not a mom. From what I could tell, though, my son didn’t seem seriously injured, thank goodness. He didn’t need to go to the hospital. The announcer stopped the race for a restart, and the downed racers gradually dispersed.
I looked around. There weren’t too many single moms out there, mostly dads. This was a rough sport, after all. I wondered about myself. A concerned parent should be down there in the trenches with their boy. Why was I so worried about my son’s reaction and what other people thought about it? You’re supposed to do the right thing, regardless of how the world sees it or what the reaction is. Why did I think I could do this single parenting job, anyway? Wasn’t I just a lightweight, fair-weather mom? Somebody who could handle parenting only when everything was going fine? Yep, that was me, all right. The old feeling moved in as it so often did when the chips were down on the home front: incapable, ineffective, not up to the job. I was a person who could do just fine back at the office, in my department, where things tended to be neat and tidy. But real life out here on the crash track wasn’t like that. Out here, people broke bones, took a punch, cracked their teeth, got flattened.
Eventually—I don’t remember how he made it—Dylan somehow limped around the track to the spectator side, which was also near the final straightaway. He sat on a mound near the track and watched the proceedings. I was scouting a path to climb down from the stands when I noticed a man down below approaching my son. I could see the stranger was talking to him, probably to ask him how he was, to tell him he was glad it wasn’t any worse, and not to worry—it was just one race. Dylan said something, nodded his head. I was thankful. From Dylan’s reaction, I judged he was staying calm. By then, I was on my way to talk to Dylan myself. We sat together for a while, then I asked if he wanted to watch the rest of the races or go home. He wanted to watch for a while. By the time I helped him up, he could walk, slowly, favoring his left knee. When we got home, we knew it was important to get ice, prop his leg up, get movies to watch. Back then, my thirteen-year-old son seemed so indestructible, had come through so many sc
rapes and falls, I thought he’d heal up and be back at it in a few days. It would be a week later before Dylan would tell me, “Mom, I have to go to the doctor. My knee feels strange; this is different.” He was right. The doctor said he had a torn ACL; the ligament would eventually require surgery to fully stabilize the knee again. It would be advisable to wait until the bones finished growing, however. He’d have to wait a few years. For now, he should keep icing it for the swelling. After that, he could continue biking for casual transportation and fun. But as for BMX racing, no. Too hard on an injured knee.
Other things were changing, too. Gradually, from twelve to thirteen to fourteen years old, Dylan’s behavior became more unpredictable. I couldn’t count on him to follow through with rules or agreements we’d made. In eighth grade, he insisted that he wanted to switch from fall soccer to football. I wasn’t keen on the idea, but we discussed it, and I agreed to let him try it. Things went well for a while, but then one day he didn’t show up for practice. The coach didn’t know where he was, so I went looking for him in the neighborhood. I finally found him nonchalantly visiting with a friend. “Hey, Mom, what’s up?” he said, as if nothing was wrong. I explained that skipping football practice wasn’t an option. I found myself having to mete out “groundings” and punishments—that or taking away privileges, things he would look forward to. It was like trying to train an unruly horse. Hadn’t we been through all this before when he was younger?
For his part, Dylan felt I wasn’t holding up my end of the deal. Why had I been among the last parents to pick up their kid at soccer practices? I told him it wasn’t easy to work full-time and be a parent-chauffeur, but these rationalizations fell on deaf ears. Everyone else’s parent was doing it, so why couldn’t I? My assignment: try harder, Mom. I made it a point not to be late.
Problems cropped up at school. He didn’t always do his homework. Sometimes he was tardy; on occasion, he didn’t show up for school at all. This shocked me. He knew how important getting an education was. Why was he doing this? When I quizzed him on where he went and why, his answers were sketchy; they didn’t make sense to me. None of these behaviors seemed to fit who he’d been. Whereas before we’d always been able to talk and work things out, now we had loud disagreements. I talked with him and tried to understand, but I was losing a clear sense of who my son was. Our relationship became less trusting, and I felt more like an inquisitor—or even, at times, a jailer. “No, you can’t go out tonight. Not after what happened today. You have to stay home,” I’d tell him. Little did he know that this was as bad a punishment for me as for him. Once, after a particularly frustrating episode with my rebel son, I asked Rev. Patrick to intervene, and he came to our house to speak with him, too. They had had a good connection since he’d been Dylan’s soccer coach when he was younger. It helped to have the outside support, but we needed more.
I began to sense I really couldn’t do this all alone. Dylan’s dad lived far away in northern Ohio, and though Dylan visited him every school holiday and during the summer, I didn’t feel this new stranger was getting enough guidance. In retrospect, all these incidents (the tardiness, the truancy) should have been waving red flags for me—and for the school counselor. It should have been standard practice for the counselor to intervene, to suggest Dylan have a mental health screening to investigate possible causes for the changed behaviors. We both could have been interviewed. At that stage, with the school’s help, we could have found out about medical treatment, appropriate counseling, and maybe even alternative options for doing classwork. This we can see clearly in hindsight. But in those years, a “zero tolerance” attitude toward behavior problems was still widely in place. I can only hope a more comprehensive approach, along with early intervention, will be more common for kids and families in this situation today.
Toward the end of turbulent eighth grade, incidents were coming fast and furious. By this time, given the prevailing wisdom of the era, I should have had him on a strict schedule, under lock and key if need be, with me as warden. Would that have helped? One day, he’d climbed with a friend up to a high floor of the college’s Fine Arts building. According to witnesses at an outdoor café across the street, a folding chair came careening off a balcony to crash on the sidewalk below. Fortunately, no one was injured, but someone certainly could have been. The campus police took the call and found two kids, one of them my son—he’d been the one to throw the chair. When I later asked him why he did it, he said he didn’t know; the idea just came to him. He thought it would be exciting to watch it fall. An impulse. I couldn’t believe he didn’t think about the consequences.
Because of this event, Dylan was assigned a juvenile court representative. He had to attend after-school and Saturday meetings and do community service; together, we met with his counselor several times. One would think such a regimen would cause a kid to change his behaviors, realize that every action has a consequence, but that wasn’t happening. Dylan would say he was going to do better in the future, and say so sincerely. But then … a new incident. I began to feel that my bright, curious son wasn’t learning anymore. Or that he wasn’t learning one of the most important lessons you have to know in life: self-management. Why couldn’t he? What was wrong?
Dylan had always been prone to tantrums and inexplicable fits of irritability. These weren’t going away, either. In the past, Mike and I had learned to remain calm, impose a time-out, keep him in his room until he calmed down. When he was in a rage, you couldn’t talk to him. No communication was possible—this had been true since he was a little child. I maintained the same policies as before during these troubled years, only now my son was older, bigger, stronger. It wasn’t so easy to persuade a kid rapidly growing past my height and weight that he needed to keep himself under control. My tools for maintaining discipline often seemed too small for the job. Once, in an angry outburst, Dylan struck the inside arm rest of the car on his side, shattering the plastic. I noticed that behind posters, there were holes punched in his bedroom door. He had already patched up a hole in the wall by himself, where he had kicked in the drywall. That happened earlier, when Mike was still there. We learned to be calm and matter-of-fact; if you ruin it, you fix it. I used the same methods, but I was getting more and more worried about these explosions. Even his hard-won BMX trophies weren’t safe. They could be smashed in a rage, along with other easy targets. What Dylan really needed was help in anger management, but that would not come until later, after things spiraled out of control. Back then, none of us understood why.
The worst thing was that I no longer felt I could trust him. He had always been a volatile kid, but now he seemed like molten mercury. He seemed to be at least two different persons, depending on which moment I intercepted him. As for myself, I wasn’t a dictator-type; I wanted Dylan’s involvement in thinking through what could work better. And he would come up with good ideas that I could agree with. There were actually days when we were on the same page. So it was that we could have a perfectly rational conversation about something on Tuesday, make an agreement about what to do, and then by Friday all bets would be off, as if the discussion had never occurred. I began doubting my methods, my whole approach. Were all my cherished ideas about parenting wrong? Was I supposed to become a dictator? The rules that worked well enough at age nine or ten were now being unilaterally overthrown. I’d tried to be a creative person, think outside the box. Now the box I really cared about had grown powerful legs and was running away from me. When the phone rang, sometimes in the middle of the night, it could be the police. “We picked up your son with a friend of his. They were caught driving on Highway 141, and the officer pulled them over.” Dylan had snuck out at 2 a.m. for an adventure in the car his friend Doug had “borrowed” from his mom. I called Mike in exasperation. He knew things weren’t going well.
I thought maybe Dylan needed a stronger father presence in his life. True, Mike would call Dylan every week to talk to him; Dylan could call him anytime. And true, the boy always visited h
is father during his school breaks and vacations, maybe three of those, plus maybe three weeks during the summer. But Mike lived twelve hours away—too far away to be involved daily. As the difficult school year wound to a close, we began to talk about Dylan spending more time with his dad. In fact, would Mike be able to take over the major parenting role? What if Dylan moved up there to live with him and his partner, Linda? I admit I latched on to this option with fervor, which wasn’t good for my pride, but it did calm my anxieties. I could no longer defend any of my parenting ideas; they were failing miserably. Besides, trading with Mike seemed fair to me. I had done my share of solo parenting. Now it was right for Mike to do his.
And what about Dylan? Would he go along with this? I talked to him about it. I brought up everything that had been happening and presented the case to him. Maybe he would like to be in a larger place, make a fresh start? If things weren’t going so well with Mom, maybe it would be better with Dad? He wasn’t enthusiastic about it. He didn’t think his dad would understand him as well. I was dubious about this. Wasn’t his objection just a ploy to be with the less strict parent? Maybe he was better able to manipulate me because I was easier to deal with. When it came right down to it, over the weeks of deliberation with Mike and Dylan, I decided not to let my son’s preference hold sway. The way I saw it, Dylan had already exerted too much of his own out-of-control authority, and it was time to try something different. Even if—maybe even especially if—Dylan didn’t like it.
Suspended Sentence Page 12