I then moved on to books about intelligence— Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Multiple Intelligences, and every other kind of intelligence except military intelligence— all of which made me keenly feel my own lack of intelligence. If only I could figure out whether Taz was best described as logical or people-oriented? Musical or visual? And what about me? Was I like the mother in Slummy Mummy, or was I more like the author of Confessions of a Slacker Mom? Most of the time I just felt like the Clueless Mom.
Reading about all these different categories didn't exactly solve my problems, but at least they made me feel less weird. I figured if I could find a chapter in every book that described some aspect of my child, then whatever was going on in our house was probably normal.
For example, it was sort of a relief to find out I wasn't the only mother with a kid who refused to wear pajamas because “they feel funny.” At first I saw this as a problem, and I tried many different types of pajamas made from various fabrics in an effort to identify an acceptable brand. But I finally gave up, after reading in one book that there are some children so sensitive to the way things feel that they only like wearing very soft clothes.
Reading that made it OK, somehow, and his rejection of pajamas actually turned out to be something of a blessing. Both he and his brother got used to sleeping in whatever T- shirt or jersey they were planning to wear the next day, and that made getting dressed in the morning quicker.
It was only later that I learned that pajamas as sleep-wear aren't considered cool anymore. But pajamas as streetwear— well, that's a whole different story. Kids don't want to wear them to bed when they're four, but they don't mind wearing them to school when they're thirteen.
Somehow, the small comforts I had gotten from reading books about raising young children did not carry over to reading books about raising adolescents. One look at the table of contents in Parenting Teens with Love & Logic, with chapter headings called “Sex” and “Drug or Substance Abuse,” made me want to turn to the chapter called “Suicide Threats” and make a few of those myself. The chapter titled “Parties,” I could only guess, had nothing to do with tips for making your own piñata.
Actually, there was one passage in that book that was unintentionally hilarious. It was in the section on how not to let kids yank your chain by overreacting to provocative statements they might make. As an example, the authors offered the hypothetical scenario of a parent asking, “What if my kid comes home and says something off the wall, like, communism is a really great way to distribute wealth and create just societies? How do I handle that?”
This cracked me up because the only person in our house who would ever say something like that is Elon. Now, don't go thinking I'm some left- wing lunatic or anything; I assure you I am not. I leave the left- wing stuff to him, and in return he doesn't follow me into the voting booth. He also allows me to invest in the stock market even though it is, in his view, a pillar of a corrupt capitalist society. (When we retire, however, and find that there is no dacha waiting for us in the Russian countryside, I suspect we will be thanking our 401(k)s for allowing us to dine on something other than 9Lives.)
In contrast, Taz, like a lot of materialistic, money-obsessed kids his age, is the Ultimate Capitalist. He imagines some future life where he'll be living in a mansion with a pool (unlike our cramped apartment), driving a nice car (anything would be nicer than our twenty- year- old junkheap with 130,000 miles on it), and eating takeout every night (instead of my strict “we can only afford to eat out once a week”).
I remind him, of course, that in order to achieve the lordly existence of his dreams, one must have a rawther high- paying job, and those jobs don't tend to be handed to people who failed to graduate from high school. But, naturally, he finds that part of the discussion to be unutterably boring.
He also can't seem to accept the concept of cutting back on consumption in order to keep expenses down. I'm forever yelling at him and Sport to turn off the lights and the TV when they leave the room, not just to save the earth, but, more important, to save on the electric bill.
When I was a kid, if you left the light on, somebody's mother would always say, “Whaddaya, got stock in the electric company?”
But when I tried that line on Taz, he said, “That's a good idea! Can we get some stock in the electric company? And maybe we should get some stock in Starbucks, too? And Apple?”
The authors of that guide to raising teenagers, with their example of a kid advocating communism in order to shock you, seem not to have anticipated the possibility that your kids might be more conservative politically than you are. But they do offer an all- purpose line to use—whatever your obnoxious adolescent's viewpoint might be. When he voices an opinion that challenges your values and everything you hold dear, you just say, “Thanks for sharing that. I've always wondered how teenagers see that.”
So I told Elon that if Taz decided to pick a fight with him by saying that he idolizes Donald Trump or some other (in Elon's view) capitalist pig- dog, we should simply say, “Thanks for sharing,” and smile.
But it never worked out that way. Any time Taz expressed admiration for someone on the order of Paris Hilton, neither Elon nor I could contain our horror. Like every other parent who ever existed, we instead wasted our breath trying to explain to our child why his adulation for someone we had no respect for was not only upsetting but also morally bankrupt.
To which Taz would usually respond, “Whatever.”
It struck me as incredibly ironic that we couldn't let things go with a simple “Thank you for sharing,” but he had no problem dismissing us with “Whatever.” I wonder sometimes if he hasn't been secretly reading a book called A Teenager's Guide to Blowing Off Parents.
One question that I didn't find the answer to in the guide to raising teens is why, once my child turned thirteen, did he decide that he could not spend more than five minutes in his own house? For years, my living room was the default location for entire gangs of neighborhood boys. They would play video games, have Stephen King movie marathons, and pig out on junk food for hours while camping out on my sofa and floor. From the time Taz was eleven to the time he officially became a teenager, it seemed like no weekend went by without my hosting at least a half- dozen boys for a meal or two.
Sport loved having all these big boys around. He made a pest of himself most of the time, but they were, for the most part, very good- natured about including him in their football games, their video games, and even their movie watching, though we had to drag him out of the room when the Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy videos gave way to Pet Sematary. (Sport was so enamored of the big guys that I finally had to institute a rule: You can't invite anyone to your birthday party who is more than twice your age.)
For a while there, it felt like I was running the Harpaz Hilton, or an overnight camp for middle schoolers. They were big enough so that they didn't mind sleeping in their clothes, and they were too old to wake up in the middle of the night and demand to be taken home, the way they sometimes do when they're little. But they were also small enough that two or three of them could sleep on the pullout sofa bed, another one could curl up in the big armchair, and another two could manage on a blow- up mattress on the floor.
Every now and then one of my neighbors would peek her head in the apartment and be horrified by the large number of boys she saw there.
“I don't know how you can stand it,” she'd say.
But I was thrilled that Taz had such nice friends. They even berated Taz if he was fresh to me. “Don't talk to your mother like that!” one of them would inevitably say. In fact, in many ways, they were utterly unlike what I had expected adolescent boys to be. They made eye contact, they said hello, they brought their dirty dishes into the kitchen. Some of them— but by no means all— even put the seat down after using the toilet.
When I was in second grade, my teacher had us write down our dreams for when we grew up, and I remember writing that I wanted to have twelve children. We
ll, I only had two of my own, but some days it felt like I was the den mother for the whole dozen.
But something changed when Taz turned thirteen. My living room was suddenly empty. No more movie marathons. Saturday night no longer included a moment around 3 a.m. when I would have to go out and tell them to shut up and go to sleep for God's sake, before I called their parents. Sunday mornings no longer involved making bacon and eggs for a crowd.
Instead, Taz was just never home. Here is a typical exchange between the two of us if he was kind enough to stop by and drop off his book bag before heading out again five minutes later.
ME: Where are you going?
HIM: Places.
ME: But who are you going with?
HIM: Oh you know— peeps.
(Presumably, dear reader, you are sufficiently in the know to realize that this refers not to a type of marsh-mallowy Easter candy shaped like baby chickens, but is thug- talk for the word people, as in “my peeps.”)
ME: And what exactly are you planning to do with these … peeps?
HIM: I don't know. Like, chill, prolly?
(Note: “Prolly” is not a girl's name. It is teenage mum-blespeak for “probably.” You will find it on page 34 of the book I intend to write for Berlitz one day called Useful Phrases for Touring the Adolescent Countryside.)
Later, if I would I call him on his cell and ask what he was doing, he would tell me: “Jus’ chillin’.”
Well. Natch!
Sometimes days would go by without a single Taz sighting.
“I'm sleeping over at Ethan's,” he'd say in a call Friday night.
“Tonight I'll be at Michael's,” the word would come Saturday night.
I didn't know whether to put him on the endangered species list or issue an AMBER Alert. He'd leave messages on the answering machine from time to time, and sometimes he'd come home to change clothes, which I deduced from the fact that his dirty laundry pile kept growing even when no one had slept in his bed.
Often on Sunday nights, though, he'd make an appearance. Why?
“I have a twenty- page paper due on The Odyssey. I forgot to read it, and it's due tomorrow.”
When I thought back to those days of having all those boys camping out in our living room, it made me sad. I hadn't changed, so what was different? Couldn't they just please land on me all of a sudden for dinner one night, like the old days? I told myself if only they'd all have another movie marathon, I wouldn't even complain about the smelly feet. I wouldn't even yell at them to be quiet if they woke me up with their hollering at 3 a.m.!
I offered to cater Chinese food, if only Taz would invite a bunch of his friends over. They could even order a pay- per- view wrestling event on the TV in my bedroom and leave potato chip crumbs on my pillows!
But no matter what I offered, Taz was having none of it. “That's OK,” he'd say in a singsong voice on his way out the door. “See ya!”
When I finally got him to explain himself, he said his friends had just gotten too big for our little living space. They were six feet tall now, not five feet tall. They couldn't sleep curled up in the living room chair anymore. He couldn't even hang out in his own room with a couple of friends; it was barely big enough for a single bed, a dresser, and a nightstand. The only air conditioner and cable TV was in the bedroom I shared with Elon. How could he invite six big guys over to watch a show in his mother's bedroom?
I had to agree, when I thought about it, that that would be awkward. Even hanging out in our living room was problematic. Any noise made in one room could be heard in all the rooms. They wanted to stay up late without having a mother come and shush them, and they wanted to play video games and watch movies without having a little brother interrupt them.
Our lack of physical space had never been an issue before. We had three small bedrooms, a living room/ dining room, and a kitchen. Sure, there were always kids’ toys all over the place, and homework got done at the dining- room table next to the computer desk, but I never felt deprived.
Once when the place was being repainted, we all had to live in the master bedroom together for a week. I actually kind of liked it. It was cozy. Simple. A little crowded, yes, but not unmanageable. It made me realize that if I had to live in Japan, in one of those tiny little spaces with the screens and the beds that you roll up, I'd be totally fine.
Besides, I hate housekeeping. I figured the fewer rooms, the less vacuuming. I didn't mean to create a Spartan existence for my family, but I always felt like it was just the right amount of space. One bathroom for four people never bothered us, though on that count, I considered myself lucky to have boys, who rarely spend more than thirty seconds in the bathroom at a time, anyway.
But now I tried to see it through Taz's eyes. For the first time, I wished I had a big house with a basement, or a den, or a family room or playroom, where Taz and his buddies could sprawl. I had no place to put a Ping-Pong table or a dartboard. And since I couldn't offer any of that, Taz said I'd just have to get used to the fact that he was going to hang out elsewhere.
One of his friends had a big- screen TV, cable, and central air in a media room; his mom was happy to have Taz over any time. Another friend was an only child with an entire floor at his disposal and plenty of room for other kids to sleep over. Another kid had a country house at a lake, and spending the weekend there was far preferable in Taz's eyes to sitting at home playing Monopoly with me and his little brother.
Taz managed to go to swankier places, too. One of his friends’ parents had a beach house in the Hamptons. I'd just like to announce that I have never been to the Hamptons. I have never even been invited to the Hamptons. But there was one weekend last summer where not only was Taz in the Hamptons, but my niece was in the Hamptons, too, and they weren't even together. They both, and let me stress here, separately, had people to visit in the Hamptons. My sister and I did not. “Yes,” I e- mailed her that weekend, “we ARE chopped liver!”
One weekend while Taz was chillin’ in the Hamp tons, I happened to pick up the Sunday New York Times. In a column in the back of the magazine, Marion Winik, a mother about my age, bemoaned her sixteen- year- old son's unwillingness to spend more than five minutes at home. On that rare occasion when he deigned to drop by, he told her it was only to pick up his fifteen- year- old stepbrother so that they could go “chill at Trav's.”
“What exactly is involved in ‘chilling at Trav's’ I will leave to your imagination— God knows it's had a vivid dramatic life in mine,” she wrote. She denied permission for the outing, which was followed, she said, by “shock, outrage and furious debate. The main arguments they offered were that they are teenagers, it is summer and I am stupid.” Later that night, the boys sneaked out of the house. She located them by cell phone, ordered them home, and they argued some more.
Well, at least I was not alone in wondering why my house is the last place my son would care to be at any given moment. But reading Winik's column had made me depressed. I actually hadn't allowed my imagination to consider the many things Taz might be doing when he claimed to be “chillin’ ” with “peeps.” I had in the past expressed concern about some of the less- savory types who hang out along the main drag in our neighborhood, but he assured me they were no problem.
“You mean those people drinkin’ forties and smoking cigarettes down on the corner?” Taz asked. “Don't worry about them, they know me.”
Was that supposed to make me feel better? It didn't.
I have an old collection of Erma Bombeck's humor columns that I pick up now and then in an effort to comfort myself when I start worrying too much about the fact that I Am a Terrible Mother. I read the book kind of like how my boys liked to have me read The Runaway Bunny over and over again to them when they were little.
“If you run away,” the mommy bunny told her little bunny, “I will run after you.” No matter where the little bunny goes, the mommy bunny finds him. But now that my bunny was a great big bunny, there was no hunting him down. I remembered Erma
had tackled this subject at some point; I flipped through the book and found it.
“In my mind, I always dreamed of the day I would have teenagers,” she wrote. She imagined that they'd all gather around the piano and sing songs together, then have a family meeting to decide on what flavor ice cream they were going to have.
“It never worked out that way,” she added. “Our teenagers withdrew to their bedrooms on their thirteenth birthday and didn't show themselves to us again until it was time to get married. If we spoke to them in public, they threatened to self- destruct within three minutes.”
She also had these words of wisdom: “Could I have ever comprehended that something so simple, so beautiful and so uncomplicated as a child could drive you to shout, ‘We are a family and you're a part of this family and by God, you're going to spend a Friday night with us having a good time if we have to chain you to the bed!’ ”
Well, it was a relief to know I was in good company and that this problem of children who disappear at age thirteen was not unique to my family, but had existed way back in the middle of the last century— a term I love to use because it upsets my sister. She read a reference recently to something that happened in the middle of the last century, and it took her a few minutes to realize that they were talking about the decade she grew up in and not something out of Dickens.
Reading Erma calmed me down enough that I could face a stiffer dose of advice— from my old friend and oracle Google. I figured I ought to read up on some serious subjects now that itchy pajamas were no longer my main concern. So I screwed up my courage and went surfing for wisdom on adolescents and marijuana— or should I say weed, which is the term most teenagers prefer these days.
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