13 Is the New 18

by Beth J. Harpaz

  But most of the websites I found sounded like they were either written by Joe Friday from the old TV series Dragnet (“Marijuana is the flame! Heroin is the fuse! LSD is the bomb!”) or by Bob Marley. The websites offered by the government were the scariest. A study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Did you know we have such a thing? Your tax dollars, hard at work!) told me that “those who used marijuana weekly were nine times as likely as nonusers to say they use alcohol or drugs … six times as likely to say they had run away from home … nearly six times as likely to say they had cut classes or skipped school… five times as likely to say they stole.”

  OK, it's one thing if your kid tries pot— er, weed— but according to this, he's also going to run away from home, skip school, and become a thief.

  The scariest study was what I like to call the Reefer Madness study, by British doctors, which claimed to show an increase in psychosis among people who smoke pot. The study appeared to be valid and scientific and built upon many other reputable studies.

  But the researchers admitted that they couldn't be sure that smoking was causing the psychosis. Maybe, instead, people who are in early stages of psychosis feel the need to go out and smoke. This reminded me of my long- held conviction that all heroin addicts start out by drinking milk.

  Reading about the study inspired me to want to see the movie Reefer Madness and actually watch some pot smokers lose their minds. My ever- reliable Window on the Universe, Google, obliged. Turns out Reefer Madness can be seen its in entirety on Google Video because it's in the public domain. The film was originally made in the 1930s as an anti- marijuana propaganda movie, but it became a cult film in the seventies after being rediscovered in the Library of Congress by a guy who advocates the decriminalization of marijuana. The movie's pot smokers grin maniacally are horny as hell, and dance a lot at parties, reminding me of teenagers in general, whether they smoke pot— or weed, or whatever— or not.

  As long as I was investigating the subject, I decided to check out an article on another website, titled “Marijuana: Telling Teenagers the Truth About Smoking Pot,” which was more or less at the other end of the spectrum.

  “Pot is less addictive than coffee,” the article states. Its author does admit that “pot will cause some short-term memory loss,” but reassuringly notes that it's no more serious than the memory loss caused by beer. Risks to pot smokers, according to the website, include gaining weight because of the munchies and having too much sex.

  The author adds, “I have been smoking pot for the last twenty- five years and I still test as a genius on IQ tests.”

  The Genius goes on to point out that pot is illegal, and you could go to jail if you get caught with it.

  “People get very weird about pot,” he notes. “So if anyone asks if you've been smoking pot, Just Say No!”

  At the Partnership for a Drug-Free America website, I decided to take the “Two-Minute Challenge.” Embarrassingly, I only got two of the eight questions right (whether cigarette use among teens is down— yes; and whether sniffing powdered heroin is risky— yes, or should I say, duh). All the tricky questions— where do most kids get their drugs (the right answer is friends, while I guessed classmates), and where most kids get information about drugs (school, not, as I guessed, the media)—I flubbed.

  Then I decided to do a little research into the oft-repeated notion that eating dinner together with your family is the key to raising perfect children. Turns out this comes from a survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. The survey found that the more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink, or use drugs.

  One of the differences between researching things on Google and reading a book is that when you read a book, you get the author's point of view, and all the evidence he has gathered to support his point of view. But when you research a topic on Google, you get every point of view. So virtually every study you turn up, the results are countered by the next link.

  In this case, the next page I clicked on took me to an academic's analysis that convinced me the survey about family dinners was hopelessly flawed. Eating dinner together, the analysis said, is a sign that a family is already functioning well. It's an effect, not a cause. The analysis went so far as to say that a screwed- up family that starts eating dinner together will probably make its children even more screwed up than they already are.

  We do eat dinner together most nights, but then again, I think we're pretty loopy as families go, so according to this analysis, I was just making my kids turn out worse by sitting at the dinner table with them.

  By the way, did you ever notice how often in The Sopranos Tony and Carmela sat down with their kids for dinner like a normal family? Not just that famous last scene in the diner, mind you, but lots of times at home, they'd gather together for a meal. Now, if that isn't proof that a dysfunctional family only makes their children more dysfunctional by eating together, what is?

  Actually, Elon and I 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.

  In the end, they punished Meadow by taking away her credit card. For three weeks.

  Taz doesn't have a credit card yet, but the offers come daily in the mail. This, too, is completely alien to me. Like a lot of people my age, my parents didn't have any credit cards when I was a kid. My dad finally got one in the seventies when car- rental companies stopped accepting cash. I remember getting my first one after I'd been out of college and working full- time for a few years. It was a really big deal; I felt so honored that American Express deemed me worthy of their trust!

  Little did I know that twenty years later, I'd be on the phone with their service center, begging them to stop clogging my mailbox with offers for more cards. At lower rates! With cash advances! And extra cards for everyone in the family— even my children!

  Maybe Meadow Soprano needed a credit card, but Taz does not.

  There was one other type of show that I thought might help my dysfunctional family in my search for expert advice. I tried watching, with my children, all the shows about the mean nannies who come in and straighten out screwed- up families.

  But I could never bear to watch through to the end. It was just all too close to home— the spoiled children, the household in chaos, the clueless grown- ups. Besides, it always seemed to me that no matter what the circumstances were, the nanny always blamed the mother.

  Usually by the time that scene was about to unfold, where the nanny would confront the mother about how everything was all her fault, I would be near tears and would beg the kids to change the channel. I just couldn't bear watching a fellow Terr
ible Mother's public humiliation.

  Then one day I came up with the brilliant idea of applying to be on one of the nanny shows. I didn't want to watch the humiliation scene, but somehow the idea of being part of it was appealing (in an anorexia- bulimia kind of a way).

  I located the show's website— naturally— by Googling it.

  “Kids driving you nuts?” the website asked. “Need harmony at home?”

  Yes! Yes! I filled out the application form and e- mailed it in. I mentioned to a colleague at work that I had done this, thinking that it was a very clever thing to do, but he looked at me like I was out of my mind.

  “Did you tell your family that you are doing this? Does Elon know?”

  Well, no, I thought I'd surprise them.

  Next thing I knew, I got an e- mailed response, thanking me for my query, and instructing me on how to submit a video of household chaos so that they could make sure we would be a good fit for the show.

  The only problem was, the only person in the family who was capable of making a video was Taz, but how could he make the video if the video was supposed to show him out of control? I decided to let Elon in on my little surprise and ask his advice about the video.

  Up until this point, I had, as my colleague at work pointed out, neglected to inform Elon that I had nominated our family to be on one of the nanny shows. And I have to admit, I was not prepared for the vehemence of his reaction.

  “You did WHAT? Are you out of your MIND? No, I'm not going to help you figure out how to make a video of our so- called household chaos, and if you figure it out on your own, I'm telling you right now that I refuse to have any part in anything that happens thereafter!”

  Maybe calling in a TV nanny for help wasn't such a good idea if it was going to cause my divorce.

  I abandoned the idea, and went back to reading books. Someone told me that Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck had a section on raising children, so I thought perhaps that would be both amusing and instructive. Well, it was funny, and I did laugh. Even the author photo was hilarious— surely the most memorable author photo of all time, with her hiding her neck, and half of her face, under a black turtleneck pulled up all the way to her eyeballs.

  Then I got to the chapter on parenting, which Nora started off by pointing out that when her kids were young, “you didn't need a book” to tell you how to be a parent.

  Well, Nora, I said to myself, you must have been a parent somewhere in the middle of the last century, because I definitely need lots of books, including, apparently, yours.

  Nowadays, the book continued, people who engage in the practice of “parenting,” which also apparently did not exist in the middle of the last century, have been told that “if your children believed you understood them, or at least tried to understand them, they wouldn't hate you when they became adolescents.”

  I had to admit she was right. That was part of why it was so awful that Taz no longer wanted anything to do with us. We were foolish enough to think that unlike with our own parents, there was no generation gap here. We thought we understood what being a teenager was all about. But Taz thought otherwise.

  “Your adolescent is sullen. Your adolescent is angry. Your adolescent is mean,” Nora added. “Your adolescent is probably smoking marijuana, which you may have smoked too, but not until you were at least eighteen. Your adolescent is undoubtedly having completely inappropriate and meaningless sex, which you didn't have until you were in your twenties, if then.”

  By then I was feeling nauseous. This was much more upsetting than any of the nanny shows.

  She went on to point out that parents who engage in “parenting” have devoted themselves to their children in every way— emotionally, materially, and physically. And yet, she said, adolescents still turn out “exactly the way adolescents have always turned out. Only worse.”

  I knew I was supposed to be laughing at this, but I wasn't. It was too shocking to be funny. How could she know these things? How could she be so wise, she who raised her children in the middle of the last century when there was no such thing as parenting?

  I put the book down on my lap and I stared at the ceiling.

  My mind was racing.

  The immortal words of another expert on child rearing suddenly popped into my head.

  “If you bungle raising your children, nothing else much matters in life.”

  You could say a lot of things about Jackie Kennedy. But you could never say that she was a Terrible Mother.

  he phone rang at my desk at work. I glanced nervously at the caller ID. Just as I'd feared, it was Taz's school.

  Again.

  “Hi, this is the social studies teacher. We had another incident today.”

  “Really?” My heart was pounding. I reminded myself about being a Terrible Mother. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I hope it wasn't too serious. What happened?”

  “Well,” said the teacher, “this time he brought a can of soda to class.”

  Oh my God, I thought, a can of soda, what horrible things could he have done with a can of soda? He probably threw it at the teacher and blinded her in one eye! Or maybe he dumped it on another kid's head and the other boy took out a knife and stabbed him! Or else he spilled it on the computer that houses the server for the entire New York City Board of Education and the records for all 1 million students have been erased!

  I screwed up my courage to continue the conversation. “And … what happened?”

  “Well,” said the teacher, “I asked him to throw the can away.”

  I was almost afraid to go on, but I forced myself. “And?”

  “And he wouldn't.”

  “I'm not following you,” I said. “He brought the soda to class. And you asked him to throw it away because …?”

  “Because it's against the rules!” she said impatiently. “Completely against the rules! They're not allowed to bring any food, or drink, to class.”

  It seemed like a dumb rule to me. I mean, who cares if a kid brings a can of soda to class? But then, I'm ashamed to admit that like a lot of Americans, I've gotten totally addicted to never being without something to eat or drink for more than fifteen seconds, and apparently I'd raised Taz to be the same way.

  I realized this would not be the right time to make excuses for my child's behavior, nor would it have been appropriate to debate whether the rule is a good one or not. This call was a dressing- down for being a Terrible Mother, and I was just going to have to sit there quietly and take it.

  “I see,” I said in my most humble and polite tone of voice. “So he brought the can of soda to class, and that's against the rules. And then what happened?”

  “Well,” she said, in her by now unbearably slow delivery of a course of events so earth- shattering that she had to call me at work, “the whole class stopped.”

  She wasn't exactly reeling me in with compelling details here. I noticed that my mood was starting to change from guilt and proactive horror at my evil son's doings, to annoyance at being interrupted at my desk. I may be a Terrible Mother, but I had work to do! Deadlines to meet! Stuff that was way more important than listening to a blow- by- blow description of how my son's soda can somehow brought down the entire system of education in the United States of America.

  “OK,” I finally said, trying not to sound too impatient, “and THEN what happened?”

  “Well, that was it. I asked him to throw it away, and he refused, and the class just stopped.”

  I was trapped in a cartoon with five possible captions, but I couldn't bring myself to say any of them. So I just said them in my head:

  “The entire class came to a halt because he had a can of soda?”

  “What if he threw a chair?”

  “What if you had ignored the entire incident and gone on teaching?”

  “What would you have done if he had a gun?”

  “Every time a kid breaks a rule, do you call his mother?”

  The words kept bouncing inside my brain like the refrain o
f a top forty song, but they never came out of my mouth. Finally, I apologized for my son's behavior and promised to talk to him about it. I gave the teacher permission to impose whatever punishment she deemed appropriate. I thanked her for calling, and hung up.

  A few minutes later the phone rang again. I looked at the caller ID. The school.

  I got up from my desk and walked away. The phone went silent after the third ring; the answering machine kicked in, confirming what I and the person on the other end already knew: I Am a Terrible Mother.

  Later, I mentioned the incident to a friend, thinking she'd have a good laugh with me about it. I imagined myself chuckling as I said, “Can you imagine how ridiculous that is? The teacher couldn't deal with a kid who brought a can of soda to class?”

  But instead, as soon as I started to tell the story, my friend gasped in horror.

  “Oh my GOD!” she said. “Are you KIDDING ME?? He brought a can of SODA to class? You can't just break the RULES like that! You're going to have to think up some REALLY bad punishment for this one!”

  What I felt like saying was: “Gee, maybe I could take his nonexistent credit card away for three weeks?” But, of course, I didn't say that. In fact, at this point in our conversation, I wished I were about two inches tall and that I could disappear. I heard myself stuttering, which is something I almost never do, as I tried to quickly come up with some type of appropriate answer.

  “Ah, yeh- yeh- yes, um, I, I was just, just thinking that, d- d- definitely, I'm really going to have to t- t- talk to T- taz about this,” I said, before declaring that I was so thirsty I needed to get a soda— I'd been at least five minutes without something to drink. Then I slunk away.

  The soda incident was hardly the first time Taz got in trouble with a teacher. He was a wild little boy in the early years of elementary school. He didn't want to sit still. He didn't want to do his homework. He just wanted to play and play and play. When he was in kindergarten, I got a call from school one day saying that he had simply up and left the building.