I wondered innocently where the key might be. Not that I was hunting for it, but didn't I see it over by the expired train passes? Hmm, perhaps that was it. I decided it wouldn't hurt to just take a quick look and see what a thirteen- year- old considers worth keeping under lock and key. Chances were there was nothing in there but a $2 bill and a Kennedy half- dollar. Don't all kids love to hide money? I figured I'd just take a peek, then lock it up and put the key away, and he'd never have to know.
OH MY GOD. This was far worse than anything I ever imagined. Two water bottles filled with what smelled like bourbon! (Only a thirteen- year- old would put brown alcohol in a water bottle, when vodka or gin might have gone unnoticed.) And what was in this bag, wrapped up in a tissue, inside another bag, wrapped up in tin foil? Some kind of … herb? Drug? Tea?
This was so embarrassing. I was born in the sixties and I'm not sure what pot looks like! It's just that, well, I was never much of a smoker. I reminded myself that the term of art now is weed, not pot, in case I had to discuss this with Taz or anyone else under the age of thirty, and I continued my investigation. The most troubling part was yet to come. There were, like, condoms in here! Not one or two, but a dozen! Where did he get them? Why does he have them? When did my thirteen- year- old decide he needed to be prepared for safe sex? And was that a good thing or a bad thing?
Worst of all, now that I'd found all this stuff in the lockbox, I had no idea what to do with it. Should I confiscate it? Put it back and pretend I never found it? Check again in a few months to see if he'd progressed to manufacturing crystal meth? Make an appointment with a psychiatrist or save myself $800 and just turn my entire family in to the Drug Enforcement Administration? Or maybe don't bother with the feds. Go local, to Child Welfare. No, I decided, that's no good. They'd probably send Taz and Sport to live with wacko foster parents who'd starve and beat them while partying on their monthly checks.
I reminded myself that I Am a Terrible Mother. But I tried to look on the bright side. At least there was no porn in the box. Then I realized that was probably hidden on our computer somewhere. And if I were to find porn there, I'd already decided I would try to follow the example of a friend from abroad. When she found her son with a picture of a woman with her boobs hanging out, she simply said, “I'm European. You can't shock me.” And walked away. So I had been practicing saying aloud, “I'm American. You can't shock me!”
Then I looked up at the posters Taz had hanging on his bedroom walls. The Olsen twins were up there, along with Angelina. A couple of basketball stars, and the ad for The School of Rock. It all seemed so innocent, and sweet. But then I noticed Eminem. And the poster for Hustle & Flow. This room's rating went from PG to R some time ago, and I obviously wasn't paying attention.
Did I mention, by the way where Taz was as I stood in his room looking at the walls, cleaning out the garbage and discovering all that stuff I wished I hadn't discovered?
He was in Australia.
Yes, Australia. A place I have never been, and probably never will go because I can't afford it. Don't ask me how I was able to send my son there. It has something to do with the fact that sleepaway camp in New Jersey costs $1,500 a week, so it made a teen trip to the other side of the world look inexpensive. OK, so I raided my retirement fund to help pay for it. It was worth the peace and quiet I had in the few hours I managed to be at home each day that summer without engaging in screaming fights with Taz. After all those calls from school, after the prom night debacle, I was just as happy to have him out of my hair, out of my time zone, and out of my hemisphere for a while that summer, and he was just as happy to leave.
Still, the fact that the only person I personally know who has been to Australia is my thirteen- year- old son is truly mind- boggling. All the adults I know can barely afford to drive to the Jersey shore for a week in July. I sincerely hope that there is reincarnation, so that in my next life, I can come back as a thirteen- year- old, because thirteen- year- olds these days live a life that no grownup can ever hope to live.
Taz had gone to Australia with a youth organization that takes kids around the world. There were kids profiled in the promotional brochure for this organization that are, like, sixteen years old and they've already been to every continent on the planet, including Antarctica (not to mention already having been vaccinated against every disease on the face of the earth except maybe rabies. And I actually think for some countries, they recommend that, too, as protection from mad dogs.).
In some ways, though, it was better than sending him to summer camp in, for example, Pennsylvania, because he was so far away, he couldn't ask for any more money than we had already spent to send him there. The time difference was so bizarre that he couldn't figure out when to call us. It was always fourteen hours ago tomorrow when he tried to use his phone card to reach us, and we were never home.
Later, we'd find strange messages on the answering machine at 8 p.m. saying things like, “Oh, hi… it's six-thirty in the morning here and I just woke up and we're heading out to throw boomerangs in the koala preserve … I need to ask you something but I guess I'll try to call back.” If he had been in camp near home, he might have been able to get hold of one of us and demand that we deliver candy or cash or who knows what else before sundown.
So that was part of why we didn't feel sad or worried putting him on the plane. But he also had no qualms about taking this trip without us, and I'd been impressed that he was so curious about a place most Americans know almost nothing about.
When he was eleven, he went to camp in Kansas with a friend, and I cried for two days after he got on the plane. I wasn't sure he could handle the ups and downs of travel without me, and, as it turned out, he'd ended up on the flight from hell— delays, cancellations, sitting on the tarmac for hours, waiting out a storm. He was supposed to arrive in Kansas at 3 p.m. and he didn't get there until 3 a.m. That was partly why I'd felt so sad about it, because I wasn't there with him when he had to endure all those problems. Of course, he had a great time in Kansas, anyway— despite the fact that he had left all of his socks home and had to wear the same pair the whole week.
But when we sent him to Australia, I knew he was mature enough and savvy enough that he'd be just fine whether facing a plane delay, jet lag, bad weather, an unpleasant roommate, icky food, getting lost, or just the lack of clean socks. (One of the good things about boys is, they're OK with dirt. Really.) Besides, I needed a break from all his shenanigans.
So seeing him off at the airport, once he checked in with his group and we'd made sure for the thousandth time that he had his passport, his ticket, his wallet, his iPod, and everything else he needed for the twenty-four- hour plane ride, just wasn't that emotional. Elon and I bade our good- byes and tried not to embarrass him in front of the other kids as we hugged him and wished him well. Then we walked out of the terminal and got on the bus to the parking lot.
There we encountered one of the other mothers from the group. I saw that behind her hastily donned sunglasses, her eyes were flooded with tears. I gave her a hug and assured her the kids would be fine, that this was an experience they'd remember forever.
“Now stop crying,” I said to her, “because you're going to make me cry.”
But that was a lie. I didn't feel like crying in the slightest. I could only feel relieved. It was sort of like what a friend told me when she finally sent her son off to college. The kid had been acting like such a jerk that saying good- bye proved far easier than she ever imagined.
Of course, the other aspect of Taz being in Australia was that I couldn't exactly call him up and say, “What the hell is going on with all this stuff I found in your room?” That conversation would have to wait until he got home, which would give me plenty of time to figure out the right way to handle it all.
I decided to ask a couple of friends whose kids were going off to college in September how they'd dealt with these situations. “So,” I e- mailed one of them, “what would you do if you found contraband in y
our son's room?”
“What sort of contraband?” he cheerfully responded. “Would that be pornography? Weapons? Narcotics?”
His flippant tone suggested that he couldn't imagine what I was dealing with. I couldn't bear to admit the whole truth, so I only told him about the alcohol. He responded that he'd never had a problem like that, despite being the father of teenagers. Once, he added, some cash was missing from the household, and he told the kids that if it were returned, there would be no questions asked. The money was back by nightfall.
OK, so Mr. Goody Two Shoes and his Perfect Family were not going to be much help. I e- mailed someone else, this time someone who likes to party. He also has a couple of kids older than mine. Well, he said, once when his daughter was sixteen, she came home really drunk, and they took her cell phone away for a week, but that was about it.
Thanks anyway, but that wasn't much help, either. Taz accidentally dropped his cell phone in the toilet a month before I found the lockbox, and I'd done nothing to replace it, so I couldn't punish him by taking away something that didn't work. Besides, if he were sixteen instead of thirteen, this wouldn't have been so bad.
I asked my sister if she had any advice, but she laughed at the notion that anyone would come to her for advice on raising teenagers. “I don't know,” she said. “I failed that part of being a mommy.” Even though she claims she failed, her daughter grew up to be a lovely young woman, gainfully employed as a nurse, the type of girl any parent would be proud of. I wondered if some day when Taz was grown up, people would also have a hard time believing that he put us through the wringer when he was a kid.
I thought about consulting some of the mommies in our neighborhood, but I quickly abandoned the idea. You see, most of these mommies are Perfect Mommies, and I am not. In fact, I have long lived in fear of their judgment. I've never been able to compete on their level or meet their standards, and so I don't even try. I refer to myself as one of the IPM, the Imperfect Mommies, but we are a despicable minority in the nabe, easily recognized by our unkempt hair, our lack of enthusiasm for PTA events and soccer games, and our failure to insist that all taxis come equipped with car seats and that every child be slathered in SPF 30 sunscreen every day from April to September.
Now, the differences between the PMs and the IPMs actually started to become clear to me very early on, when I was pregnant. The other pregnant mommies were all buying elegant dresses at a store called Pea in the Pod, but I was too cheap to go out and spend money on nice maternity clothes and shoes that actually fit my swollen feet, so I just wore down the backs of my shoes until my heels hung over the edge, and bought some skirts with elastic waistbands and smocklike jersey tops at Kmart. I remember this one skirt in particular that was lavender, and I had found a matching top to go with it, which pleased me to no end. I had never been a purple person before, but somehow being enormously pregnant seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with a new wardrobe palette.
Given my sartorial state, I shouldn't have been surprised when a woman I knew took pity on me after her daughter was born and loaned me three beautiful maternity dresses that she no longer needed. I wore them every Tuesday Wednesday, and Thursday for the last three months of my pregnancy. (Monday and Friday I wore the Kmart outfits and hoped no one would comment on the contrast.) After I gave birth, I had the dresses dry- cleaned and returned them to her. But she didn't feel the need to have a second child, so she didn't want the clothes back.
That was OK; they came in handy when I got pregnant the second time. See, unlike my benefactress, I knew I'd need another child if only to prove that nature, not nurture, was the explanation for all my problems as a parent.
The PMs tormented me after the baby was born, too. They would sometimes call me at night on the phone, after I had gone back to work, kind of like how the popular girl in high school who wasn't really my friend would sometimes call me to get the math homework but would never call me to invite me to her sleepovers. I always knew I was in trouble when a PM began the conversation with statements like “I almost didn't call you … I wasn't sure you'd want to know this but … I saw your babysitter today at the playground … and …”
And what? In that excruciating moment before she got around to actually describing what she had seen, the most horrifying forms of abuse would occur to me. Perhaps the PM had seen my baby crying hysterically strapped into his stroller, while my babysitter chatted with her friend! (I'd seen that plenty of times myself, but could never bring myself to tell the unsuspecting mothers, even though I sometimes knew them well.) Or maybe the PM had seen the sitter feeding my baby McDonald's french fries, or offering a sip from her own diet soda filled with chemicals! Digging even deeper into the abyss of the pit of tortures no yuppie mother wants to hear that her baby has endured at the hands of a sitter was corporal punishment. Please don't tell me you saw my sitter hit my baby! I actually didn't think it was possible that a report like that would get back to me by phone in the evening. Surely any PM worth her latte would whip out a cell phone and call the cops on the spot if she ever saw a babysitter smack a child in our rarefied little corner of the playground.
But no, as it turned out, none of these things were what had impelled one of these caring woman to reluctantly phone me one night. Instead, the revelation that ensued was not about abuse so much as what she considered to be neglect. My irresponsible babysitter had allowed little Taz to go barefoot in the sandbox. A discussion followed about all of the harmful things that might be in the sandbox. Like broken glass or pigeon poop. Or squirrel poop or doggie poop. Then a discussion ensued about what exactly my babysitter looked like, because she was fairly sure it was my sitter (“She has dark hair, right?”) and Taz (“He's blonde, right?”), but she couldn't be 100 percent sure. She did note that in her opinion, my sitter was quite good- looking, and she somehow made this seem like it was my fault, too. (Maybe I was trying to wreck my marriage in addition to harming my child?) But actually my sitter, while not unattractive, was, in my opinion, a rather unremarkable- looking middle- aged woman, and I said so.
“Oh no,” my informant insisted. “She's very voluptuous!”
This was getting weird. And then a discussion ensued about whether I actually considered the sandbox accusation a fireable offense, and when it became clear that I didn't, well, I suppose that only underscored the in adequacies that led me to have such an irresponsible babysitter in the first place. The phone call was finally, mercifully, over.
As Taz grew older and Sport was born, the PMs never left my life; they just moved onto other things. Did I know Taz had sneaked out of afterschool in third grade to go to the candy store? Well, no, I didn't know that, because of course the reason he was in afterschool was so that I could work. Did I know he was Rollerblading without his wrist guards? Running in the street after a ball? Biking without a helmet? Yeah yeah yeah, he'd been on the road to hell since he went in that sandbox barefoot. And what had I been doing about it? Nothing! Why? Because I'm an IPM, not a PM.
There weren't quite as many reports from the PMs regarding Sport, but the few that did come in were memorable. He's a very agile child, with a sensibility sort of like a mountain goat, and when he was in kindergarten, he figured out how to climb up to the tippy top of a piece of equipment on the school playground that was not designed to be climbed on but was actually ornamental. It was like a small cupola high above a domed climbing apparatus, and he loved to scramble up and perch there like an owl, looking down on the rest of us from twenty feet above.
I'd cower in a corner of the schoolyard whenever he did this, pretending not to notice and hoping that the PMs didn't realize he was my child. But then one day I heard a passerby on the street call up to him, “Hey little boy, where's your mother?” My cover was blown; I had to fess up.
“I'm right here,” I croaked, and waved, then shrugged in response to the stranger's quizzical stare. “It's not easy being Spider- Man's mother, ha- ha- ha,” I added with a feeble laugh, but the Righ
teous Citizen did not appear amused.
I stood beneath the jungle gym and pleaded urgently with Sport to come down before somebody called the cops. Eventually, he did, proving that unlike his older brother, he at least cares what the rest of the world thinks, or cares enough about what I think the rest of the world thinks to help me out.
Actually, for a while there, I aspired to be a PM. But in the end, I realized that it takes not just wisdom and problem solving to be a PM; it also takes a certain amount of competitiveness, and I've never been good at that sort of thing. I prefer to be in my own little world, cluelessly casting about for perfection than measuring myself against others. I just don't care if I have round-toed shoes when everyone else has pointy- toed shoes, or if other people make their babysitters keep food logs while I merely leave a few bucks for pizza.
Fast- forward to my discovery of Taz's contraband, when it was more obvious than ever just how far I'd fallen short of Perfect Mommyhood. All my maternal failures were staring me in the face in the form of that little metal box filled with booze, condoms, and whatever that green stuff was. I didn't know what I was going to do.
I decided to try my trusty source in all things, better than a priest, a shrink, a ghostbuster, or an encyclopedia, or any of the many parenting books I'd read over the years. My guru, my oracle, my goddess, my Google. Yes, I pray to the Temple of Google, for Google knows all.
I tried to sum up my problem in a sentence. Then I typed it into the search box on my computer: “I found contraband hidden in my child's room.” Thank goodness, 765,894 responses came back. I scrolled through the first few pages of hits until I found a Q&A from some family services agency. “I found a condom in my sixteen- year- old daughter's purse. What should I do?” wrote one mother. (Oh, if only Taz were sixteen …) The agency said it's probably a good thing that the girl is prepared for safe sex (here I perk up a bit) and warned the parent against assuming that the girl is already sexually active. Right, I said to myself, mustn't assume anything! Nevertheless, the website added, it's important for the parent to speak with the girl, warn against sexual activity at this age, and explain the risks and consequences. I have no problem saying what my rules are, and what the risks are. But where was the advice about how you deal with your kid's screaming and yelling over the fact that you went snooping in the first place?
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