13 Is the New 18

by Beth J. Harpaz

  I saw a way to send a question in, and so I clicked through and submitted my query. “Hi, I found liquor, condoms and an herb- like substance that I couldn't identify in a locked box in my thirteen- year- old's room, and he's going to be really angry that I was looking in his stuff. Do you have any advice?”

  I clicked Send and then realized that I was a total moron. Not only would the vice squad be pounding on my door within minutes, not only had I jeopardized my family life and Taz's future, but I sounded like an idiot!

  Then I formulated the answer to my own question in my head: “You don't have to justify anything! You are the mother! As long as your child is living under your roof, as long as he is a minor suspected of breaking the rules, you have the right to search, snoop, and confiscate!” The vice squad never came. Neither did advice from the website. It appeared I had sent my plea for help into a black hole.

  I freaked out on my own for a few more days before getting the courage up to tell Elon about what I'd found. He was, as usual when these parental crises occurred, sad and resigned. We are failures as parents, he sighed, doomed. And there's no point in doing anything. He thought it was pointless to take the stuff away, and said instead that we should just keep an eye on what's in the box. Who knows how that stuff got stashed in there, he added, or why, but maybe it'll still be there in a couple of months, untouched, and all this worry will be for nothing.

  I decided to consult a friend who writes about parenting. Her kids are much younger than mine, but she reads a lot of books and talks to a lot of experts. And lo and behold, she had an idea that might work: Take the stuff away and leave a note in the lockbox expressing my concern.

  It was a plan I could live with. Wimpy, yes, utterly cowardly. And yet at least I'd be doing something, rather than nothing. I confiscated the liquor and the herb, whatever it was. I left the condoms in there, with a note in the lockbox expressing my concern. “We need to talk!” I wrote in my loopiest schoolgirl script. “Love, Mom and Dad.”

  Before we knew it, the day arrived when Taz's plane was due home. I put all the worries about contraband out of my head, and told myself I'd deal with it at a later time. Right now, I was just going to concentrate on welcoming my son home from his once- in- a- lifetime trip Down Under.

  I'm sort of embarrassed to admit that some of my biggest fears for him going on that trip had to do with material possessions. I knew they could always be replaced, but among the many things that Taz had done to irk me during his thirteenth year was that he developed a tendency to lose things. He'd misplace his keys (like he did the day Sport put a bobby pin in the lock), lose the train pass he needed to get to school, and ask for help in finding his shoes. (They were always under the bed, of course, but he needed me to tell him that.) He missed deadlines at school, left his jacket at his friend's house, wasn't sure where his backpack was. If I gave him $10, it was gone in an hour, and he had nothing to show for it.

  I knew several people who'd had their passports stolen on trips abroad, so I bought him one of those geeky document holders that you wear on a string around your neck, under your shirt, to keep the passport and his cash in, in the hopes that it would help insulate him from either his own carelessness or potential pickpockets.

  I agonized about whether to send him with Australian currency, a debit card, traveler's checks, or a credit card, and finally decided that cash might be the easiest for him to keep track of and budget, even though it posed the risk that if he lost the money or were robbed, he'd be without a cent.

  I gave him enough underwear and changes of socks so that he'd have clean clothes every day for half the trip. I hoped he'd figure out how to do his laundry at some point, but if he had to wear every item twice, I recognized that it wouldn't be the end of the world. I just hoped he didn't do like he did in Kansas, and spend days on end in the same pair of socks.

  But truthfully as I packed his bag— sending him off with a video camera, a digital camera, and an underwater camera for the Great Barrier Reef— I mentally kissed each item good- bye. I imagined he'd leave a trail of electronics at every hotel room between Canberra and Sydney. I tried to look at it philosophically, figuring that for a couple hundred bucks, they could all be replaced.

  Besides, who knew if he'd even remember to charge them. Maybe he was going to end up standing in a eucalyptus forest, faced with a unique chance to take a photo of a koala bear, and find that the camera had run out of battery power. And, of course, since the voltage in Australia is different from here, I had to buy a converter in addition to an adapter.

  But guess what? He came back with every single item he left home with. He got great video and great still photos of everything from kangaroos and crocodiles to Aboriginal street musicians and the Sydney Opera House. He even had underwater shots of the coral reefs. His passport was there, and he'd managed his money just fine, getting rid of all his Australian dollars before he returned and even coming home with $25 in U.S. cash. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit here that on a subsequent family trip, I was the one who lost the video camera, leaving it in a hotel room in Oregon, never to be found again. Obviously, I will never live this down with my children.)

  But what was most remarkable to me about Taz's trip to Australia was that he came home with clean socks. It seems he'd done his laundry at some point and a few items were still unused. He didn't know how to do his laundry at home, but the fact that he could do it on another continent gave me hope for the future. I'd clearly underestimated the kid.

  Then as we waited for his luggage, I heard an announcement over the loudspeaker in the terminal.

  “Will the passenger who left a baseball cap on Flight Forty please return to the gate to get your hat?”

  Yep, it was his. Five minutes on home soil and he was back to his old ways already.

  We fetched the cap and then started asking him about his trip. He'd had a great time, of course, but he also seemed taller. And over the next few days, he seemed helpful around the house. He played nicely with his little brother. Some of the kids he'd been hanging out with before he left seemed to be gone from our lives.

  Taz was still thirteen, but as he headed to the fourteenth birthday, just a few months away, he actually seemed slightly more mature.

  And then a few days after he got home, I sensed him sort of staring at me with an amused smile. It was a strange expression and I didn't quite know what to make of it. Then I realized: He'd looked in the lockbox and found my “We need to talk” note, and he was waiting for me to say something.

  I berated myself for my cowardice. I should have confronted him the moment he came home. Once again, I could only conclude that I was a Terrible Mother. But I just didn't have the guts to bring it all up out of the blue. I felt like Taz could read my mind, like he knew that I was thinking about this all the time, that every conversation we had about other things was actually false because there was a different conversation we were supposed to be having.

  Finally, after what seemed like a long period of procrastination— although in reality it was only a day or two— the right moment presented itself. Sport was out of the room, but Elon and I were there.

  “So I guess you know we found that stuff in your box,” I said.

  No reaction from him.

  I proceeded with the Lecture that I'd been rehearsing in my mind, outlining the rules against drugs and alcohol, explaining the risks, and adding that if there was another incident like this, we'd all have to go to family counseling, with the money coming out of the fund for our next vacation. As for the condoms, I said I certainly hoped he wasn't going to need them until he was much older, but I had decided not to take them away because I wanted him to know that I considered safe sex important.

  I looked at him, waiting for a response. I had expected him to be furious, defensive, making a scene. But he was strangely quiet.

  And what was that spreading over his face? A grin?

  He was smiling! As if this whole thing was a joke!
/>   “You think this is funny?” Elon asked angrily.

  “I knew you'd go looking in there,” Taz responded with a snicker. “So I left all that stuff for you to find.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. “You don't think we're going to believe that!”

  “No, really! I found that stuff in the park. I don't even know what it is. I just figured you'd find it and flip out while I was gone.”

  The grin on his face could only be described as shit-eating. But I wasn't laughing.

  “You found a dozen wrapped condoms in the park? Right. You must think we're idiots!” I said.

  “Oh, no, I found the bottles and the other stuff in the park. The condoms, they were giving those out at the gay pride parade. They were giving them to everybody, even little kids! I was walking down the street when the parade went by, so I collected a bunch of them. I'm going to dress up as Trojan Man for Halloween.”

  “Trojan Man?” I said. “You're kidding, right?”

  “No, no, it's going to be really funny. Another kid I know is going to dress up as a birth control pill. Won't that be great? We'll go trick- or- treating together. It's going to be so funny!”

  “OK, the Halloween costume is one thing, but the liquor …”

  “I swear, I found it! The homeless people and the high school kids, they leave all kinds of crap in the park. I knew you'd go looking in my room, so I thought it would be funny if I put that stuff in there to freak you out.”

  He was laughing by then, high on his own demented cleverness. I looked at Elon. He was shaking his head and looking at the ceiling. He was not smiling.

  Finally, he looked at our son. “You can't possibly expect us to think you're telling the truth,” he said.

  “Fine, don't believe it. But it's the truth.” He looked at me blankly, the innocent look of a newborn who's just taken his first poop.

  But I didn't know what to think, or say, or do. Of course it was absurd! Ridiculous! How could I believe this cockamamy bullshit!

  On the other hand, the bit about the condoms at the gay pride parade and the plan to dress up as Trojan Man, well, it was so utterly juvenile that it actually seemed plausible.

  Either way, though, whether it was true or false, Taz had outwitted me and I had no idea how to respond. Finally, I pointed out that none of the Perfect Mommies of our neighborhood were going to give candy to a hulking teenager covered in condoms; he'd be better off getting a chain saw and dressing up as a crazed murderer.

  Just then, Sport called him from another room. He wanted Taz to come play Monopoly.

  “I'm coming,” Taz said, and off he went.

  “So,” said Elon, “how do you think our little talk went?”

  “Um, good!” I said cheerfully. “We stated our values and we stated the rules. That's what we set out to do, and we accomplished our goals.” I smiled sweetly and added: “And I think I gave him some really top- notch advice.”

  “About what?”

  “About Halloween costumes.”

  ometimes it seems like a cruel trick that I ended up with two sons, since I knew so little about the ways of boys when I became a mother. Not only did I spend my teenage years at an all- girl school, but I also grew up with a sister and no brothers. I practically didn't have a conversation with a boy my age until I went to college.

  And yet somehow I am now a Lone Woman in a Land of Men, the only member of my household who won't walk around wearing nothing but underwear and who goes ballistic if the toilet seat is left up.

  I am also the only one in my house who has no interest in watching, playing, or following sports in any way, shape, or form. And that's another one of those things from my childhood that has changed with the times— thank goodness. Like a lot of girls I knew growing up, I pretty much never caught or threw a ball, or watched an organized ball game, until my own kids started playing sports. I'm still mystified by the definition of a double play, and inevitably I am chatting with another mom or reading the paper when a Really Important Thing Happens in the game.

  Which always leads Elon to come running over to loudly cross-examine me.

  “Did you see what your son just did?” he'll demand after Sport— who is a very good athlete— has done something amazing. “Did you? You weren't paying attention, were you? Your son scored the winning goal”—or shot, or hit, or run, or pitch, or whatever they call it in whatever sport was being played— “and, as usual, you missed it.”

  I'm so pathetic, most of the time I can't even tell which team is winning, or whether our score is being tallied under “Home” or “Guest.” I'll try to fake it, try to sound halfway intelligent and attentive by saying things at halftime or between innings like “So, how are we doing? Are we still— I mean, is the score, uh, still, you know, two to … uh, what is it now? I think I might have missed that last play when I had a sneezing fit. You know, I think I must be allergic to something out here in the field!”

  Inevitably, my ploy only makes me sound more idiotic than ever. The score is never two to anything; it is always some improbable set of numbers that I couldn't begin to guess at, like fifteen to nothing, or tied six- six for the past forty- five minutes.

  But it wasn't just sports where my knowledge of boys was deficient. So ignorant was I in the ways of boys that I naively thought, when Taz was little, that all gender differences were culturally imposed rather than inborn. I even got him a doll when he was about three, thinking, idealistically, that probably boys would love to play with dolls if only they had the chance. I showed him how to cuddle the dolly hold it, rock it, and pretend to feed it.

  “It's like your baby,” I explained.

  He immediately informed me that it wasn't a baby, it was a passenger on a train. He lined the dining- room chairs up and smashed the dolly down on a chair, then pretended to be the conductor, taking imaginary tickets and announcing imaginary stops.

  Next, he went and got his little toy doctor kit and told me the dolly was sick. He proceeded to give it injections, take its temperature, wrap its leg up in a cloth bandage, and give it an operation. I'm fairly certain he was planning an amputation, but I managed to save the dolly before any limbs were severed.

  All in all, he had a great time with that dolly, but he did things to it that I never would have dreamed of doing to a doll when I was little.

  Despite this early and somewhat shocking introduction to the concept that Boys and Girls Really Are Different, gradually I came to love the Ways of Boys. And the more time I spent around Taz and his brother and their friends, the more I related to them, and the less I found myself able to relate to girls. Eventually, girls grew even more mysterious to me than boys had ever been.

  For example, I loved the way boys carried out their friendships. There was no gossip, no meanness, no exclusionary behavior, no teasing or tattling. If they didn't like something, they'd just punch the other guy. And then, five minutes later, they'd be friends again. It was all so clear-cut.

  In contrast, with girls, there was always a long, involved, complicated story involving alliances, nuances, guessing what the other one was thinking or saying behind your back, whispers, and tears.

  I remember going on class trips with both my kids, and finding it so much easier to help corral the wild boys than to sort out all the emotional entanglements of girls. With boys, all you needed to do was yell at them to sit down and be quiet, stop throwing things, and quit poking the kid in the next seat.

  But with girls, it seemed like one of them was always sitting alone in the corner of the bus crying, while a trio of her former best friends sat nearby giggling, giving her sidelong glances.

  A few times, I was foolish enough to try to wade into this morass to make peace. “What's the matter?” I'd say, unleashing an unfathomable tale of double- crossing, sly insults, and betrayals. Eventually, I'd give up trying to make sense of it, and say something like “I don't understand. You girls were friends yesterday. Can't you just shake hands and be friends again? What's the big deal? Don't y
ou see how silly this all is?”

  It was quickly made clear to me that I was the one being silly. No group of girls ever resolved their problems so straightforwardly, and somewhere in the back of my mind I began to remember my own complicated experiences with cliques and castes and judgments. I guess I'd tried to block it out after all these years, but, yes, somewhere at the edges of my memory, I do remember feeling weepy about being left out of this sleepover invitation or that round of phone calls about what to wear to school the next day.

  Watching my boys and their buddies fall in and out of friendships with no hard feelings had allowed me to repress those painful memories of what being friends with other girls was really all about. It was totally different with male friendships, from what I observed. So what if they hadn't played with a certain kid in two years? If he was the only warm body around and they were short a man to get a game of street football going, hey, he was suddenly an old pal again, just like that.

  A couple of mothers of girls I know also tell me that they all use instant messaging and MySpace pages to gossip about one another and say terrible, hurtful things. (And then there was the crazy case of the mother who pretended to be a kid, saying hurtful things to a teenage girl who eventually committed suicide.) Well, as far as I could tell, boys also insult each other online. But to them it's all a joke, or a competition even— an online version of the Dozens, the old insult- trading game that, in a more innocent era, began with “Your mother wears Army boots!”