13 Is the New 18

by Beth J. Harpaz

  So I forced myself to get to the task at hand and look for Taz's page. I found it easily enough. On it was a photo of him with a girl I didn't recognize. She had her arms wrapped around him and an expression of utter glee on her face. But he was staring straight at the camera, looking positively bored. There was nothing salacious about it, and yet his look of “been there, done that” ennui was somehow a little disturbing.

  A day or so later, Taz checked his Facebook account and saw that there was an invitation from me wanting to be his Facebook friend. Even more horrifying, he realized that many other people he knew had gotten an invitation from his mother to be their Facebook friends.

  Meanwhile, I still hadn't quite figured out how to have my own Facebook page, or what I would do with a Facebook page about myself if I could figure out how to make one, but one bright spot was that I already had a Facebook invitation to do lunch with one of my cousins.

  “Why did you go on Facebook?” Taz demanded.

  “I wanted to see your page,” I said. “Mike's mom said your picture was really good.”

  “You shouldn't have gone on there. Don't you know how embarrassing this is? Facebook is for teenagers!”

  “But there's lots of moms on Facebook. I invited a whole bunch of people to be my Facebook friends, and all the ones who are my age said yes.”

  “Exactly! All the ones who are your age, and nobody else. You don't need Facebook. You can just make a phone call or send an e- mail or something. You need to delete your Facebook account.”

  “How can I delete my Facebook account when I'm not even sure how I created it?”

  “Mom, please, this is humiliating!”

  Finally, I agreed that now that I had achieved my objective of seeing his Facebook page, I didn't really need a Facebook page of my own. I gave him my password and told him he could delete it if he wanted to.

  “Me? Why should I do it?” he said. “I'm busy!”

  Well, yes, I explained to Taz, that is part of the problem— you are always busy. Even too busy to hang out with your mother, which is why I felt the need to try to get to know you through your Facebook account.

  Taz never did delete my Facebook account. And neither did I. And, eventually, a funny thing happened. I became addicted to Facebook, and it had nothing to do with Taz. I think it started when a former coworker whom I hadn't heard from in years found me on Face-book and said he liked the poem I'd put on my Facebook Wall. Until that moment, I hadn't even realized other people could see my Facebook Wall. I thought it was more like a diary.

  Then the lightbulb went off. It is a diary. But it's a public diary. And that's what's fun about it. (Fun, that is, as long as your father isn't running for president and your Facebook page doesn't say you support some other guy.) Facebook is like TV— only every single show, every minute of every single day, is about someone who's your friend.

  An important breakthrough in my Facebook evolution was when my niece— the twenty- five- year- old Glam Queen of Long Island— requested me as a Face-book friend. After my experience with my son's rejection, I hadn't even bothered to ask my niece to be my Facebook friend, so I was pleased and flattered when the request came from her. She said she couldn't believe how many Facebook friends I had, and that she liked my photo. She even said she wanted to come hang out at an event I had mentioned on my Wall— an art show hosted by a friend.

  This was especially amusing because my sister had just told me she didn't know if my niece was coming to the art show. She'd e- mailed and phoned her but hadn't gotten any response.

  “She's definitely coming to the art show,” I told my sister. “She just wrote me a note about it on my Face-book Wall.”

  “She wrote on your Facebook Wall?” my sister said. Then, after a pause: “You have a Facebook page?”

  Suddenly, I felt so popular. It was like being back in high school— only this time I get to be one of the Cool Girls! At work, someone said that playing with Facebook was like being twenty- seven years old again. “ Twenty-seven?” I said incredulously. “You mean seventeen!”

  I now routinely waste every free minute of entire weekends on Facebook. I joined a group called “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet,” and another called “People who always have to spell their names for other people.” I took the movie compatibility test and was pleased to see that according to the results, my boss and I are highly compatible.

  I was afraid to add the “What kind of drunk are you?” application, but I would really like to, because a woman in Denmark whom I met once for ten minutes, and who is now my Facebook friend, has it on her FB page. I did take the “Which Beatle are you?” quiz, and was surprised to find that I am George. (I was so sure I was John!)

  Then I got my sister to sign up for Facebook, and she took a quiz to find out what type of animal she was in a past life. She was a platypus, and she talked me into taking the same quiz, and it turns out I was a platypus, too. I found this a little embarrassing, like I was being a copycat of my big sister, but, in her wise way, she assured me it was fine. “It is as it should be,” she declared on her Facebook Wall. “You are my baby sister platypus.”

  But I didn't realize the extent of my FB addiction until 12:43 a.m. one Saturday, when I sent a message through Facebook to a friend in Seattle, where it was only 9:43 p.m. I told her how much I liked the pictures of her puppy that she had put up on her Facebook page, and she immediately wrote back, “I can't believe you're on Facebook at 12:43 a.m.! ADDICT! ADDICT!”

  Facebook even started to creep into my work life. My employer has offices all over the world, and I've dealt with many colleagues by phone and e- mail without ever meeting them. Friending them on Facebook was a way of matching faces to names and getting to know them a little more personally. But this also meant that work conversations sometimes took place on Facebook. One day when a coworker sent me a work- related message on Facebook, I asked him to continue the conversation by phone.

  “You have to help me stop!” I wrote. “I'm addicted to Facebook!”

  “Help you stop?” he wrote back. “I can't help you stop— I'm an enabler!”

  But why can't we stop? Well, it's just that it's so much fun. I can't wait to see what's on the little “News Feed” that tells me Ted is catching up on his reading! Diane is going to a party! Hilary just bought a car and got a job waitressing in New Zealand! I love posting my own news on my Wall— things like “I made a festive holiday craft today— I glued glitter on pinecones!”

  At the same time, it was sort of horrifying that I felt the need to share the news about my festive holiday craft with my 129 FB friends (and counting). What was happening to me? I was becoming a different person, a Person Who Lives for Facebook. (This realization even prompted me to change my Facebook profile. Where it asks you to fill in religion, I wrote, “I worship Facebook.” Which led one of my Facebook friends to comment, “I like your religion.”)

  Every few days now, I get a message from another mother who sounds just like I was when I started out on Facebook, back in the dark ages.

  “Hi, I'm not sure how I found you on Facebook, but I did,” wrote one friend recently. “I joined Facebook to see my son's page, but he refuses to approve me as a friend and now that I've found you, I'm not quite sure what to do.”

  “Put a photo on your profile,” I e- mailed back. “Ask everyone in your address book to become your Face-book friend. Take the movie compatibility test and join the group ‘When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.’ And never mind your son— don't you know that grown- ups are ruining Facebook for the kids?

  “By the way,” I couldn't resist adding, “can you try the ‘What kind of drunk are you?’ application and tell me what it's like?”

  As I pressed Send, I realized I had hit another milestone in my Facebook career.

  I wasn't just an addict. I was an enabler.

  hen a revival of A Chorus Line came back to Broadway, I wondered if Taz would like it as much as I did when I was in high school. I'd
been obsessed with the show as a teenager, and so had all my friends. Balcony tickets were just $6 when it opened in 1975, and even though I earned only a dollar an hour babysitting, at those prices I was able to see the show three times.

  Thirty years later, our tickets cost $110 each, and they weren't even in the orchestra. That's our family theater allowance for the year, so I sure hoped the show would live up to my memories.

  The concept of A Chorus Line is simple. A line of young dancers takes the stage, and one by one they tell stories of growing up and surviving the torments of adolescence in order to pursue their dreams. I remembered how meaningful it was for me to hear these tales of emerging sexuality, of trying to fit in, and of worrying if you're pretty enough or talented enough, when I myself was going through those same awkward phases.

  But even as an adult, the show still resonated with me. I still knew every word of every song, and every nuance in the melodies. I cried and laughed as the dancers told their tales, and I realized all over again why the show had meant so much to me as a kid.

  There is no intermission in A Chorus Line. It's the rare one- act musical where you can't share your opinions midshow, so I had no idea what Taz was thinking as we sat there, and he betrayed no hint of a reaction. He clapped at the right moments, laughed when everyone else did, but was he just being polite?

  When it was over, we poured into the street with the rest of the audience and got on the train without speaking much.

  “So, did you like it?” I finally asked.

  He nodded and smiled. “It was really good,” he said. But he seemed lost in his thoughts, and it was late on a school night, so I didn't push him.

  When we got home, he headed straight for the computer. I was just about to tell him that he really needed to go to bed, when I heard the familiar words from one of the show's songs coming from his room: “Hello twelve, hello thirteen, hello love …”

  He was downloading the song from iTunes onto his laptop. I guess that's the twenty- first- century equivalent of buying the original cast album (which, of course, I still own).

  I smiled. It had to mean that he'd liked it.

  In the weeks that followed, I kept humming the song he'd downloaded, but in my mind, I had changed the lyrics to suit what was happening in our house: “Goodbye thirteen, hello fourteen, hello hope!”

  See, Taz was about to leave the dreaded thirteenth year behind, and I was fervently praying to the God of All Mothers that the next stage of child rearing would be less trying. And gradually, very gradually, I started to feel slightly optimistic that things would be OK.

  For example, all of a sudden one day, I realized it had been awhile since he'd gotten into any serious trouble. Either he was getting better at covering things up, or he was straightening out a little.

  He seemed less obnoxious lately, too. If I so much as made him a sandwich, he'd say, “Thanks, Mom, I love you!” He was too young to remember Eddie Haskell from Leave It to Beaver telling Mrs. Cleaver how lovely she looked, so I chose to take the good vibes at face value.

  And ever since the Bad Report Card, I had only gotten one e- mail from a teacher (threatening to fail him if he didn't hand in the thirty- two homework assignments that he owed; Taz claimed they really were on the floor of his room this time, and that he'd be sure to straighten it all out).

  In fairness, there did seem to be a fair amount of homework being done in his room on a regular basis. I knew this because I was sometimes summoned to help explain things that I barely understood, like what the hell Demien's problem was in the Hermann Hesse novel (I tried to read a few chapters in the hopes of figuring it out, but, frankly, could not get through it) and how you say “My dog is very intelligent” in Spanish (that one I knew), and what unilateral disengagement is (no, it has nothing to do with sex ed; it's related to peace negotiations with Israel).

  He knew better than to ask me for help with math or science, but I did help him memorize a scene from The Glass Menagerie, and I also provided vital assistance when he had to create a three- dimensional model of a church from colonial Mexico. (I went to the store, bought a couple of Communion cards, and told him to cut the crosses and pictures of the Virgin Mary out to decorate his cardboard box with. It looked really nice when it was done, it really did.)

  Another good sign was that now when Taz got Cs or Ds on his papers, he sat down and revised them and handed them in again to try to improve the grade. And a few times, he was even up very late past midnight trying to finish something due the next day.

  I'd lecture him about the importance of not waiting until the last minute to complete a big project, and then I'd usually tell him it probably wasn't worth staying up all night, that he might as well just get some sleep and hand it in a day late, but he was having none of that.

  “No!” he'd whine. “You don't understand! I can't do that.”

  There was always some reason why he had to finish it no matter how long he stayed up, whether it was part of a team project and he didn't want to let the other person down, or because the teacher in that particular course didn't accept late work.

  I had to admire his willingness to get the work done. I just wished he wasn't such a procrastinator.

  One day after school, he stopped by my office. I introduced him to the book review editor, and then, remembering his famous MySpace declaration, “I hate books,” I jokingly added: “But Taz hates books, so I guess there's not a lot for you two to discuss.”

  “I don't hate books!” Taz said in an outraged tone.

  “You don't?” I said, genuinely surprised.

  “No!” he replied, as if I'd insulted some deeply held value of his.

  “Well, what's your favorite book?” said the editor genially, trying to help smooth out one of those awkward public tiffs between mother and son.

  “Um, I think probably Angela's Ashes,” Taz said matter-of- factly. “That was a good one.”

  It was something he'd been required to read for high school. Certainly, if I had suggested he read a book about a mother raising two sons in the last century, he would have run screaming in the other direction.

  “And Catcher in the Rye,” he added as an afterthought. “That was pretty good, too.”

  The book editor smiled at me. “So I guess he doesn't hate books after all,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  To myself, I said: Good- bye thirteen, hello fourteen, hello hope!

  One night I was hanging out with Sport playing Monopoly. We hadn't seen Taz all evening. He'd left a message at some point to say he wouldn't be home for dinner. Although it was hard to accept his wanderings and disappearing acts at first, by this point in my life as an Experienced Mother of a Teenager, I'd more or less gotten used to it and I'd sort of given up tracking him down, so I didn't even try to call him back. My standards had definitely declined.

  Then the dog lifted her head, perked up her ears, and walked to the door expectantly.

  Sport looked at me and smiled. “Taz is home,” he said.

  Sure enough, the door opened and slammed shut a moment later.

  “Hi, Mom!”

  It was indeed Taz, home from a night of… chillin’ … or … gulp … who knows what. He walked into the room and handed me a twenty.

  “Here's your money back,” he said. “Remember you gave it to me yesterday? I didn't need it after all. I was at Ethan's house and his mom made dinner for us, so I didn't need to buy any food.”

  “Um, OK.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you Friday— I got an A on my history paper, the one on Buddhism.”

  He was grinning. When I didn't grin back, he prompted me.

  “Isn't that great? I can't wait to tell Dad.”

  I nodded stupidly.

  Maybe he didn't hate us? Maybe chillin’ was more innocent than I had imagined? Maybe he was actually a good boy instead of the fiend of my nightmares? Maybe I had been right to Keep Hope Alive?

  “Taz, when are we gonna go to the movies?�
�� Sport asked. “I really wanna see the new Harry Potter.”

  “Um, I don't know, maybe this weekend?” Taz said “I'll check the schedule at the theater.”

  Then he spied a pile of clean laundry on a tabletop. “Don't worry about this, I'll put my stuff away,” he said, scooping up the shirts, pants, and boxers that belong to him.

  He turned back before leaving the room and added, “You want me to walk the dog?”

  He whistled and Buddy's toenails skittered on the wood floor as she slipped and slid over his way, tail wagging.

  “C'mon, Buddy,” he said, “let's go. G'night.”

  “G'night,” I said.

  He walked down the hall. I heard him opening and shutting drawers as he put his clothes away, then the jangle of the dog's leash being snapped on her collar, and the door slamming as they went out to walk around the block.

  Before they returned, Sport wiped me out with the rent on a hotel on Boardwalk. “You want to play again?” he asked hopefully.

  I shook my head.

  “Time for bed,” I said. “Go brush your teeth. Make sure you do it for the whole two minutes now, remember what the dentist said, use the timer, OK?”

  “OK,” he said.

  I could hear him dutifully brushing away from the kitchen as I cleaned up the Monopoly pieces.

  “I love you,” I called out to him, for no reason in particular.

  “Love you, Mom,” he said through a mouthful of toothpaste suds.

  It's true that I had finally gotten used to the idea of having a teenager in the house, but I still felt so glad that my little boy was only nine.

  Taz turned fourteen not long after that. But somehow it just didn't seem like that big of a deal. We didn't even have a real party. A couple of kids came over (including a girl with really nice sneakers, but I stifled the impulse to compliment her) and had a slice of pizza at our house, then they all went off to a movie. It was pretty low-key.