13 Is the New 18 (11 page)

“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 of 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.

Fortunately, a passerby found him on a nearby street corner, apparently headed home, and returned him to the school just as his teacher was realizing he'd disappeared.

“What were you thinking?” I said when I picked him up that day.

“School is too boring, Mommy,” he explained. “I didn't want to stay there anymore.”

I smothered an impulse to say, “Welcome to the real world, buddy! Everything in life feels that way sometimes, but you just gotta do your time.” After all, he was only five. I didn't want to break it to him yet that his best years were already behind him.

In fact, his feeling that school was kinda boring didn't change too much as the years wore on, although he knew better than to go AWOL in the middle of class. His favorite subject was recess; calls or notes home from the teacher were not unusual. He liked to fool around;
he wouldn't concentrate. He claimed frequent stomachaches, sore throats, twisted ankles— anything that might get him a day off. Parent- teacher night was my most dreaded night of the year, every year.

I finally consulted our pediatrician, a wise man whom I privately regard as the medical equivalent of King Solomon. Although he doesn't have a beard, I think of him stroking his beard as he contemplates my questions, which over the years have ranged from “Are you sure he doesn't have leukemia?” to “Isn't he done growing yet?”

What's especially good about this doctor is that he could be counted on to give sage advice for things that really didn't have a lot to do with medical care, such as “How do I deal with a kid who pretends to be sick so he doesn't have to go to school?”

“It's simple,” the doctor said. “If he's not throwing up, if he doesn't have a fever, and if he doesn't have diarrhea, well, then, he has to go to school.”

I laid down the doctor's rule, and that was the end of the “My tummy hurts” game. If only everything about raising children were that simple!

Fortunately, when Taz first got to middle school, we saw a huge change in his attitude. The middle school had an emphasis on science and technology, and he loved experimenting with dry ice, counting bacteria, and learning how to make PowerPoint presentations. He'd never liked reading, and I still couldn't get him much interested in that, but at least he was enjoying a lot of his classes.

But it took a long time for it to register with me and Elon how much better Taz was doing in sixth grade than he had been in elementary school. We steeled ourselves for the first (and always dreaded) parent- teacher conference of middle school, but to our astonishment, one teacher after another came up to us and told us how wonderful our son was.