13 Is the New 18 (17 page)

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 Righteous 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?

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!