13 Is the New 18

by Beth J. Harpaz

  Still, I could see that the thirteenth birthday was a turning point, too, just like when he'd turned five. Childhood had abruptly given way to adolescence. All the little triumphs that had seemed so important along the way suddenly felt unremarkable— learning to swim and skate, memorizing times tables, crossing the street, and walking to school without a grown- up.

  Now all those accomplishments seemed like one big given, the inevitable result of a little boy growing up. But if I pushed myself, I could find, at the edges of my maternal memory, the details that proved each of those achievements was incredibly hard- won. Like his father steadying him on a two- wheeler day after day until he could pedal a few yards on his own without falling over. How many times did Elon jog around the block, following that wobbly little bike to make sure there were no accidents, kidnappings, or hit- and- runs?

  And how we worried for days after Taz started walking to school alone in third grade that something terrible might happen to him. The worry intensified three grades later into sheer parental terror when he started middle school in another neighborhood and had to take the train to school. Parents in other parts of the country worry when their kindergartners first take the school bus, and when their teenagers first get learner's permits, but we live in New York, where the parental nervous breakdown comes when your kid starts riding the subway without you.

  I comforted myself by noting that at least Taz wasn't driving the train, he was merely a passenger. But what if he got lost? What if he got mugged? What if he lost his fare card? What if a crazy person pushed him on the tracks or tried to kidnap him?

  The first few days of his new commute, Elon and I went with him, morning and afternoon. I wasn't sure how we were going to keep doing this, given that we both work full- time, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead. By the third day, though, Taz had had enough of our mollycoddling.

  “Just what do you think is going to happen to me?” he demanded.

  Not wanting to frighten him with my paranoid visions of disaster, I said, “You might get lost.”

  “I'll prove to you that I won't,” he said. “Follow me, and don't say a word.”

  It was around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night. I didn't particularly feel like leaving the house at that hour just to test his sense of direction. But he nagged me until I relented. He was determined to go to school the next day by himself, and getting me to test him that night was the only way he could think of to get me off his back.

  Wordlessly, I followed as he made the trip that night to school and back without any interference from me. When we got off the train near home, he turned to me triumphantly.

  “See? I did it!”

  Instantly, my brain was flooded with a hundred what- ifs. I decided to quiz him.

  What if a scary person got on the train and started staring at him?

  “I would stand next to a nice- looking lady and pretend that she was my mom.”

  I was impressed. “What if the train skipped your stop?”

  “I would get off at the next stop and take the train back.”

  Then came the trivia. I quizzed him on transfers, train lines, directions, neighborhoods, and everything else I could think of. Quick as a winning Jeopardy contestant, he fired off every answer flawlessly until I was exhausted.

  “OK, then, now can I go to school by myself?”

  What could I say? I had to give in. I made him promise to call me on his cell phone before he got on the train and when he got off the train. Though exactly how this would help him if someone was trying to kill him wasn't clear to either of us. Still, it made me feel better.

  Little did I know that the cell phone I was counting on to rescue him would soon become the monster that ate my bank account. He goes over his minutes every month, by a lot, and it's not from calling me. They have to mail the bill in a ten- by- fourteen envelope, it's so big.

  I make him pay back every cent over the basic charge, but that doesn't seem to stop him from exceeding the limit every time. I could just not pay the bill, but it's not like it used to be, where they cut off service if you owe. Now they wreck your credit rating, too. I could take the phone away, but then when it's 8 p.m. and I don't know where he is, how am I going to find him?

  Sure, he's getting too big to kidnap, but what about the crazies who might push him onto a subway track? What about drivers who don't yield to pedestrians? What about muggers looking to steal a wallet or an iPod or the very cell phone I'd hoped would keep him safe?

  One night, as he heads out the door to get pizza with some friends, I remind him about kids we know who were mugged— one outside school, one on a bus, one at knifepoint near our house.

  “Mom,” he says, “I'm not stupid!”

  “I know you're not stupid,” I say. “Just be careful.”

  “Mom,” he says, “I'm un- JUMP- able.”

  That's a new word for me. But as he pulls up the hood of his oversized sweatshirt (reminding me of another word, hoodlum), I suddenly see him and his friends the way someone else would. They are hulking. Rowdy. Horsing around. Cursing, high- fiving, laughing about some private joke. If I was walking toward them, I would probably cross the street.

  They really do look … unjumpable.

  “See you later, Mom. I love you!”

  What?

  He said, “I love you,” to his mother in front of his friends? I'm stunned.

  As they file out, one kid knocks the dog's water dish over, another steps on the cat's tail. They're pushing and shouting and singing snatches of a rap song, one of them chanting, “I love it when you call me …” and all the others chiming in, “Big POP- pa!”

  Finally, the door slams.

  Then it opens again.

  “Mom,” he says, “can you give me ten dollars?”

  Sighing, I reach for my wallet. “Get juice, not soda! No candy! No pepperoni! It's not good for you, all that sugar, all that fat. I don't want you to get diabetes! There's an obesity epidemic in this country, do you know that?”

  I interrupt myself to hand him a $20 bill. “I want change from that, OK?” I say.

  “Thanks.” He smiles.

  We both know that twenty dollars is as good as spent.

  here we were on the mini golf course, where we've been going for years for a fun day with the kids while on vacation up in Maine.

  As we walked in from the parking lot, I smiled at the comforting sight of the kitschy little turning windmill that you hit the balls through, and the hole that looks like a tiny cemetery with fake tombstones. And I was really looking forward to a scoop of ice cream after the game from the nearby stand selling Gifford's, a creamy local brand with a zillion interesting flavors. Flavors like pumpkin and maple and peppermint with little crunchy pieces of candy inside.

  This, I thought to myself contentedly, was what a good- old- fashioned family vacation was all about. Togetherness. Quality time! An afternoon where your biggest worry is whether you're going to go for the pistachio or the butter pecan.

  Suddenly, my reverie was interrupted by the sound of raised voices. Familiar raised voices. I realized that Elon and Taz were having a huge fight.

  “You're going to play mini golf with us whether you like it or not!” I heard my husband growl, to which Taz wailed something about hating his family more than anything in the world.

  Welcome to the family vacation, starring an angst-ridden, friend-deprived thirteen-year-old, who experiences humiliation every second of every day simply because his parents exist. Apparently that feeling had reached a climactic intensity on the mini golf course.

  The specific issue here, other than the generally embarrassing context of an adolescent having to appear in public with his parents and little brother, was that the kid realized his cell phone could get service at the mini golf course. He wanted to call his friends instead of playing with his family.

  My sister and I vacation in a little cottage on a pond in Maine, about fifteen miles from this mini golf course, which is located in the town of Sk
owhegan. There is no cell service in our house on the pond. (Not only that, no cable TV, video games, or Internet service, either. Just a well- worn Monopoly game and a canoe. Could I have ordered up any greater torture for an adolescent?)

  But on the golf course in town, not only was there a strong cell signal, it was even free— no roaming charges! From Taz's point of view, why shouldn't he use this opportunity to call all the thirteen- year- olds he hadn't spoken to in two weeks and say profound and cool teenage things? Like, “So, whassup?”

  I had never realized before how much my son has in common with African wildebeests, but it suddenly hit me that deprived of his herd, this young mammal was becoming disoriented. He needed, with an almost physical urgency, to be roaming the savanna with the other animals. Forced to spend twenty- four hours a day with his parents and little brother, he was starting to lose his identity.

  His separation from friends while on vacation not only included lack of phone contact, but because he couldn't go online on the computer, he also had no access to instant messaging. MySpace had become NoSpace. Facebook was Faceless. The deprivation had actually led him to beg to go to the town library a few times— not to get books, mind you, but in order to attempt to make contact with his friends, using the library computer.

  Back on the mini golf course, I tried to make peace between father and son.

  “Please,” I pleaded, “please stop fighting! Please don't raise your voices! It's only mini golf!”

  All around us, happy families putted away— in between taking sneak peeks at our dysfunctional unit in full pitched battle before we even played the first hole.

  “What's the problem?” I whispered. “Can't we just work something out here?”

  “I'm really homesick!” whined Taz, his face creased in pain. “I miss my friends! I just want to talk to some of them, and I finally got a cell signal here! Why do I have to play mini golf?”

  Elon turned to me, fuming. “Why can't he just be a part of this family? We came here to play mini golf and he's ruining a perfectly nice day!”

  Eventually, I brokered a compromise worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Taz would play mini golf, but he would play one hole behind the rest of us, while talking to his friends back home on his cell phone. I hovered between him and the rest of the family, making sure to write down everyone's score and enforce the truce.

  The cell phone was cradled between his shoulder and his ear as he swung the club on the second hole, hitting a hole in one.

  A giant grin spread across his face. He held the phone away from his face. “Mom, did you see that?” he said excitedly.

  I nodded and felt a little twinge flashbacking to when he was about eight years old and was finally coordinated enough to get the ball in the little hole.

  Then he shoved the phone back between his shoulder and his ear. “Yo,” he said to his friend on the other end of the line, “I'm up in Maine, playing mini golf. And it's mad fun.”

  I was just glad he wasn't telling his friend about the other horrible thing his mother did to him on vacation. The night before we left home, I had accidentally erased all the songs off his iPod, so he was also deprived of his music.

  I swear, I didn't mean to do it! And to his credit, he was very good- natured about the incident, I guess because it confirmed his smug view of me as a complete technological ninny. Which I totally admit that I am.

  But really, how was I supposed to know that if the iPod is plugged into the computer and you turn the computer off, the iPod is wiped clean? I was only trying to cut down on the electric bill by shutting everything off before we left for vacation. (This might be a good time to also admit that I later washed the same iPod in the laundry by accident, and when I fessed up, Taz didn't get mad about that, either.) Looking back, though, I can honestly say that this business of my thirteen-year- old being too important to spend time with his family on vacation actually started with a road trip we took when Taz was twelve. At home, see, I was too busy doing the laundry and making dinner to notice that my kid had started to despise me. But on vacation, when we actually had to be together twenty- four hours a day, well, there was no denying then that Taz's idea of a good time didn't necessarily involve us.

  The road trip took place about three months before Taz's thirteenth birthday. At the time, I perceived some of the incidents on that trip as isolated, amusing little quirks. But I see now that they actually constituted a turning point— or maybe even a morphing point—where taking your kids on a wonderful family trip becomes less like a Disney commercial and more like National Lampoon's Vacation or Little Miss Sunshine (a movie I loved because it made me realize that some families are even more dysfunctional than mine).

  To put these incidents in context and fully appreciate them, you need to know a little bit more about us. I make my living as a travel editor, so you'd think that planning a family trip would be easy. But actually my job does not require me to go anywhere; I just sit at a desk in New York and read about fabulous places that other people get to go to. Oh, and I also correct their grammar. (Please don't get me started on its and it's.)

  The trip planner in the family is actually Elon, who, I think it is fair to say, is slightly obsessive about this sort of thing. This particular road trip, for example, was eighteen days long. And if, for some reason, I needed to know six months in advance where we were going to be on the afternoon of the eleventh day, he could pretty much tell me exactly, because he'd planned the whole trip out in three-hour blocks. Before it was over, we'd driven three thousand miles through six western states, plus the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and ten more national parks (but who's counting?). P.S. Did I mention Universal, Vegas, and Disney?

  We started our trip in San Francisco, staying with my cousin Stuart. Stuart is a real- life private detective, and as we went around town with him, he kept pointing out homicide scenes he'd investigated. As New Yorkers, this made us feel right at home.

  Stuart also lives around the corner from Haight-Ashbury. “Oh my God, that's so cool,” I said when I saw the street signs at the intersection.

  “What? Why is it cool?” asked Taz, but I refused to tell him.

  A few days later, I got a glimpse, almost without realizing it, of what life with a teenager was going to be like. Taz's reaction to our visit to Sequoia National Park was definitely what my tenth- grade English teacher referred to in Tess of the D'Urbervilles as an ironic foreshadowing.

  We had driven to Sequoia to see the largest trees on earth— the General Grant Tree, the General Sherman Tree, and all the rest. But Taz immediately pronounced them the “Generally Boring Trees.” We set out to hike the loop trail to see more of these amazing phenomena, but after about a quarter mile, Taz just couldn't take it. He started hyperventilating and bent over, clutching his stomach.

  “Is it the bacon burrito you had for lunch?” I said, genuinely alarmed.

  “No, I just can't stand it here! These trees— they're so stupid! I gotta get back to the car!”

  “You must be kidding me!” I said. “Would you mind explaining to me what exactly is so bad about being in the woods with your family in the presence of these incredible trees? You don't like the color green? You're mad because there are no electric outlets to plug your phone charger into?”

  But before I even finished asking the question, Taz took off and started running back to the parking lot.

  Elon and I looked at each other in disbelief. Here we were, walking through one of the country's most amazing national parks, on an absolutely beautiful day in the shadows of these ancient, majestic trees, so big around that six people holding hands and stretching their arms out couldn't begin to make a circle around them. And our son couldn't care less! What a wretch of a boy! What was wrong with him?

  Then Elon started freaking out.

  “What if he gets lost?” he said.

  “It's a loop trail,” I said. “He'll be fine.”

  “What if something happens to him? What if someone KIDNAPS him?”
/>   “What, you think he's going to be kidnapped by a big tree?”

  But you know how it is when you're a parent. Once you utter the K word, once you've allowed that thought to enter your mind, there is no going back to being calm. You've crossed the parental bridge that leads from rationality to mental breakdown. Your thoughts are now flooded with every horrible kidnapping story you ever heard of, and the only cure is to physically get hold of your child— before, of course, someone else does.

  Since Taz was now out of sight, that meant Elon would have to run ahead to catch him and protect him from the Forces of Evil lurking behind the General Grant Tree in Sequoia National Park. Elon took off, and I was left with Sport, who seemed to take it all in stride. Within moments, Elon had disappeared down the trail, so Sport and I just held hands and trudged along the path to reunite with them.

  Sport was just seven years old at the time, really just as sweet as could be and still young enough to be filled with wonder when I pointed out a pine cone the size of a Chihuahua. As it turned out, though, we were rewarded with an even more remarkable sight. A mama bear and her cub were cavorting in a glade, just above the trail.

  “Oh, Mommy, let's run and tell Taz and Dad!” he said.

  I should have been touched by Sport's sweet impulse, to not want his brother and father to miss out on such a special thing. But at the moment I couldn't focus on that. I was too busy freaking out. It wasn't kidnappers we had to worry about on this trail. It was wild animals! I knew even more stories about bears attacking people, especially children, who are small and delicious, than I did about kidnappers.

  I grabbed him and moved back from the edge of the path. “Don't run away from me,” I said quietly. “Don't go any nearer to the bears than we already are. They might try to eat you.”

  To his credit, he didn't get upset. After all, a kid who grows up in New York City is raised with all kinds of crazy warnings. Was the concept of a bear wanting to eat him scarier than the thought of a crazy person pushing him in front of an oncoming train? Not really. So we crouched low across the way, took a few not- very- good pictures, and let the noisy German tourists who were walking behind us scare the bears back into the woods. After a few moments, I even relaxed a little and started to appreciate how special it was that we had gotten to see this. (Not to mention how miraculous it was that we hadn't been mauled to death.)