Another school has an excellent science program. Well, imagine my surprise when another mother informed me that on her tour of this school, she was astonished to see that most of the students in the labs were female. Why is this? she asked the school tour guide. “The boys don't want to work that hard,” she was told. When I was in high school, schools were desperate to get girls interested in science.
I told a colleague at work I couldn't understand how it was that boys do so much worse in school than girls, and yet somehow boys end up running the world, anyway. Maybe that would make things easier for my son, but it didn't seem fair to the girls.
She assured me that change was afoot. “Boys may run the world right now, but when this generation of girls graduates from college, the boys better watch out, because the girls are going to take over.”
I briefly considered grooming Taz to be a trophy husband for some powerful woman down the line. Maybe I should worry less about having him slog through Shakespeare and start getting him interested in pedicures?
Either way, despite my lack of insights into girls, I do feel that it's my duty as a mother to occasionally try to talk to my boys About Girls and Related Subjects, such as Sex. And yet you get to a point with these Important Talks where you don't know exactly what to say.
I mean, I've tried to be responsible over the years, but hey, once they know where babies come from, once they know what AIDS is, once they know what condoms are for, what's left? You told them, the school told them, ads on TV told them, and every other kid in the neighborhood told them. When you get down to the nitty- gritty, it's not all that complicated, and a parent can actually run out of talking points. My friend Vivian told me that the only questions her son Julian had left were either not about sex (“What is lactation?”) or were not questions she was sure she knew the answer to (“How do gay people do it?”).
Still, I figure when you have a teenager, it's irresponsible not to bring the subject up from time to time, even when you're pretty sure they already understand the basics.
“Taz, I need to have a little talk with you,” I told him as he walked in the door on a Friday afternoon.
“Again? Didn't we just have one of these? Do we have to do it now? It might ruin my weekend,” he said.
“Actually, I'm sort of hoping it will,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I just want to go over a few things about sex.”
“Not again! I know everything I need to know.”
“That's what I'm afraid of.”
And therein lies the parent's dilemma. Do you really want to know the extent of your teenager's sexual knowledge? Not that they would tell you if you asked, but should you ask, and if you ask, what are you supposed to ask?
I took the coward's way out. I didn't ask. I just told.
“Taz, I hope you don't have sex until you're much older, and I hope when you do that it's with someone you love and not just because a bunch of people got drunk at a party or something.”
I'd so far been avoiding eye contact, but there I paused for effect and tried to get my nerve up for the next pronouncement. I looked at him and he seemed completely unembarrassed by anything I'd said. I could have been telling him that he needed to work harder in geometry and he'd have had the same look on his face of utter nonchalance.
Finally, I took a deep breath and let out the next bit: “And I hope that you respect the girls you know and that if there's a girl who doesn't respect herself, that you don't take advantage of her.”
Here he looked at me a bit quizzically. I could see that he wasn't 100 percent sure of what I was saying, but, frankly, I didn't have the guts to spell it out any more explicitly than that. But I had to try, and I had to do it in a most unfeminist way.
“You know, I am a girl,” I said, not intending it to sound quite as dramatic as it did.
He shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah,” he said.
“What I mean is, I was a girl. And I knew lots of girls. And sometimes girls can get boys into trouble. And then later they blame the boys. And since you are a boy and I am your mother, I just want to make sure you don't do something stupid because of a girl.”
Now he was knitting his eyebrows. “OK …,” he said a bit tentatively.
Then he brightened, interpreting my pause as the end of our little chat. “Can I go now?”
I wasn't sure I'd made my point all that well. Maybe it was worth trying a different tack. “Um, just one more thing. I just want to remind you of the turkey story.”
“What does that have to do with this? Besides, you don't have to remind me. I remember it.”
“Too bad, I'm going to tell it again anyway.”
Some families still use Bible stories to teach children right from wrong. But I like to use sensational tabloid headlines to hammer home my do- right lessons, and the turkey story is my all- time favorite. When the incident happened, I read the account from the paper out loud as we gathered around the dinner table, and I have brought it up at least once every few months in the three years since.
The turkey story is basically this: A group of teenagers used a stolen credit card to go on a shopping spree. Their purchases included a frozen turkey from a supermarket. They all got in a car, and one of them decided to pitch the turkey at another car. It smashed the windshield, injured the driver, and all of the kids were arrested.
Even though this is not directly related to sex, to me it seems to capture perfectly the idiotic behavior that groups of teenagers frequently engage in, and how, like sheep, they will follow one another, giggling and failing to use a shred of common sense, in doing the most inane and dangerous things. They can hurt themselves, they can hurt others, and the actions of one of them can get all of them arrested. It reminds me of every story I've ever heard of frat parties gone bad and teams getting in trouble, stories which not infrequently involve sexual misdeeds of various sorts.
So I retold the story and added, “The point is, you have to think for yourself. Just because a bunch of people are doing something stupid doesn't mean you have to go along with it. If one of those people gets in trouble, you will, too. Like at the prom, remember?”
“OK,” he said, impressing me with how pleasant and sincere he sounded. “Can I go now?”
But the turkey story had emboldened me; now I had my second wind and suddenly felt like I could say what was really on my mind.
“Just one more thing; I promise this is the last thing I wanted to say. I just wanted to remind you about condoms …”
He interrupted me. “Oh, don't worry about that,” he said. “Come in my room for a second.”
What? “Come in my room for a second” is not the right response when your mother says she wants to talk to you about condoms. Now I was freaking out. Exactly what was it he was planning to show me? We walked down the hall together and into his room. He reached into a little wooden box on top of a shelf covered with a jumble of CDs, DVDs, deodorant, acne medicine, keys, candy, and empty water bottles.
“See?” he said. He pulled out a couple of NYC Condoms, the brand the city of New York created as a free-bie to promote safe sex. The sleek black wrapper is designed to resemble the logo for subway lines, with each letter in NYC CONDOM pictured in a colorful little circle, the way the F train's F appears in an orange balloon on the front of the train and the A train's A is set in a circle of navy blue.
He smiled and looked at me expectantly, the way our dog, Buddy, looks when she sits on command or puts her paw up to shake. She knows she did a good job, she's proud of herself, and now she wants a treat.
I reminded myself that I brought up the subject of condoms, and here he was showing me, like the good boy he thought I wanted him to be, that he had some.
I suppose this shouldn't have shocked me. After all, we'd already been through the incident with the Halloween condoms, which did, in fact, disappear after October 31 that year— whether in service of a costume or an orgy I guess I'll never know for sure. But I hadn't r
ealized that the supply had been replenished. I was about to stutter, “Where did you get them?” but then I remembered that when these NYC Condoms had been introduced a few weeks earlier, the condoms were handed out in subway stations and on street corners. People even brought them in to show around the office that day. After that, you could pick them up in bars and many other places around the city, even coffee shops and hair salons. So I knew they were easy to find even in our neighborhood, but I was still a little taken aback.
Before I had a chance to say anything, though, he offered an explanation, saying that when the city started handing them out, his friend Chris picked up a whole bunch and gave him a couple.
“Now can I go?” he said.
“Uh, sure,” I said. “I guess I've said everything I wanted to say.”
“Great,” he said. “Bye, Mom, see you later.”
The apartment door slammed behind him and I resisted the urge to walk over to the window and watch him go— or even follow him— down the block to hang out who knows where, with who knows who, doing who knows what.
A few days after Taz and I had our little chat, Elon came storming into the kitchen where I was making one of those special dinners I get all proud of, and then want to kill myself because no one will eat it. This one was a lovely stir- fry of chicken and asparagus, but as I peeled the ginger, I could already imagine Taz conspiring with Sport to microwave some Bagel Bites when I wasn't looking.
“Do you know what your son has in his room?” Elon said.
“Let me guess. Ten pounds of dirty laundry from the last twenty- four hours? A history paper with a big C written on it in red ink?”
“Condoms! And they're not the ones we found last summer that he said were for the Halloween costume.”
“No, these are the NYC Condoms that have those subway train designs on them, right?”
Elon looked horrified. “You know about this?”
“Well, yeah. I was giving him a little sex ed lecture the other night because, well, I don't know, somehow it seemed like the right time, and he showed them to me. He says he got them the day they were giving them out all over the city. There are two in there, right? Why don't you check again in a couple weeks or whatever and see if they're still there?”
Elon sighed. “OK.”
It was so easy to pretend to be calm about this and talk the talk, like the reasonable parents we were trying to be. But inside, both of us were wishing that we didn't have to be thinking about these things with regard to a thirteen-year-old.
It's like they said on South Park: “There's a time and a place for everything. It's called college.”
But, in reality, it starts long before then.
t was a big relief to leave the mess that was eighth grade behind us, and start fresh with ninth, in a place where none of the teachers knew anything about Taz. Or about the famous soda can incident. Or about the prom.
I tried to be optimistic that everything would work out OK in his new school. I told myself he would learn a lot, and hopefully be happy, and hopefully make friends with kids who would be a good influence on him.
But I was well aware that he had a few months to go before he stopped being thirteen. And, inside, I worried that the final stretch of this unlucky number might be just as bumpy as what we'd already been through.
As I explained before, where we live, there are no neighborhood high schools. Even ordinary public school students like Taz have to apply to high schools— just like college— and hope they are accepted at the school of their choice. It's a complicated system, with dozens of schools to choose from, in which the best schools look at your grades, your standardized test scores, and your attendance.
In addition to all of that, at Taz's first choice of a school, they also looked at teacher recommendations and a portfolio of work, and you had to come in for an interview and write an essay on a surprise topic. Elon and I were certain that Taz would never be accepted at this school. It was just too popular, and he was competing against kids with résumés that could get them into Harvard at the age of thirteen, forget high school. When we went for a tour, there was a line down the block, and by the time we got to the door, the person who greeted us apologized because she'd run out of maps. “We only printed a thousand,” she said.
As charming as Taz could be (when he wanted to, that is, and only with people who weren't his parents), we knew he wasn't going to go in there for the interview and discuss poetry or physics. He plays no instrument, has no hobbies, and hasn't been on a team since he was a nine- year- old Little Leaguer who ducked every time the ball came within ten feet. If you ask him, “Who do you admire?” he'll say the guys in Wedding Crashers.
And yet he has a certain charm. He is cool and confident. He has a lot of friends. He is suave, like James Bond without the spying. I can't take credit for any of this; he's been that way since he was a little kid. In fact, it's one of the humbling— dare I say nerve- racking— aspects of being a mother that your kid's personality is a function of nature, not nurture. I read somewhere once that as long as you feed them and don't lock them in a closet, most of them will turn out fine, and we're just deluding ourselves to think that all the fine- tuning and obsessing we do makes any difference. Maybe Taz's inborn charm would allow him to jump through the hoops; certainly, if he aced the interview, it would have nothing to do with me.
Interview day arrived. Elon and I wished him luck and watched him walk in. He seemed totally nonchalant about the whole thing, but we were ready to throw up.
A half hour later, he emerged from the school, beaming.
“I'm in!” he announced in the cocky tone that can only be voiced by an adolescent who hasn't lived long enough to be disappointed by life's randomness.
Elon rolled his eyes. “Right,” he said.
“You're in?” I said. “How could you possibly know that? It'll be months before they tell us if you've been accepted.”
“I just know,” he said. He folded himself into the car, bouncing his knee, a grin on his face, stuck his iPod buds in his ears, and shut his eyes. If Elon and I were a TV station, Taz had just changed the channel.
But I had to smile at his sheer hubris. God, it's great to have no self- doubt! I wish I could be that way sometimes. Then I reminded myself that it's attitudes like that that lead adolescents to indulge in Dangerous Risk-Taking Behavior! Like Failing to Put on Seat Belts! Riding Motorcycles Too Fast! Taking Ecstasy, Even! Not that Taz had done those things, mind you, but they are all among the ten thousand things I make lists of when I can't sleep.
Later, a girl we know who attends the school Taz was applying to asked Taz what the surprise essay topic had been.
“You were supposed to write about a memory,” he said.
Uh- oh, I thought, not the “write about a memory” assignment again! I hoped he hadn't frozen up, like the kid in the newspaper column who told his mom he didn't have any memories.
“So what did you write about?” the girl asked.
“I wrote about the time my uncle took me to a Mets game,” Taz said.
“That was a mistake,” she said. “You should have written about someone who died!”
“My uncle did die!” Taz said.
I marveled how the both of them had intuitively understood that the assignment wasn't really about a memory. It was really about whether you have Soul. Pity the kid who's had nothing but happiness in life and has no dead relatives to write about. A kid like that, writing about his first pony ride or some other wonderful moment from childhood, doesn't stand a chance in an essay exam these days.
Still, even though Taz appeared to have understood what was being sought in an essay topic, and thought he did well in the interview, the school seemed like a reach. For a second choice, I insisted that he put a school I was certain he'd be accepted to— one that I liked, but he didn't. (Yes, my thirteen- year- old needed a safety school. Back in my day you didn't need a safety school until you were applying for college.)
At one mi
nute after three o'clock on notification day, my office phone rang.
“Mom?” he said, his voice small and sad. “I got into number two. The one you wanted.”
I hated myself. I suddenly realized what a stupid thing I had done. “I'm so sorry,” I said.
“Just kidding!” he shouted boisterously. “I got into you-know-where!”
“WHAT? No way! Are you sure? Read me the letter! I don't believe it!”
He read the letter aloud, and it seemed indisputable that indeed he had been accepted to his first choice. He had been right that day after the interview when he told us he was in. He had been right not to doubt himself. And to tell the truth, I felt bad that the doubts had come from us.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, things would work out for Taz after all.
In the months that followed, the summer of Taz's thirteenth year came and went, and with it, the trip to Australia and the discovery of contraband in Taz's room, along with the usual “I Am a Terrible Mother” self-pronouncements. Then, finally, after Labor Day, high school began. Thank GOD! He would be someone else's worry, at least for a few hours each day.
I offered to accompany him to the building the first day, but he had no interest in being delivered to high school by his mother. He said he'd have no trouble figuring it out on his own. The first day was only a half day and he promised to call me when it was over.
When he reached me, he sounded positively jubilant. Our conversation went something like this.
TAZ: Mom?
ME: Hi, Taz, how was the first day?
TAZ: Awesome! I signed up for tennis, bowling, Fris-bee, skiing, and the trip to France.
ME: What? Did you actually make it to school today, or did you get lost on the train and end up at a country club?
TAZ: No, see, these are all afterschool activities.
ME: A trip to France is an afterschool activity?
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