Did we even get Taz a present? I can't remember. But presents for kids just aren't what they used to be anyway. Half the kids I know can't even think of what they want for Christmas because they already have everything. And if they do want something, it's an iPhone or a Wii or some other thing so expensive you have to get a second job to pay for it.
I also just found myself feeling much calmer about the concept of fourteen than I had been about the concept of thirteen. When Taz was twelve becoming a teenager, it was different. It felt momentous, and it was. I was totally unprepared for all the changes in his appearance and his behavior. But by now, I had spent so much time being appalled by everything from cigarette smoke to condoms to liquor that I almost couldn't imagine what there was left to horrify me.
Well, I guess I hadn't had to bail Taz out of the city jail yet, although prom night was a close second, and I hadn't yet found pot plants in the windowbox (though if you had told me that there was one growing in there, I suppose I wouldn't have been all that surprised). It was like I'd survived one of those military campaigns the Pentagon comes up with weird names for: Shock and Awe! Operation Rolling Thunder! The war was still going on, but now that the invasion was a distant memory, I had gotten used to bombs falling on my village every day.
Still, it never ceased to amaze me that just when I would get rid of one worry, another would come along and take its place. When Taz was twelve and wanted to go to the movies, I worried that the people in the box office wouldn't believe he still deserved the child's ticket price. When he was thirteen and going to the movies without me, I worried he'd try to sneak in as a twelve- year- old and pay the discount price, and that just didn't seem right. Now that he was fourteen, I worried he'd pass for seventeen and get into all the R- rated movies. My worry list was like a treadmill.
My attitude evolved about other things, too. One night I was on the phone with a friend who lived in the suburbs and Taz was heading out the door. I interrupted my conversation to give him the usual third degree: Where are you going? Who are you going with? When are you coming home? Be careful, don't get in trouble. How are you getting there?
Turned out he was taking the train to a friend's house in another neighborhood, and I was actually feeling just a little bit proud, as my friend overheard snatches of the conversation, of how independent Taz was. This was partly why I had decided it was a good thing to raise my children in the city, because they wouldn't need to be chauffeured everywhere by their parents, and they also wouldn't be driving each other around as teenagers.
When I got back on the phone, though, my friend said that after listening to my conversation with Taz, she was so glad she lived in a place where kids need to be driven everywhere.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you just have a lot more control that way.”
I realized she was right. Taz would be gone for hours, and I would just have to take his word for it if he called me, saying he was at so- and- so's house. If I'd driven him to his friend's house, I'd know for sure that's where he was. I might see his friend, get a read on what was happening there, even say hi to the parents.
As it was now, I couldn't even be sure there were any parents over there. I suddenly realized that the good thing about being forced to drive kids everywhere is that every time they change locations, some grown- up gets to step in and assess the situation. Maybe if you know somebody's dad is going to be looking into your eyes in an hour or sitting next to you, you'll be more careful about whether your breath smells like booze or your clothes reek of smoke.
Of course, what's bad about living someplace where kids have to be driven everywhere is that all those kids eventually turn sixteen and learn to drive themselves. And as some of my friends who grew up in suburbs have told me, there's nothing to stop your kid from finding another kid who lives within walking distance and whose parents are gone, at which point your kid has a new place to commit all his evil deeds.
But at that moment, on the phone with my friend, the idea of reducing some of the independence that I had once thought of as positive seemed appealing.
And yet I also knew it was too late to curb Taz's wanderings. I grew up in the city, too. I remembered how thrilling it was to take the train to visit friends in places I'd never been because I suddenly had friends in high school who didn't live within walking distance of my house. I felt so grown- up figuring out how to get to the Bronx by myself to hang out with a friend on a Saturday, or to distant Queens for a party. I wondered if my mother had worried about me the way I worried about Taz. I suppose she had, but if she did, I don't remember her admitting it.
And yet, in a weird way, I sort of admired Taz's mastery of the trains and buses. He'd surpassed me in that regard. One day Taz told me he was going to Sea Gate to visit a friend, a neighborhood I had only vaguely heard of. I felt a pride only a city mom can have as I listened to him explain the web of trains and buses he'd be taking to get there.
One Saturday night, Taz told me he was taking the bus with some friends to sleep over at one of their houses— one of those houses where there was plenty of room for a couple of big guys to stretch out, and a really nice dad who more often than not could be persuaded to take them all to a diner for breakfast Sunday morning. I knew the other two boys he was going with, and it all sounded perfectly fine. It was around 9:30 p.m. when Taz left, and I was tired. I had learned long ago that I need more sleep than my children, and that there's no shame in saying that it's my bed time, even if it's not theirs. I told Elon and Sport good night, and I turned in.
I was awakened some time later by some sort of commotion. I heard Taz's voice. What was he doing home? Didn't he say he was going to sleep over at his buddy's house?
I tried to figure out what was happening by listening to the voices in the hallway, but it didn't quite make sense to me, so I turned the light on and got out of bed.
I saw Taz and I wanted to cry. The skin around his left eye was swollen, purple and blue.
“What happened?” I said.
“We were getting out of the bus and these guys jumped us,” he said quietly.
Taz had gotten away from the attackers and had run to get his friend's dad, who lived just around the corner, but the bad guys ran off after giving them each a slug. They didn't steal anything— not that a couple of fourteen- year- olds have much worth stealing. Seemed like they were in it only for the thrill.
The father called an ambulance, and the paramedics said the kids were all basically OK. The cops said each boy would have to come to the precinct with a parent if we wanted to make a report, but Taz said that seemed pointless.
“You could have called us,” I said. “We would have come and picked you up.”
“I didn't want to upset you,” he said. “I figured it was just better to come back here.” The other boy's dad had driven him home.
I was trying hard not to smother Taz with sympathy or make it out to be worse than it was. I offered him an ice pack and a Tylenol, and told him that nobody lived in New York without eventually becoming a crime victim. It wasn't like he'd done anything wrong; he'd been taking the bus, for God's sake, from one safe neighborhood to another safe neighborhood. It wasn't even that late— before 10 p.m. He hadn't been alone, and goodness knows, if I'd been looking to mug somebody, those three big boys certainly didn't look like easy targets to me.
But then who knows what motivates a couple of bad boys to beat someone up. If they'd wanted an easy mark, surely there was a little old lady getting off that bus, too. Maybe what they prized was the challenge of picking on another teenager. Maybe Taz was big enough now to count as a conquest. Maybe because my kid had a black eye, somebody else's kid had passed an initiation rite into some evil gang somewhere.
Back when I was trying to navigate the Land of Thirteen-Year- Olds, things frequently seemed absurd, unfathomable, incomprehensible. Things were darker on Planet Fourteen, but in some ways they were more recognizable to a grown- up. Forget about the “Whassup, JC” prattle of last year. T
he right response to what happened to Taz that night was OMG WTF
On the other hand, I tried to put it in perspective, both for me and for Taz.
“Listen,” I said, “when you're older, you'll get called for jury duty. And there's always this moment in the courtroom when the judge asks whether anybody in the jury pool has ever been a victim of a crime.”
“Why do they need to know that?”
“Well, they want to see if you can be fair when you hear the evidence. If you've been robbed, then maybe you can't be objective listening to a case about a robbery. So the DA and the defense attorney need to know what everyone's experience has been with the criminal justice system.”
“Your point is?”
“Well, it's just that when they ask if anyone's been a victim of a crime, I've never been in a jury pool where everyone didn't raise their hand. So my point is just that most people at some point end up having a run- in with a bad guy. It might be something simple— your car got broken into, your wallet got lifted from your purse. But you just hope you don't get hurt. And you weren't seriously hurt, thank goodness. So maybe this was the one thing that had to happen to you so that you can be one with your fellow jurors and raise your hand when they ask that question. It might be the only good thing about what happened tonight.”
Taz let out a chuckle and nodded. He got what I was saying.
“You gonna be able to go to sleep?” I asked.
“Yeah, don't worry about it,” he said. “I'm OK.”
“All right,” I said. “If you wake up in the night, and you're freaking out, or whatever, you're allowed to wake me up. OK?”
“OK.”
But I knew he'd never do that, and he didn't.
When they're little, and you go for years without a good night's sleep, you wonder if they'll ever make it through to morning without finding some reason to wake you up. But then one day you look at the clock and it's 7:30 a.m., and you realize that nobody called for you in the dark, nobody crawled in your bed and stuck their frozen toes on your warm knees.
For a panicked moment, you wonder if your child is— well, I can't even say it. You leap out of bed and run into his room and if you haven't wakened him up with all your commotion by then, you stand there for a minute trying to make sure that he's still breathing. You see the chest rising and falling and you let out a sigh. There's nothing wrong. He's just growing up. He doesn't need you anymore, is all; he doesn't need to wake you up in the night.
Taz was pretty good about calling me after school most days to let me know his schedule, but one day I didn't hear from him. I didn't get too worried, though; it was no longer that unusual for him to occasionally go missing for a while. Finally, he came through the door around 6 p.m., looking both exhausted and triumphant.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Coney Island,” he said.
It was the dead of winter, so I knew he hadn't been at the beach or the amusement park.
“Why?”
“By accident, I forgot my backpack on the train with all my books and my homework in it, and when I asked the worker in the station for help, he said the only way to get it back was to go to the end of the line, to the depot at Coney Island.”
He then told me a long, complicated story in which he took the next train all the way out to Coney Island, about a half hour from our house, and pretty much got the runaround— as you might expect— from every person he asked for help in recovering the lost backpack.
But he was just determined to get it back, and basically went from worker to worker at the depot until he located the one who remembered removing his backpack when the train was cleaned at the end of the line. That worker then took him to the room where they kept lost property, and there, indeed, was the missing bag, with all his schoolwork in it.
“You should have called me!” I said. “I would have driven you out there. I would have gone with you. I would have helped you look for it.”
He shrugged. “It's OK,” he said. “I figured it out.”
I was impressed. And I also realized that had he called me for help instead of trying to figure it out himself, I might have told him not to bother going to the depot. I have never heard of anyone losing anything on the train and finding it again, and I tend to wither in the face of bureaucracies. It was just as well he'd decided to handle it on his own; my pessimism would have been more of a liability than a help.
I was proud of him for solving his own problem that day. And I took a step back and considered it all. If Taz could lose his backpack on the subway and then find it again without my help, and if he could get socked in the eye and not feel the need to call home right away, well, maybe that was a good thing.
Maybe it meant I had done my job as a mother, and raised him right.
Or maybe it just meant he was old enough now to realize that there was nothing I could do to make it better.
Whichever it was, one thing was for sure: My unjumpable son was no longer unjumpable.
y the time Taz turned fourteen, my life had revolved around my children for so many years— and happily so, for the most part, entertainingly so— that I couldn't imagine what it would be like when they were grown up and gone.
I can no longer even remember what I did in my spare time before I had children, and that's probably proof that whatever it was, it wasn't very important. Oh, I suppose before I had kids, I ate out more, and saw more foreign films, and maybe I went to grown- up parties, but I actually don't recall any of that as being more interesting than watching a baby learn to walk and talk.
I'm not saying that every aspect of child rearing is fascinating. I remember going to the playground at a time when I had probably gone to the playground at least once a day for eight years straight. (When your kids are five years apart in age, early childhood lasts a very long time.) But when I plopped myself down on the park bench, I was immediately overcome with the need to sleep.
I actually thought I was going to pass out. I could barely keep my eyes open, and I kept snapping my head back up every time it lolled to the side. I realized I was sort of making a spectacle of myself, and tried hard to straighten myself up on the hard wooden bench in the hope that an erect posture would fool my body into thinking it wasn't time for bed.
It also wasn't the first time this had happened. Lately it seemed like whenever I went to the playground, I felt positively narcoleptic.
Just then, a father I knew sat down next to me and said hello.
“How are you?” he said. “What's new?”
“Oh, nothing much,” I said, stifling a yawn, then letting out a little laugh. “Oh my, excuse me! I didn't mean to yawn in your face! It's just the strangest thing, though. Every time I come to the playground with the kids, as soon as I get here, I feel like I'm going to fall fast asleep.”
The father looked at me skeptically. “You think you're the only one?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody feels that way.”
“They do?”
“Of course. You get here, you sit down, and it's so incredibly boring that you immediately feel like lying down to take a nap.”
Leave it to a Straight-Talking Dad to set me straight on what taking a kid to the park was really all about. You can bet your yoga mat that the Perfect Mommies would never have admitted to being bored in the playground. They were too busy making sure that Other People's Babysitters weren't doing something wrong.
But as the years go by, you go to the playground less and less. At some point, you're asking the kids if they want to go there more than they're asking you to take them.
And then one day you realize it's been months since you went to the playground. Your kids have outgrown the swings and those stupid boxy climbing thingies that replaced the much more interesting (and more dangerous) monkey bars of your childhood.
Now they're playing video games with their friends, instant- messaging kids in their class and begging for a ride to the mall.
The change
s can be measured in the decline of other rituals, too. There's a period of ten years or so where you have to buy your kid a new bike every other year, because he's outgrowing them so fast. Then one day you buy him an adult bike, and that's the last bike he'll ever need.
Same thing with painting the bedroom. First, you have the nursery colors, then something bright but basic. Then comes a cool and trendy look, which might just last until college starts. In Taz's case, the walls of his room are swirls of dark blue and white, evoking an ocean or a misty night sky. It's so soothing and dark, like a womb or a little boat floating in the sea.
But will I leave those blue swirls on the walls once he's off to college in a few years— a shrine to Taz's childhood? Or should I quickly paint over the ocean of blue with linen white and call it a guest room?
One day I sat down and thought about the fact that Taz was only going to be living in the house for another couple of years (please, God of All Mothers, let him get into a college that's too far away to commute to).
Maybe, I thought, I ought to try to make the place more pleasant for him in the time he had left with us. After all, when they're little, you childproof your house, and when they get bigger, you buy all kinds of stupid stuff to clutter your space with— like indoor basketball hoops and gigantic dollhouses nobody ever plays with. Maybe, I thought, there was something along those lines that a teenager might like to have in his room.
He seemed pleased when I approached him with this idea. First, he asked for cable TV, which I wasn't inclined to get. Then he asked for an air conditioner. His room was small and airless, and it did heat up like a closet in the summer.
For years, I'd taken a sort of perverse pride in knowing that my children were not so coddled they needed air-conditioning. Fans were good enough for them, I told myself! It toughens 'em up to sleep in ninety- eight- degree heat and 100 percent humidity every July! Nobody had central air when I was little; why should they have such extravagances now?
On the other hand, Elon and I had an air conditioner in our bedroom. And I recognize that the older you get, the bigger your body is, the harder it is to tolerate heat.
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