Cindy on October 31st, 2009
Children are a great comfort in old age, and they help you reach it much faster, too.” — Lionel M. Kaufman
Take it from a seasoned parent. There comes a time in every mother’s life when she realizes parts of her wardrobe shouldn’t be flaunted in front of teenage boys. And I’m not talking about thong underwear.
This hit me several years ago while the family and I were getting ready to visit my favorite art fair in Royal Oak — an annual summer event that typically draws crowds of creative types, including some neighbors we haven’t seen all winter. I wanted to dress for the occasion. Scouring my closet, I chose a nice black T-shirt and an ankle-length peasant skirt. It was a departure from my traditional blazer-with-jeans uniform, but still within the bounds of good taste.
Or so I thought. The silver bracelet is what got me in trouble. Rescued from a flea-market, the vintage cuff was two inches wide and etched with a subtle ethnic design. Not all that remarkable – unless, of course, you were looking at it through the discerning eyes of an adolescent boy.
“You’re not wearing that giant bracelet in public, are you?” asked Nate, glaring at my wrist.
“Why not?” I shot back.
“You look like a Babylonian… Or maybe a barbarian,” the kid said, choosing his words carefully. A week earlier he announced that my feet looked “Cro-Magnon” in sandals. Apparently I’d morphed into a badly dressed savage.
What could I do? When the same kid was a cranky infant, I couldn’t treat his diaper rash without consulting a stack of childcare guides. Soon enough, though, Doug and I were navigating the choppy waters of parenthood without much advice from Penelope Leach or T. Berry Brazelton, the most respected parenting experts of our era. Living by our wits, we maneuvered through mealtime face-offs and nerve-racking episodes with the neighborhood bully. We even managed to steer a fairly civilized carpool. But things changed when our little boy began slouching toward adolescence. We needed more help from the experts.
Just in time, Doug found a copy of Anthony Wolf’s aptly titled guide, Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall? (Noonday Press). As the author notes, today’s youth “are vastly different” from kids forty years ago. Just for starters, their social and academic pressures are more complicated, more intense.
“Teenagers treat adults in their lives in a manner that is less automatically obedient, much more fearless, and definitely more outspoken than that of previous generations,” writes Wolf, who happens to be a parent as well as a clinical psychologist. Many adolescents, he says, feel trapped between the growing need for independence and the secret wish to cling to childhood – an agonizing conflict if ever there was one.
“The two main forces of adolescence are the onset of sexuality and the mandate that demands that teenagers turn away from childhood and parents,” Wolf writes. Not only do teenagers see their parents as grossly flawed, he adds, “they also find them outright embarrassing, especially if seen with them anywhere outside the home.”
This explains why your teenager will hug you in the kitchen when nobody is looking but never, ever, in the school parking lot. Or why he ridicules your impeccable fashion sense and mostly wishes you were invisible.
Let me assure you that this too shall pass. Even the mouthiest teens can grow up to be agreeable, well-adjusted human beings. In the meantime they need our patience, love, and a healthy dose of discipline. But patience can be the hardest part, especially for barbarians. – Cindy La Ferle
A slightly different version of this essay is reprinted in Writing Home.
Cindy on October 14th, 2009
You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right. ~Maya Angelou
When my son Nate first left home for college, I felt strangely out of place in my cleaner, quieter house. I wasn’t ready to call myself “an empty nester,” and my early coping strategy included listing all of his holiday breaks on our kitchen calendar. I looked forward to being Mom again — if only for a few days.
Two weeks before Nate returned home for fall break of his freshman year, I channeled June Cleaver and planned a few family meals. I stocked up on Nate’s favorite snacks. I reorganized my deadlines, freeing extra time to take him out for lunch. I retrieved the Halloween decorations earlier than usual, stringing rows of miniature pumpkin lights and autumn leaves across the mantel in our living room. My husband repaired the plaster damage from a roof leak in Nate’s bedroom, and then repainted it.
As soon as Nate walked in the side door, the epiphany struck: What the kid really needed was a low-key week. Stressed-out from exams, our son wasn’t expecting a Martha Stewart fanfare or nostalgic pot roast dinners. He’d been looking forward to sleeping in and simply hanging out with family and friends. He wanted home — in all it’s normal, chaotic splendor. In my efforts to turn his visit into a special event, I’d forgotten that Nate didn’t want to feel like a guest in his own house.
Realizing my error, I backed off and let the week unfurl without a plan.
In retrospect, the high points of that visit were the times we ran errands together. Driving to the dry cleaner, the grocery, and the drugstore, Nate and I chatted about his new classes, his friends in the dorm, and which Guster CD was the best. College had turned my snarky teenager into a thoughtful young man, and I found myself enjoying his company. At last, I felt ready to move on and enjoy this new phase of motherhood.
More than wrinkles and gray hair, our kids never fail to remind us of our own aging. Overnight, they morph from preschoolers in OshKosh overalls to college students in size 12 running shoes. Along with applauding their first steps toward independence, letting go requires that we come to terms with the fact that time won’t stand still for any of us. It’s a sobering thought — and ever more poignant when autumn rolls around.
Last week, I watched the neighborhood teens pose for homecoming photographs in their formalwear. Giddy with anticipation, the girls could barely stand still while a group of proud parents focused their cameras. The boys struggled to look comfortable in freshly pressed suits, not-so-secretly hoping that the photo opportunity would end quickly. Their youthful beauty took my breath away, and my heart ached a little.
It occurred to me then that my days of snapping photos of prom gowns and homecoming suits were over. And I wondered: Had I fully experienced those moments as they unfolded, or had I merely captured them in my camera lens to savor later? How often had I darted mindlessly from one major event or field trip to the next? In my efforts to make things memorable and special, what else had I overlooked? It finally hit me, as Carly Simon sang, that all we really own is the present moment; that these are the good old days.
It’s a worthy thought to ponder before the onset of the winter holidays — before we get tangled up in Christmas lists and decorating marathons and long lines at the malls.
In anticipation of Thanksgiving, I’m composing a little prayer of gratitude for the mundane and the uneventful. I’m counting my commonplace blessings: the bowl of McIntosh apples on the kitchen counter; the mischievous cat chasing the pens on my desk; a lazy morning with the Sunday paper; a hearty bean soup simmering in the slow cooker. This season I’ll practice coming home to the present, to the grace of ordinary days opening one at a time, like the paper windows on my Advent calendar. — Cindy La Ferle
