13 Is the New 18 (10 page)

Besides, I hate housekeeping. I figured the fewer rooms, the less vacuuming. I didn't mean to create a Spartan existence for my family, but I always felt like it
was just the right amount of space. One bathroom for four people never bothered us, though on that count, I considered myself lucky to have boys, who rarely spend more than thirty seconds in the bathroom at a time, anyway.

But now I tried to see it through Taz's eyes. For the first time, I wished I had a big house with a basement, or a den, or a family room or playroom, where Taz and his buddies could sprawl. I had no place to put a Ping-Pong table or a dartboard. And since I couldn't offer any of that, Taz said I'd just have to get used to the fact that he was going to hang out elsewhere.

One of his friends had a big- screen TV, cable, and central air in a media room; his mom was happy to have Taz over any time. Another friend was an only child with an entire floor at his disposal and plenty of room for other kids to sleep over. Another kid had a country house at a lake, and spending the weekend there was far preferable in Taz's eyes to sitting at home playing Monopoly with me and his little brother.

Taz managed to go to swankier places, too. One of his friends’ parents had a beach house in the Hamptons. I'd just like to announce that I have never been to the Hamptons. I have never even been invited to the Hamptons. But there was one weekend last summer where not only was Taz in the Hamptons, but my niece was in the Hamptons, too, and they weren't even together. They both, and let me stress here, separately, had people
to visit in the Hamptons. My sister and I did not. “Yes,” I e- mailed her that weekend, “we ARE chopped liver!”

One weekend while Taz was chillin’ in the Hamp tons, I happened to pick up the Sunday
New York Times.
In a column in the back of the magazine, Marion Winik, a mother about my age, bemoaned her sixteen- year- old son's unwillingness to spend more than five minutes at home. On that rare occasion when he deigned to drop by, he told her it was only to pick up his fifteen- year- old stepbrother so that they could go “chill at Trav's.”

“What exactly is involved in ‘chilling at Trav's’ I will leave to your imagination— God knows it's had a vivid dramatic life in mine,” she wrote. She denied permission for the outing, which was followed, she said, by “shock, outrage and furious debate. The main arguments they offered were that they are teenagers, it is summer and I am stupid.” Later that night, the boys sneaked out of the house. She located them by cell phone, ordered them home, and they argued some more.

Well, at least I was not alone in wondering why my house is the last place my son would care to be at any given moment. But reading Winik's column had made me depressed. I actually hadn't allowed my imagination to consider the many things Taz might be doing when he claimed to be “chillin’ ” with “peeps.” I had in the past expressed concern about some of the less- savory types who hang out along the main drag in our neighborhood, but he assured me they were no problem.

“You mean those people drinkin’ forties and smoking cigarettes down on the corner?” Taz asked. “Don't worry about them, they know me.”

Was that supposed to make me feel better? It didn't.

I have an old collection of Erma Bombeck's humor columns that I pick up now and then in an effort to comfort myself when I start worrying too much about the fact that I Am a Terrible Mother. I read the book kind of like how my boys liked to have me read
The Runaway Bunny
over and over again to them when they were little.

“If you run away,” the mommy bunny told her little bunny, “I will run after you.” No matter where the little bunny goes, the mommy bunny finds him. But now that my bunny was a great big bunny, there was no hunting him down. I remembered Erma had tackled this subject at some point; I flipped through the book and found it.

“In my mind, I always dreamed of the day I would have teenagers,” she wrote. She imagined that they'd all gather around the piano and sing songs together, then have a family meeting to decide on what flavor ice cream they were going to have.

“It never worked out that way,” she added. “Our teenagers withdrew to their bedrooms on their thirteenth birthday and didn't show themselves to us again until it was time to get married. If we spoke to them in public, they threatened to self- destruct within three minutes.”

She also had these words of wisdom: “Could I have
ever comprehended that something so simple, so beautiful and so uncomplicated as a child could drive you to shout, ‘We are a family and you're a part of this family and by God, you're going to spend a Friday night with us having a good time if we have to chain you to the bed!’ ”

Well, it was a relief to know I was in good company and that this problem of children who disappear at age thirteen was not unique to my family, but had existed way back in the middle of the last century— a term I love to use because it upsets my sister. She read a reference recently to something that happened in the middle of the last century, and it took her a few minutes to realize that they were talking about the decade she grew up in and not something out of Dickens.

Reading Erma calmed me down enough that I could face a stiffer dose of advice— from my old friend and oracle Google. I figured I ought to read up on some serious subjects now that itchy pajamas were no longer my main concern. So I screwed up my courage and went surfing for wisdom on adolescents and marijuana— or should I say
weed,
which is the term most teenagers prefer these days.

But most of the websites I found sounded like they were either written by Joe Friday from the old TV series
Dragnet
(“Marijuana is the flame! Heroin is the fuse! LSD is the bomb!”) or by Bob Marley. The websites offered by the government were the scariest. A study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Did you know we have such a thing? Your tax dollars,
hard at work!) told me that “those who used marijuana weekly were nine times as likely as nonusers to say they use alcohol or drugs … six times as likely to say they had run away from home … nearly six times as likely to say they had cut classes or skipped school… five times as likely to say they stole.”

OK, it's one thing if your kid tries pot— er, weed— but according to this, he's also going to run away from home, skip school, and become a thief.

The scariest study was what I like to call the Reefer Madness study, by British doctors, which claimed to show an increase in psychosis among people who smoke pot. The study appeared to be valid and scientific and built upon many other reputable studies.

But the researchers admitted that they couldn't be sure that smoking was causing the psychosis. Maybe, instead, people who are in early stages of psychosis feel the need to go out and smoke. This reminded me of my long- held conviction that all heroin addicts start out by drinking milk.

Reading about the study inspired me to want to see the movie
Reefer Madness
and actually watch some pot smokers lose their minds. My ever- reliable Window on the Universe, Google, obliged. Turns out
Reefer Madness
can be seen its in entirety on Google Video because it's in the public domain. The film was originally made in the 1930s as an anti- marijuana propaganda movie, but it became a cult film in the seventies after being rediscovered
in the Library of Congress by a guy who advocates the decriminalization of marijuana. The movie's pot smokers grin maniacally are horny as hell, and dance a lot at parties, reminding me of teenagers in general, whether they smoke pot— or weed, or whatever— or not.

As long as I was investigating the subject, I decided to check out an article on another website, titled “Marijuana: Telling Teenagers the Truth About Smoking Pot,” which was more or less at the other end of the spectrum.

“Pot is less addictive than coffee,” the article states. Its author does admit that “pot will cause some short-term memory loss,” but reassuringly notes that it's no more serious than the memory loss caused by beer. Risks to pot smokers, according to the website, include gaining weight because of the munchies and having too much sex.

The author adds, “I have been smoking pot for the last twenty- five years and I still test as a genius on IQ tests.”

The Genius goes on to point out that pot is illegal, and you could go to jail if you get caught with it.

“People get very weird about pot,” he notes. “So if anyone asks if you've been smoking pot, Just Say No!”

At the Partnership for a Drug-Free America website, I decided to take the “Two-Minute Challenge.” Embarrassingly, I only got two of the eight questions right (whether cigarette use among teens is down— yes; and whether sniffing powdered heroin is risky— yes, or
should I say, duh). All the tricky questions— where do most kids get their drugs (the right answer is friends, while I guessed classmates), and where most kids get information about drugs (school, not, as I guessed, the media)—I flubbed.

Then I decided to do a little research into the oft-repeated notion that eating dinner together with your family is the key to raising perfect children. Turns out this comes from a survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. The survey found that the more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink, or use drugs.

One of the differences between researching things on Google and reading a book is that when you read a book, you get the author's point of view, and all the evidence he has gathered to support his point of view. But when you research a topic on Google, you get every point of view. So virtually every study you turn up, the results are countered by the next link.

In this case, the next page I clicked on took me to an academic's analysis that convinced me the survey about family dinners was hopelessly flawed. Eating dinner together, the analysis said, is a sign that a family is already functioning well. It's an effect, not a cause. The analysis went so far as to say that a screwed- up family that starts eating dinner together will probably make its children even more screwed up than they already are.

We do eat dinner together most nights, but then
again, I think we're pretty loopy as families go, so according to this analysis, I was just making my kids turn out worse by sitting at the dinner table with them.

By the way, did you ever notice how often in
The Sopranos
Tony and Carmela sat down with their kids for dinner like a normal family? Not just that famous last scene in the diner, mind you, but lots of times at home, they'd gather together for a meal. Now, if that isn't proof that a dysfunctional family only makes their children more dysfunctional by eating together, what is?

Actually, Elon and I had some wonderful parental bonding moments watching Tony and Carmela argue about their children. In fact, I would count
The Sopranos
among my sources for child- rearing information— if only as a reality check on my own life.

One of my favorite episodes was when Meadow and a bunch of other teenagers threw a party with booze and drugs in her grandmother's house, trashing the place. Tony fetched Meadow and brought her home, and Carmela asked him what he said to their daughter.

At this point in the show, Elon and I looked at each other. That's
exactly
what Taz says! He's always claiming that nobody else's parents really punish them— they just
say
they punish them to save face in front of other parents!

Later, as Tony and Carmela tried to figure out some way to make Meadow pay for her crimes, Tony told Carmela: “If she finds out we're powerless, we're fucked.”

It was delicious to see that Tony, who could whack people without a second thought, who was swift and unmerciful when it came to punishing anyone who challenged him, was completely hamstrung by his teenage child.

In the end, they punished Meadow by taking away her credit card. For three weeks.

Taz doesn't have a credit card yet, but the offers come daily in the mail. This, too, is completely alien to me. Like a lot of people my age, my parents didn't have any credit cards when I was a kid. My dad finally got one in the seventies when car- rental companies stopped accepting cash. I remember getting my first one after I'd been out of college and working full- time for a few years. It was a really big deal; I felt so honored that American Express deemed me worthy of their trust!

Little did I know that twenty years later, I'd be on the phone with their service center, begging them to stop clogging my mailbox with offers for more cards. At lower rates! With cash advances! And extra cards for everyone in the family— even my children!

Maybe Meadow Soprano needed a credit card, but Taz does not.

There was one other type of show that I thought might help my dysfunctional family in my search for expert advice. I tried watching, with my children, all the shows about the mean nannies who come in and straighten out screwed- up families.

But I could never bear to watch through to the end. It was just all too close to home— the spoiled children, the household in chaos, the clueless grown- ups. Besides, it always seemed to me that no matter what the circumstances were, the nanny always blamed the mother.

Usually by the time that scene was about to unfold, where the nanny would confront the mother about how everything was all her fault, I would be near tears and would beg the kids to change the channel. I just couldn't bear watching a fellow Terrible Mother's public humiliation.

Then one day I came up with the brilliant idea of applying to be on one of the nanny shows. I didn't want to watch the humiliation scene, but somehow the idea of being part of it was appealing (in an anorexia- bulimia kind of a way).

I located the show's website— naturally— by Googling it.