13 Is the New 18 (28 page)

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 changes 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.

“OK,” I promised. “I'll do it. I'll get you an AC.”

The following weekend, we went and bought him an air conditioner. It was small and noisy, but it made the room ice cold in minutes.

It wasn't exactly on the level of
The Brady Bunch
episode where they created a bachelor pad for Greg, the oldest teenager. But still, Taz was grateful for it. And once it had been installed, to my surprise, he started spending more time at our house than he had in months. He was chillin’ at home for a change— literally.

I have a good friend from childhood whose son is a few years older than mine. I don't see her very often, but once in a while we run into each other and chat on the avenue. I saw her not long ago, and she told me she was coming home from a piano recital.

I had no idea she played piano. She told me it was something she started doing as her son got older. Believe it or not, she told me, she had time on her hands now— time for a hobby! “You'll get there,” she said. “Just wait.”

I had to laugh; I'd tried studying piano when my boys were little. What was I thinking? Take up a new hobby in between potty training and nap time? Taz was about five years old at the time, and he'd seemed fairly
musical, so I'd also asked my teacher to give him a few lessons in addition to teaching me.

But it was a disaster. The piano teacher was old-school, Russian, gifted, and passionate; she had no patience for little Taz, who was wild and silly. She wanted to pour her knowledge into an empty vessel; he wanted to play games. After two lessons, she basically fired herself as Taz's teacher, saying she couldn't work with him.

As she swept by my refrigerator on the way out the door, she noticed a photo I'd taped to the outside of the freezer that showed Taz at the beach.

In the image, he'd turned a pail upside down on the sand and was banging on it like a drum. He had a gleeful grin on his face, as if to say, “Yeah, I'm a wild little boy, makin’ noise at the beach, woo- hoo!” To me it was the cutest picture in all the world. But Madame Tolstoya took one look at it and said, “You know, he's always up to something.”

I stopped taking piano lessons myself a short time later after finding that the only time I could practice was 1 a.m., which my neighbors didn't appreciate, and which was a time of day when I was better off sleeping, anyway.

But hearing my friend talk about studying piano now that her son was nearly grown made me realize she was right. In a few years, I, too, would be free of most of the responsibilities of child rearing, and I could take up piano again if I cared to.

After all, I'd have to find something to do once I no longer had to supervise homework, sort mountains of laundry, and help everyone find obscure missing objects.

“Mom, do you know where my NBA Playoffs T- shirt is? You know, from that game Dad took me to a couple of years ago?”

“Mom, do you know where the Monopoly dice are? You know, the ones that fell on the floor when the board got knocked over the other day?”

“Mom, do you know where my flip- flops are? You know, the ones I took to the beach last year?”

“Mom, do you know where my math book is? You know, the one I brought home at the beginning of the semester?”

“Mom, do you know where my yearbook is? You know, the one from fifth grade?”

What am I, the Amazing Kreskin? What's really incredible is that, actually, I do know where all those things are, and ten thousand more like 'em. I dream of the day when I not only will not be asked to find all these objects, but my house will actually be free of them.

One year, Elon took the kids away on a road trip over spring break, and I spent the entire week throwing away things like one- armed action figures, toy cars with three wheels, and hundred- piece puzzles that only had eighty-nine pieces left. I stuffed them all in big bags and prayed that the garbage would be collected before they got
home. If they didn't catch me getting rid of all this stuff, they'd never notice it was gone. But if they saw traces of it in the trash, I'd never be forgiven.

Thank goodness, the Department of Sanitation trucks rolled down the street the morning of the day they were due to arrive home. But I didn't count on one bag being left behind in one of the garbage cans.

They hadn't been back for ten minutes when Sport came to me in tears. “You threw away Zerg?” he wailed, clutching an eighteen- inch- tall plastic creature that once upon a time had bellowed in a deep and spooky electronic voice, “Who dares approach Zerg? Ya- ha- ha!” each time you pressed a button. Now it only moaned out vowels like a recording played at too slow a speed or a ghost from a phony seance: “Ooooh aaa- aah- oh orrrr?”

Taz wasn't crying, but he was mad— I'd thrown away his size- eight Jordans from three years earlier.

“Mom, I can't believe you did this— these are collector's items! Some day I'm going to sell these for a lot of money!” He held one in each hand and thrust them under my chin. They looked like a pair of used sneakers to me, but what did I know?

Taz and Sport scavenged a few other things out of the trash, alternating between anger at me for being so callous, and tenderness over the discovery of long- lost treasures. “Are you kidding me, I LOVE this!” was a typical exclamation upon finding a stained
Terminator
T- shirt that dated to the days when Ah- nold was merely a Hollywood actor instead of a governor.

Then they went back inside to unpack from their trip with Dad, showering me with a whole new collection of items they'd acquired on the road— like a key chain with a Sears Tower charm on it and a tote bag from the Splash Lagoon water park in western Pennsylvania— that no doubt I'd be trying to throw away the next time I did a big cleaning.

What can I say: I might be neurotic, but I'm not particularly sentimental— at least not about kitsch, souvenirs, and broken toys. OK, I admit, I did save a lock of blond curls from each of their first haircuts and the first baby tooth. And, as long as I'm baring my inner soul here, it's true, I saved that yucky thing that dries up and falls off from their umbilical cord. (Don't ask me why; I must be descended from witch doctors or something.)

And I'll probably be adding Taz's high school report cards to my small collections of memorabilia, too. His grades got a lot better as the year went on; one of his teachers said he was the poster boy for “most improved student of the year,” and by the final report card, he had raised nearly all his Cs and Ds to Bs.

He'd even gotten an A, inexplicably, in biochemistry. When I told that to Linda, she said, “An A in biochemistry! Holy shit! I mean, if he's smoking something, it's obviously working for him!”

The best thing about the report card was that Taz said he wasn't happy with the fact that he'd gotten all those Bs. He vowed to work harder the next year to make As.

But the worst thing about the report card was that he
got one C, in the dreaded Español. Maybe I should have let him go on that trip to Cuba after all?

Besides, I'd told him I might let him go somewhere exciting sophomore year, provided he went out and got his working papers and a job over the summer. I suggested he try to secure a position in a coal mine, so that he could see what doing an honest day's work was really all about, but instead he managed to get hired as an assistant counselor at a local day camp.

It was fun to hear him complain about the children who didn't listen and how important it was to be firm with them and set limits, and how they take advantage if you don't. Ha! He didn't learn any of that from me.

It was also nice to hear him describe teaching a little boy how to roller- skate on a camp trip to a rink. And on a trip to an amusement park, he rode the big coaster with a camper who was scared. He won an award for counselor of the week, and told me he hoped he could work there again next summer.

But the best part was seeing him come home completely worn out every day.

“Oh my God,” he'd groan, “I worked so hard today! I carried eighty- nine watermelons up three flights of stairs for a party! I played kickball in the park for seven hours straight! I went crazy looking for a kid who we thought was lost, but then we realized he was in the bathroom! It feels like all I do is work! I get up and go to work. I go to sleep, and then it's time to get up and go to work!”

Then he'd grin a gigantic grin.

“So, are you glad you took the job?” I asked.

“Oh yeah! It's really fun.”

Sport, meanwhile, was going to sleepaway camp for two weeks— his first time, and mine. I never went to sleepaway camp as a child, and I felt very weepy while he was gone. I never sent Taz, either; he was happy just hanging out in the neighborhood when he was little.

But Sport was a serious jock and needed organized sports, morning, noon, and night— something that was hard to find in New York City, but that was easy to find in a camp. Still, I kept myself awake at night making lists of all the things that could happen to him: starvation, sunburn, bears, West Nile virus.

Then Linda reminded me that we knew all these girls from high school who were always talking about how much they loved sleepaway camp.