Finding It: And Finally Satisfying My Hunger for Life (3 page)

“I’m not?” he asked, with a sad face.

“Come on,” I said. “Help me think this through.”

We sat down at the kitchen table and talked. Tom pointed out that Wolfie had called home to ask permission. He hadn’t slept over at Liv’s house, even though he was halfway across the country and traveling as part of a rock-and-roll band. Tom suggested I
think about how Wolfie’s dad had been at that same age, something that made me say a quick prayer of thanks. Wolfie knew right from wrong, Tom pointed out. If he didn’t, he was trying to figure it out and had looked to his mother for advice. He was a good kid.
Ergo
, what was I worried about?

“Losing him!” I said with an exaggerated whimper.

At the time, I weighed 132.2 pounds, down 40 pounds from when I had begun a very public diet earlier that spring. I had already surpassed my original weight loss goal of 30 pounds and at some point—I had failed to note it on my calendar—I had gone from losing weight to being on maintenance.

I had talked about maintenance for months as if it were a change of life. But I had no idea what it was really about. I figured I would learn once I got there. Then I got there and wondered what it was that I was supposed to be maintaining. My life was in flux—it wasn’t a work-in-progress as much as it was simply work. As I would find out, maintenance was exactly that—more work. And it was life work, not losing-weight work.

If my weight was a barometer of the rest of my life, I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. In addition to concern about my weight, I also knew that I could be better, kinder, smarter, more disciplined, compassionate, patient, and loving. I wanted to feel like I mattered. I yearned for a lightness of being that couldn’t be measured on a scale. I wanted to feel whole, peaceful, and connected to a Higher Power even if just for a few moments.

But real life made that seem impossible. Whether it was Wolfie being away from home, Tom’s struggles to be a hands-on father to his children, my career, the house falling apart, or my anger at Bush and Cheney for where they had taken the country, I was unable
to relax much less get a firm grip. Then Wolfie fell in love and I felt as if part of the floor had given way.

“What about condoms?” Tom mused one day.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“For Wolfie,” he said.

I looked at him, aghast at his insensitivity.

“Not funny.”

I liked Wolfie’s girlfriend, Liv, who was a friend of Tom’s oldest daughter. Wolfie had met her the previous summer in Arizona, but he never appeared to take any special interest in her. Nor did she in him. One time he mentioned that she bugged him. I should have taken note.

Then Liv and her family moved to Kansas and we didn’t hear about her. In the meantime, Wolfie went on tour. We talked every couple of days. He was semi-good about keeping in touch. He texted me from Indianapolis and phoned from Chicago and Detroit. He had a story about each city. Then he called from Kansas, where in an unusually excited voice, he said that he had the day off and that he and Matt, the young man who drove his tour bus and watched out for him, had been invited to eat dinner at Liv’s house. He asked if I remembered Liv. Had I developed Alzheimer’s since he’d gone out on tour with Van Halen a few months earlier? Of course, I remembered her. He said that Liv’s mom had invited them to have a home-cooked meal.

“Isn’t that nice of them?” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I said.

“I’m so excited,” he said.

Wolfie was never that effusive unless he saw a new gadget at the Apple store. All of a sudden I paid more attention. My son
hadn’t sounded like himself when he had asked, “Is that nice of them?” He crossed the line when he said, “I’m so excited.” I realized he was telling me that there was more to this invitation than dinner. He liked this girl.

It was one of those subtle moments in life when you open your eyes and discover that the pieces that have provided longtime familiarity in a relationship have shifted slightly in one direction or another. It’s like waking up in the morning and remembering that you rearranged a couple pieces of furniture in the room. You have to create new walkways so you don’t bump into things.

I’m not someone who likes change. I have had the furniture in my living room for twenty years. I bought it with Ed early in our marriage. I have been meaning to get it recovered for the past five years. It shows you how fast I move. I wasn’t ready for my son to have a girlfriend and everything that meant. Is any mother ever ready to relinquish her place as first in their child’s heart? I wasn’t.

I told Tom, who digested the news with a calm nod. It made me suspicious. I asked if he had known that anything was going on between Wolfie and
his daughter’s friend
, Liv. I emphasized Liv’s relationship to Andie not to remind him of who this girl was but to instead put him on notice that everything that happened between them from here on out was his fault. He understood and shook his head no.

“You can’t do that to me,” he said.

“Yes I can,” I said.

“I’ll find out what’s going on,” he said.

“Good idea,” I said.

Like a dutiful soldier in the age-old battle of parents vs. children, Tom reported back that Wolfie was indeed tight with Liv. I felt a little like an editor at a tabloid magazine. But so what. I
wanted to know everything Tom had found out. According to his source, they had been texting and talking on the telephone for months. Wolfie had fallen into “deep like” with this pretty girl, and from the information Tom had turned up, she felt the same way about him.

“So it’s all good,” Tom said,

“All good?” I asked.

“I wonder if they’ve kissed,” he said, ignoring me.

“Stop!”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I don’t want to know if they’ve kissed or anything else,” I said.

“You don’t?” he asked. “Now’s the time when you want to know everything. Well, not everything. But you want to know what’s going on.”

“I hate it when you’re right.”

Late that afternoon, Wolfie phoned home and reported on dinner at Liv’s. His voice was upbeat and I could hear that he was happy, very happy. Wolfie’s willingness to talk was a surefire indicator of his moods. When his voice was soft and he used words as sparingly as a nomad would drink water in the desert, I knew there was trouble. Now I couldn’t shut him up. He told me everything Liv’s mother had served for dinner and every bit of conversation at the table.

It was a little overboard even for him. I wanted to ask, are you really my kid?

“And guess what?” he asked.

“What?”

“They invited me to sleep over after dinner. Can I?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said.

“But Ma!”

“Wolfie, it’s very nice of Liv and her family to want you to sleep at their house. But you have a hotel room and a show the next day. I’m sure Dad’s going to want you there.”

Grudgingly, he agreed. I was sure his willingness to listen to me stemmed from the newness of this relationship and the other circumstances of his living situation. I reminded myself that he had called to ask my permission rather than decide on his own, which was the way I had tried to raise him. When you don’t know something, ask someone for advice, preferably your parent—and that’s just what he’d done. But I wondered how long he would continue to listen to me. I was a year younger than he was when I got involved in my first serious romance and I worked myself into a full steam of anxiety remembering what I had done and not told my parents.

If it had been possible, I might have flown to Kansas and brought Wolfie back home for the night. I had the urge to have my little boy back, the one who used to look at me with blind devotion and raise his arms high in the air and say, “Mama up!” I didn’t want to think about him having a girlfriend and all the complications that might ensure. But as Tom reminded me when he got home, this wasn’t about me. Even though I wasn’t ready for him to have a girlfriend, he was and I would have to deal with it.

“I supposed that’s why God invented M&Ms and potato chips,” I said, jokingly.

“No,” Tom laughed. “But I think it’s why He invented the phone, the video camera, iChat, private detectives, and so on.”

Luckily for me, within a few days, Tom and I visited Wolfie on tour. The trip had been planned months earlier, so it didn’t seem like I was checking up on him. Though delighted to see us, Wolfie
still needed a little time to adjust to having his mom out there with him. I understood. I upset the routine he got into of studying during the day, going to soundcheck, performing, eating dinner late, and then staying up even later as he wound down from the show. It wasn’t exactly the day of a normal sixteen-year-old. But that’s the reason I visited as frequently as I did. I thought whatever facsimile of family time I could manufacture would be better than none.

On this trip, though, I had questions. I asked the obvious mom-type questions before the show. I didn’t ask about Liv until the show was finished and we were back at the hotel, playing cards in the two-bedroom suite Wolfie shared with Matt. Wolfie was much more relaxed than he had been prior to the show, which I reminded myself made sense considering he had many things on his mind before performing onstage in front of twenty thousand people. Finally, I asked how dinner at Liv’s had been. All of a sudden he perked up. His eyes opened wide and he began to recount the dinner in the same detail as he had on the phone. Except this time, in the course of telling me the story, he mentioned that he liked Liv.

“Oh, really?” I said, drawing on thirty-six years of acting experience to deliver that note of nonchalant curiosity.

“Yeah,” he said. “The way I felt about her last summer…”

“You liked her last summer?” I interrupted.

“Now it’s not the same, you know?”

“Good for you,” I said. “She’s a very nice girl.”

“Really nice,” he said.

We spent Thanksgiving with my parents and brother, Pat, and his wife, Stacy, in Arizona. Wolfie was there with us, regaling everyone
with stories from the road and catching up with Tom’s son, Tony, and friends. After the holiday, Liv flew in and stayed with us for a week. I was more nervous than she appeared to be; in fact, I had to remind myself that I was the parent, not the girlfriend visiting the boyfriend’s family. The problem was, I didn’t know how to play my role, whether to be strict or cool or super cool or what.

Pretty quickly I figured out that I really liked Liv, who impressed me as a mature and together young woman. I could tell that she had been raised properly. She was considerate and well-mannered. When she arrived, I had her put her suitcase in Wolfie and Tony’s room and made it clear the two boys would sleep in the plush tour bus parked in front of the house. She thanked me for allowing her to visit.

Very late that night, I woke up in a panic, wondering where Wolfie and Liv were sleeping. They had not given me a single reason to suspect they weren’t in the places I had assigned them earlier in the day, but my mind was full of scenarios that filled me with concern. It was because I had been a teenager once, and I knew what I had done at that same age. Actually, I’d been younger. Was that beside the point? Or was it the point? I had no idea. Nor did it matter. I got out of bed and crept through the house like a guard on the show
Lockup
. As I tiptoed back into the bedroom and quietly slipped back under the covers, Tom rolled over.

“And?” he asked.

“Everyone’s where they’re supposed to be,” I said.

“Except for you.”

“Touché,” I replied.

I shut my eyes and tried to go back to sleep while realizing something that many parents before me had discovered: I was the one with sex on the brain, not Wolfie or Liv. I knew that would
change if they stayed together, but for now this was more my issue than theirs. I supposed it was part of being a parent. I had the wisdom and experience to know what lay ahead, and to prepare for it.

Was I prepared? I didn’t know; I’d have to see when I got there, wherever that would be.

There was a more important question: Was Wolfie prepared? Had I done my job as a parent?

I thought about two things: The talks I hadn’t had with him about sex and love and maturity, and the discussions I should have had with him about relationships, the highs, lows, joys, difficulties, and potential of heartbreak. We had spent hours discussing favorite movies such as
Galaxy Quest
and
Lord of the Rings
. We had also talked endlessly about the video game
Legend of Zelda
. We had discussed school, music, favorite bands, clothes, acne, friends—all the stuff that happened. I had at times even solicited his opinion on stuff I had seen in the Pottery Barn catalog? How had I managed to not talk to him about girls, sex, and love? What was wrong with me?

I felt like a bad mother. I worried that I had failed both of us.

I still felt that way in the morning. As I made myself coffee, I thought about handling those feelings in the way I had done so many times in the past: by opening the fridge and eating my way into numbness. I didn’t do it. I knew it wasn’t a healthy or productive way to handle a problem. I had learned that I was an emotional eater, and as such, I had come to recognize my desire to eat during times of upset or stress for what it was—an emotional response to a feeling that is starved for action or discussion, not a desire for a slice of leftover pizza at 9:30 in the morning.

I heard Tom stirring and took him a cup of coffee. I asked if he wanted to go for a walk, explaining that I needed to work off something that was bothering me.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I haven’t had the sex talk,” I said.

He put his hands on my shoulders, pulled me close and said, “Baby, we don’t have to talk about it.”

I pushed him away.

“Not you, silly,” I said. “I haven’t talked to Wolfie about sex.”

“Doesn’t he know where babies come from?”

“I’m sure he does. It’s how they’re made that I’m not sure he understands completely.”

“Or how to keep them from being made.”

“Thank you.”