“MOM! You’re in the wrong spot again!”
Andi is sitting in the car around the corner from the high school when Cameron throws open the passenger door.
“Dad always parks across the street under the tree. I already told you.”
“Okay! Okay. I just grabbed the first spot I saw.”
Cameron has lost driving privileges for two weeks after lying about having read Fahrenheit 451 before writing an English paper about it. One would think that a kid who’s currently as mad at his parents as Cam would be drawn to the novel’s dark dystopia. But his teacher’s comments in the margins, including, I don’t recall a character named Chip, made it clear he hadn’t even bothered to check the accuracy of the internet plot summaries he skimmed.
Now, because of Cam’s choices, Andi and Dom are juggling travel schedules and client meetings to get him back and forth to school. As in, the punishment is hurting the parents as much as the kid.
“God. You never listen to me!”
Andi wants to scream. I don’t listen?
“Fine, Cam. Tomorrow, I promise. I’ll be standing under the tree waving a flag at you.”
The groan comes from his deepest, darkest depths.
They don’t speak for several blocks. Time enough for the nagging voice in her brain to pipe up. You ignored the warnings. So now you deal with the consequences.
This morning, she and Dom argued. One of those fights where whispered jabs fly from behind coffee mugs, and every facial expression says, “I hate you so much right now that I might still be angry tonight.”
He’d had the nerve to tell her where to park when picking Cameron up from school. Which, in Andi’s frustration, translated to an attack on her parenting.
“He’ll survive,” she’d hissed, already forgetting the instructions.
“What’s the big deal?” Dom threw back. “He’s familiar with the routine, and it’s easy.”
Easy. That’s the word that sent her reeling. Cameron didn’t need easy. He needed hard.
Or did he? In the hours since the fight with Dom, she’s begun to wonder if Cameron is making bad choices from a place of emotional exhaustion. Recently, she saw a cartoon circulating on social media in which a nursery full of adolescent children sit sucking their thumbs. Only, in place of their thumb is a computer monitor, the message being that screens have become the self-soothing mechanism for an entire generation. Now she can’t stop worrying whether her absence these last few years created a vacuum that young Cameron was left alone to fill.
No wonder he wants to spend all his time online. She’s essentially a stranger to him.
The fog of parental guilt hanging over her head has become so unrelenting it reminds her of that scene in The Godfather Part II. Just when she thought she was out... Choosing to spend weeks at a time thousands of miles away from her kid was one thing. But somewhere along the line, she became so detached from his needs that now she can’t even bother to show up in the place he knows to look for her.
“Sorry I barked at you, Cameron.” She shoots him an apologetic look before the stoplight turns green. “Seriously. Tomorrow. Under the tree. Same place as Dad.”
He glances at her. Briefly. Skeptically. “It makes a difference. I like to know where you’re at.”
Then, as if she’d learned nothing, the lawyer in her wants to argue. He found her today. Found her yesterday. She always comes. He doesn’t need to know where she’s parked to fulfill her promise.
But it’s the mother who rises to answer. “I hear you, bud. I got it.”