Weeks after his diagnosis, Leo turned sixteen. We threw a party with a few friends, gave him new skate shoes and a cake decorated with skateboarding action figures. That night, Leo celebrated Sweet Sixteen his way: a keg in the woods with a hundred of his closest friends.
We sensed he was up to something sneaky but wouldn’t learn the details until the next morning, when I walked out the front door for the newspapers and saw the metallic glint of a spent keg shining beneath the rhododendron. Leo had slept at a friend’s house, and when he came home later that morning, grinning like a goon, I asked how it went last night.
“How’d it go?” he said, pulling a roll of cash from his jeans, unfolding it and waving it in my face. “That’s how it went, Pops. That’s stripper money right there.”
Proud of his successful bash, he couldn’t keep it to himself. He told me about scouting a wooded location behind Lower Woodland Skatepark, announcing the party to friends via Twitter (“8:00 KEG @ WOODLAND”), charging $3 per cup—apparently a cut-rate price for a keg party—which helped lure a throng of teens to his birthday bash. I later sneaked a peek at his Instagram pics and it was indeed an admirably rowdy mob.
Refolding his bills, Leo told me: “The thing about a keg, Dad? It’s an investment.”
It was a testament to the weirdness of being a skate dad that, at such times, I’d claw once more for signs of hope. My son’s an entrepreneur, an entertainer, a salesman. Or, as Mary helpfully put it, “Didn’t Tom Cruise get into Princeton at the end of Risky Business?”
The next day Leo asked for a ride to Carkeek Park, where he was going to meet up with friends at an abandoned concrete slab they called Helipad.
I let him drive, and he parked at the trailhead at the southern edge of the park, the secret back entrance at the north end of Mary Street.
I didn’t want to let him go just yet, so I locked the car and started walking down the trail with him, watching him step gingerly over rocks and roots. Along the way, we talked about how he knew every corner of that park, spodie spots like Helipad, “Big Tree,” the railroad tracks, and the beach. Incapable of employing Mary’s method—walk, wait, listen—I launched into my standard “don’t smoke/be careful” speech and was about to add a “don’t drink too much” nudge, but caught myself. I knew I’d become a nag. And though I never aspired to be the “cool” dad, I never wanted to be a noodge, either. So I shut my mouth and kept walking. Even when I heard the clink of bottles in his backpack.
Leo finally stopped—“Okay, Dad. That’s far enough.”
We hugged, swapped I-love-yous—or, as Leo put it, “I McLove you, Pops”—and I watched my backpacked boy wind his way down the slope. He knew I was watching and tossed one last thumb-and-pinky overhead shaka wave without looking back, then rounded a corner and disappeared into the trees.
For a moment, I thought of myself at that age, roving and exploring; always on the move, always with friends; scheming and crossing lines, getting into trouble and pulling back; but always with a destination, a plan, a pack of pals—and, if lucky, a six-pack.
On a beautiful sunny evening, my kid was walking on sore feet to see friends, to catch a buzz and watch the sun go down across Puget Sound. How could I reject that?
As I trudged back to the car, I realized how much of my stress and anxiety was lashed to moments like this—to my fear of letting my boy walk down a path alone.
Despite my complicated feelings about returning to office life—to quote Leo: #fuckamonday—one of many perks at Amazon was access to lots of books. Boxes and padded envelopes arrived daily, attempts by publishers and authors to get my and my colleagues’ attention, to score a review or get selected as a Best Book of the Month pick.
A surprising number of these books were about parenting, adolescence, fatherhood, and raising boys. I’d quietly slip those titles into my backpack, and they began piling up bedside and filling bookshelves: The Secrets of Happy Families, The Smartest Kids in the World, All Joy and No Fun, Masterminds and Wingmen, and, my least favorite title, Do Fathers Matter? I even bought a few classics of the canon: The Wonder of Boys, Raising Cain, The War Against Boys, and Parenting Teens with Love and Logic.
Sample guilt-inducing snippet, from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom: “schoolwork always comes first . . . an A-minus is a bad grade.” Yellowed by my highlighter in The Teenage Brain: “best tool as they enter and move through adolescence is to be good role models. If there’s anything I’ve learned with my boys . . . they were watching me.”
My boys were indeed watching. One day Leo saw me reading on the couch, highlighter in hand, sipping whiskey. (Role model?) He picked up a book from the coffee table, read the title—How to Raise Drug-Free Kids—then dropped it like it was poison. He started to walk away, but devoted Instagrammer that he’d become, turned back, whipped out his phone, and took a picture, then typed some snarky caption (which I found years later: “my parents have had a little trouble adjusting to my ‘adolescence’”).
If Leo’s reaction to such books was often bemusement, Sean’s was disgust. He once left a note inside How to Raise Drug-Free Kids, scrawled in Sharpie: “SERIOUSLY?!”
The book that most rankled Sean was Surviving Your Child’s Adolescence, filled with my highlights and underlines in sections on “lazy teenagers” and “the age of thankless parenting.” As with other such books, I was searching for secrets but mainly feeling scolded. Sean once hid that book in my closet, and I found it months later with a rant of a note describing how much it pissed him off, “mostly because I don’t think you’re gonna get any help from a book on how to raise a child you’ve already had for 16 years.”
My son had a point. Was I really learning anything from books by strangers? Or was it parental masochism? I never actually got too far into any of these, often bailing after fifty pages, sufficiently chastised and chastened. The author of Surviving Your Child’s Adolescence blamed “indulgent parents” for allowing their kids to believe that “self, fun, and now are all that matter in life.” (No?) Such books seemed to be written for other parents, tiger parents, those able to micromanage or crack a whip.
By now Mary and I had at least learned the limits of zero-tolerance threats and punishments, schedules and limits, and advice containing the word don’t. We’d made thousands of attempts at structure and obedience, usually leading to confrontations that left us all emotionally spent. Such efforts rarely seemed to make a dent. They’d apologize for their transgressions, stoically submit to their punishments, then do it again, and again . . . As All Joy and No Fun put it, teens tormenting their parents ranked among the oldest of human stories—“wronging the ancientry,” per Shakespeare, was practically a teenager’s job. Said the Bard: “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty.”
Sean stayed out until 4:00 A.M. and came home with a girl. They rattled around the kitchen, making ramen noodles, banging pots and giggling until Mary went downstairs and cornered him. “I want to just punch you in the face right now, Sean.” I once scolded Sean for stealing one of my beers, and he apologized—for not recycling. Then there was the night Sean and friends drank more than half of the most expensive bottle of bourbon I’d ever owned, and probably ever would—George T. Stagg, a gift from a writer friend.
It sometimes felt like a war without end, our own Middle East–style standoff. Them: We want to have fun! Us: Just play the game! Us (via text): Be home by 1! Them: (. . .)
They’d become so instinctively opposed to rules, restrictions, and expectations that we realized we could spend years in turmoil and look back on only shouting, anger, and sadness. So Mary and I continued to experiment with our UN peacekeeper approach, grudgingly tolerating their defiance and fuckups, their messy slog toward self-rule, even as we worried constantly that every inch of freedom we gave them might carry them an inch closer to their annihilation.
“What if they veer too far outside the mainstream?” Mary once wondered aloud. “What if they don’t find their way back?”
We didn’t easily adopt our free-range approach. Some days it was hands off the wheel, other days hands in the air, or hands around their throats, or heads in our hands . . . It veered wildly, depending on the situation and our mood. Like a relief pitcher, we kept changing our delivery. The author of Drug-Free Kids scolded: “The key to Parent Power is being engaged in your children’s lives.” But . . . we had been engaged, we were still engaged. Yet we had limited Parent Power, and our kids were hardly drug-free.
To paraphrase Sean: our methods seemed flawed. After getting reprimanded for some pot-related infraction, he left a note on the kitchen table, addressed to weirdos:
“STOP READING BOOKS ON HOW TO RAISE ME.”
When they were younger, being their dad felt so much easier, so lacking in consequence—I wasn’t trying to get it right, I was just having fun. They wanted to hang with me, and I usually knew what they wanted: playgrounds, skate parks, movies, skate shoes, lunch, a new skate deck, a skate-themed T-shirt. But what was my role now? What, as they said at my day job, was my value prop? I wasn’t really the enforcer anymore, or the boss. Nor was I entertainer, driver, motivator, or confessor. What could I really do for them now? What could I say that wouldn’t totally piss them off?
Skating had brought us close, kept us together, and now it’d been replaced by smoking, and we no longer had solid common ground. It made me feel so separate from them, so much older. When I was in San Francisco for work, I’d be drawn to Dogpatch, the neighborhood near that Third and Army skate spot. In Los Angeles, I’d find myself jogging toward the Venice Beach Skatepark. Sometimes I’d realize how much I’d let their skating define me, how I’d co-opted their obsession and made it my own.
One night I watched Sean playing Grand Theft Auto in the basement, stalking Venice Beach. “Go to the skate park,” I told him, remembering that day we lost him during our road trip. In a rare moment of compliance, Sean guided his on-screen thug to the skate park, then heeded my suggestion to pummel a surfer in a wet suit, and we both cracked up.
Drinking a Manhattan and catching up on the New York Times one Friday night after work, I came across a story about how the trendy Paleo lifestyle applied to parenting: “Instead of cello lessons, let the kids run wild in the woods.” I called out to Mary, who was chop-prepping dinner stuff in the kitchen . . .
“Hey, guess what? We’re Paleo parents!”
That article would join others in a folder labeled SK8 CLIPS, which had grown fat with stories about three topics: skateboarding, parenting, and pot.
A sampling of headlines captured the confusing state of modern fatherhood:
The Case for Delayed Adulthood
Pot Use on Rise in High Schools
Parental Involvement Is Overrated
Skateboarders Defy Court Order to Race Down Broadway
Troubled Teens Make More Successful Entrepreneurs
New Pot Laws Have Parents Worried about Effect on Kids
Excessive Arguing with Family May Lead to Early Death
The Case for Free-Range Parenting
I would read Mary a few lines about the benefits of maturing slowly, the confidence-inducing power of letting kids make their own decisions, and how “prolonged adolescence is actually a good thing.” Per the New York Times, delayed adulthood fostered “novelty-seeking and the acquisition of new skills.”
One article cited a UCLA study that found American kids spent 90 percent of their leisure time at home, and I realized . . . Not ours. Not even close.
Another op-ed writer opined that a parent’s job was fairly simple: “They should set the stage and then leave it.” Mary and I would high-five each other and toast the New York Times for endorsing our parenting style—“Maybe we don’t suck after all!”
Then again, it was around this time that Sean got assaulted by a mob of drunk thugs at a beach party, pummeled in the head with his own skateboard.
My little boy’s face had a purple knot above his eye, a deep gash across his forehead. His nose was mashed and swollen, his lip split in two places. An angry red lump grew behind his ear. Dried blood flaked from his hair and ears, peeling off like old paint. His white T-shirt was splotched rusty brown.
We were in the kitchen. I was about to leave for work when Sean limped up from his basement bedroom to show me his injuries.
“What the fuck?” I barked, dropping my backpack and reaching out to touch him, but he pulled back and winced.
“Careful,” he said, then showed me the rest: bloody gouges on his arms, a shredded shoulder, a crooked finger, a cut and swollen ankle.
He looked like he got run over by a truck—worse than when he did get hit by a car.
“Jesus Christ, what the . . . why didn’t you call me?”
“Wrong place, wrong time,” he said, trying to sound hard but his voice cracking a little.
Driving to the ER, he told me he’d been at a Golden Gardens beach spodie when a group of “gangbangers” showed up looking for trouble and started a fight. One of them mistook Sean for another kid and jumped him. Sean curled into a ball and tried to protect his face as six guys took turns kicking and punching him. Someone snatched Sean’s skateboard and slammed him in the head. Then did it again. One of the gangbangers finally intervened, screaming that they were assaulting the wrong kid. And they all fled.
We spent three hours at the ER—the same room Mary and I visited last summer, the day before Father’s Day, with me clutching my throbbing chest. God, I hated hospitals. I thought I’d already paid my dues over the years: my brother, my sister, my mother, my sons, myself. And now I was worried about the possibility of Leo’s foot surgeries, imagining Mary and me in waiting rooms, retrieving our cut-up, drugged-out little boy. But here I was, back beneath those too-bright lights, waiting for some doctor to take charge.
After X-rays, MRIs, and other tests, a cheerful young ER doc gave his reassuring verdict: Sean was fine. Maybe a mild concussion, but no internal bleeding, no broken bones, just battered and bruised, lumpy, gashed, and embarrassed. Then a social worker came in and asked me to step outside, so she could talk to Sean . . . “Alone, if that’s okay.” It took me a second, but then I got it—“Young man, did your father hurt you?”—and it shamed me, even though I had nothing to be ashamed of. Or did I?
Back home, as if releasing a pressure valve, Sean told me about other incidents. About the night a gun fell from some punk’s pants. About the night he and his friends left Golden Gardens and heard gunfire, then sirens, and learned the next day that a woman had been shot.
“I dunno, I think maybe I’m a little too comfortable being close to danger,” Sean said, though I wondered if it was true or something he wanted to believe.
“I don’t always make the best choices,” he added, then qualified it with a line that unnerved me. “But it’s not like I’m susceptible to peer pressure. I’m susceptible to curiosity.”
Sean napped that afternoon, then we made dinner and watched a movie. Leo was at a friend’s house that weekend (it was spring break), and Mary was traveling in China for business and was spared all of this. I was reluctant to call her, to describe once again how one of our kids had put themselves in harm’s way.
When Sean came to my room to say good night, he told me, “I think the worst part of it all is . . . I lost my skateboard.”
It was a short cruiser board with fat wheels that Mary had bought him. Like all of his boards, it had “R.I.P. MAC” etched into the grip tape. One of his attackers had tossed it onto the bonfire.
“I loved that little board,” he said, and that’s when he broke down and cried.
A week later, Mary was still in China, so the boys and I packed the boards and took a road trip north to Whidbey Island.
Sean’s wounds had healed into bruise-hued rainbows of purple and yellow. I let him drive the first half, then let Leo test out his driver’s permit from the ferry terminal to our rental. After we checked in I let the boys take the van to a nearby skate park and I sat talking with the owner of our cottage, an energetic woman named Joy who had just lost her dog to cancer and seemed happy to have a stranger to chat with.
Joy was impressed that I’d convinced my teen sons to come away for a weekend. I told her they’d always been good road trippers and described a few of our adventures: Hawaii, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Mexico, ski trips, skate trips, and that cross-country adventure.
“That’s nice,” she said. “I wish I’d done more of that.”
After a few quiet moments looking out onto Useless Bay, she turned to me and got serious.
“They’re not ours, you know. You have to let them go.”
Both of Joy’s kids were in their late twenties and had moved away. She said their teen years had been the worst. She was so glad they were behind her.
“Sorry,” she added, realizing I was in the midst of those years.
I told her one of my nagging worries was that we had let them go too soon, that we’d let them be too free.
“Well . . . Better to give them freedom now than have them try to learn it in their twenties,” she said. “No matter what, they come back to you . . . eventually.”
Prying deeper into my head, she continued, “But they don’t really need us, you know? They need to learn on their own. All you can really do is love them.”
I nodded, sipped my beer. She sensed what I was thinking . . .
“And you can’t be so hard on yourself!”