8
WHY BOTHER?
TEENAGERS GO SO FAR OUT OF THEIR WAY TO IGNORE you that you may begin to suspect you do not exist. In my opinion, this situation is a tragically overlooked symptom of depression. I believe the query “Are you sure you exist?” should be added to the list of warning signs alongside “Have your sleep patterns changed?” and “Did you gain or lose weight in the last three months?”
Once you realize you’re experiencing feelings of nonexistence, a normal response might be to turn to your mate for validation of your physical reality. However, the teen years are often so difficult on the marital bond, it is entirely possible that your mate is also giving you the “silent treatment.” And so, your feelings of not existing within the four walls of your previously nurturing and cozy domicile are painfully compounded. While some people respond to this negating behavior by lashing out, many folks become morose and immobile, with a penchant for watching too much Oprah.
In fact, I think it was on Oprah that I saw an historical overview of Reverend Jesse Jackson’s career, including one of his wonderful pep talks to inner-city children. It culminated in Jesse exhorting thousands of kids to pump their little fists in the air and exclaim together, “I AM somebody!” The swell of young voices and the power of the words were incredibly emotional and rousing, and filled me with longing.
Of course, I fully realize that my puny, white, middle-class parenting problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world where many people have far more formidable issues to face everyday, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t moved to tears by this heartfelt declaration. In fact, I was so inspired, I leaped to my feet, upsetting my bowl of buttered popcorn (and yes, I have gained some weight in the past three months) and chanted, “I AM somebody! I AM somebody!”
“You are somebody lame,” one of my teenagers snidely remarked from the other room.
Once I recovered from that slight, I found it weirdly comforting to realize that my existence is of almost no consequence to my teenagers. They don’t despise me all the time—because they never think of me at all, except when I am actively ruining their life with requests to clean up their room. When people ask me if my kids mind that I’m writing a book largely based on my experiences with them, I have to laugh. Their level of interest in anything I do is zippo. I’ve gone from being the very center of their existence—the life-giving mother—to an occasional embarrassment behind the wheel of a vehicle taking them where they want to go.
Teenagers’ most telling characteristic is total self-absorption. It’s annoying as hell to live with, but there is freedom in that posture, as well as a model for you to practice. Put yourself first and try to forget they exist for an hour or two a day. It’s easier than you think.
You are somebody!
CAUTION: ZERO-GRATITUDE ZONE
It’s a simple and sadistic equation: The more parents do for teenagers, the less teens appreciate it. And of course, the less likely they are to do anything they are asked. Much as I’d like to blame them, it’s our fault. We’ve raised them to behave this way.
For instance, the times I’ve become most enraged with Lulu (followed immediately by plummeting, guilt-fueled depression) are the times I’ve done far more for her than I should have, and she responds with callous indifference, a demand for even more indulgence, or a seriously snotty attitude. I call it the “Super Sweet 16” Syndrome, based on the hideous MTV show in which some horrid child is thrown a $100,000-plus birthday party and proceeds, inevitably, to act like the spoiled rotten brat he or she is.
Once you’ve started down the Path of Overdoing It, you can’t get off without a cosmic shift in your household dynamic that will be received with all the openness of the Whitewater Commission. Overindulgence requires more and more incremental work to keep the status quo rolling. And when you’ve rendered your child helpless by doing everything for him, it does not bode well for any kind of sustainable future in which cooking, cleaning, or actual work is required. If you think I’m exaggerating, note that recent studies reveal this crop of teenagers lags in maturity almost four years behind the previous generation (making Gen-Xers look like super-motivated coffee achievers).
Most teens are emotionally and domestically retarded and that’s infuriating, for sure. They don’t appreciate your wonderful house. They don’t appreciate your multiple cars. They don’t appreciate the buffet of high-definition TVs, iPods, cell phones, video games, and computers at their fingertips. They don’t appreciate the good food you serve and the great vacations you plan. They don’t appreciate the education you’ve killed yourself to earn for them. They don’t appreciate their closets full of clothes or the jobs you’ll help them get. Particularly if you were raised in a household where almost none of this was provided, you’re likely to feel horribly jealous of your own children for what they have and you didn’t—and doubly furious at their sense of entitlement.
Yet why should they feel indebted to you? Teens are opportunistic to the bone and know that you would gladly hurl yourself in front of a truck to protect their sorry butts. The idea of gratitude is as foreign as quails’ eggs to them. They consider your servitude their birthright, and whatever they can get away with is fair game. If you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that you treated your parents the same way. The difference is, our parents were smart and cheap enough not to indulge us in much beyond the basics of room, board, and a few clothes.
If the zero-gratitude dynamic truly bothers you, stop buying your kid so much crap and make them do a few chores. Or wait and watch the world teach your grown child a lesson or two about the way things work. Sure, it will probably take your kids a good decade to realize how much they owe you; waiting for gratitude is the ultimate exercise in delayed gratification. But by then, you’ll be so thrilled to have them out of the house and the electroshock treatments will have been so successful, you’ll hardly remember this age of agony.
TALES FROM POST TEENS
My parents were sort of hippies, so they raised us in a counterculture atmosphere. We had a big, rambling house out in the country and my mother used to grow all-organic vegetables that we’d eat on plates that my dad made on his pottery wheel. They didn’t believe in giving us a lot of material things, which was okay but they also didn’t believe in modern media. So we had the smallest TV ever made—it had like a 9” screen. They didn’t want us to enjoy TV and on that set, we didn’t. You were better off reading or going outside to play. Looking back, I can see it was a brilliant strategy but at the time we thought we were so deprived we should be in foster care. Now I’ve got a new baby, and my wife and I are fighting about whether he should be watching any TV—I’m totally opposed to it and can’t stand the idea that he’s going to grow up feeling entitled to high definition and addicted to cable. Apparently, I have become my parents—how bizarre is that!
THE UNKNOWABLE TEEN MIND
It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Your daughter went to a party last night, slept in, has a minimal amount of homework, and is planning to go out tonight. You think you’re all having a pretty nice day. Yet when you walk in her room to ask her what time she wants a ride to the movies, she unloads on you like a ton of bricks. “Can’t you see that I’m doing something right now?” (That would be slathering gel in her hair.) “Just leave me alone!”
Huhhh?
What bug is biting her butt?
You can feel the veins in your forehead begin to throb because seriously, what does she have to be upset about? Her life is a total cakewalk and by the way, why isn’t she doing any of her chores? You haven’t asked a single thing of her all day, and this is how she repays you? Her room is a pigsty but she’s obviously aching for a fight and you don’t have the energy to go chastise her about it. You’ve got a good mind to walk back in there and ground her.
Maybe something is seriously wrong.
Maybe her phantom boyfriend is mad at her.
Maybe she got left out of something at school and she’s feeling terribly insecure.
Maybe she’s flunking school and doesn’t know how to tell you.
Maybe she’s getting expelled and figures the best defense is a good offense.
Maybe she went “all the way” with the phantom and now he’s avoiding her.
Maybe the idea of taking the SATs is scaring her to death.
Maybe she’s having an anxiety attack about applying to college.
Maybe she’s seriously depressed and is in there contemplating SUICIDE!
Mothers are the only ones who run this kind of tragedy triathlon, of course. Dads are likely to blithely conclude, while flipping through a couple of football games and a soccer match, “Honey, she’s in a rotten mood. Leave her alone until she gets over it.” (Obviously, he’s inured to the pain of living with a moody female.)
Now that you’re worried about the dark portents of your teen’s mood, you wonder how you can get her to confide in you and tell you what’s wrong. You know if you were a good mom, she’d be talking your ear off about all her deepest feelings. That’s how it goes down in the movies when Hilary Duff is having a meltdown and her mom walks in. The two of them end up sitting on the bed having a good heart-to-heart and hugging each other before they head downstairs for some hot cocoa. Why can’t your life be like that?
Ignoring your husband, who is deep in a sports coma and hasn’t registered that you’re doing exactly what he just counseled you against, you head back into her bedroom and say gently, “Honey, what’s wrong? I just want to know that you’re okay.”
“Mom! What’s wrong is that you won’t get out of my face! Now leave me alone!”
Why can’t teens tell you what’s wrong with them?
Well, one answer is that they don’t know. Their feelings are so huge and tumultuous, they slosh over the kids like a tidal wave. Teens literally don’t realize what hit them; they’re just angry and resentful and want to lash out at someone. And that someone is you. Not knowing why they’re feeling what they’re feeling is a special provenance of boys, as anyone who’s picked up a psychology magazine in the last ten years is keenly aware. Boys are prone to suffer from a low Emotional Quotient (EQ), which means they’re hopelessly estranged from every single one of their feelings. You’d be better off asking your basset hound to explain what’s going on in that big, sad head of his.
Another possibility is that teens won’t tell you what’s bothering them simply because you want to know. Withholding information from their parents is one of the few arenas over which teens have complete power. When they’re feeling at the end of a crack-the-whip chain of burdensome responsibilities, one more parental request for divulgence of personal information is likely to break the camel’s back.
So, if you pretend that you don’t want to know what they’re thinking and feeling, will teens suddenly begin to confide their innermost secrets?
No, sorry, it doesn’t work that way. They may feel slightly less inclined to barricade themselves against your intrusion, but many teens can literally go for years without sharing any personal information with their parents. (I know I did, but my parents didn’t seem to notice or mind one bit.) Content yourself with the knowledge that there’s not much of interest going on in their heads anyway.
And stop watching Hilary Duff movies.
PARENTS ARE FROM VENUS; TEENS ARE FROM THAT NEW PLANET BEYOND PLUTO
Between the ages of 15 and 16, your teenage son or daughter is likely to do something so excruciatingly moronic and self-destructive, it will literally take your breath away. Possibilities include but are not limited to: stealing a car (before getting a license), breaking and entering (probably one of your friends’ homes), flunking a class or getting suspended/expelled from school, falling in love with someone completely inappropriate, having unprotected sex, getting a tattoo on some highly visible body part, doing drugs, setting something on fire, or all of the above.
AGONIZING EXAMPLE
My friend Diane’s son had a devastating car accident in which his Jeep Wrangler was hit broadside at about fifty miles per hour and flipped into a drainage ditch, pinning Justin underwater, unconscious, for about five minutes. Miraculously, he escaped with a broken collarbone, punctured lung, and minor cuts and bruises. Diane was shaken to the core by her son’s close encounter with death. But the day Justin was released from the hospital, she wanted to kill him herself when she saw him out in the backyard, smoking a cigarette. With a punctured lung.
Faced with this debacle of delinquency, you will be plunged into a panic of such magnitude and duration you will question every parenting decision you’ve made, blame the other provider of genetic material, and/or enter long-term, bank-breaking therapy. Your child, on the other hand, will immediately forget much of this stuff happened unless you rudely remind him by punishing him, or the natural consequences continue to haunt her (upcoming trials, probation, house arrest bracelets, and so forth). Is this convenient lapse of memory a sign that your kid is incorrigible and remorseless, or is it simply the way teenagers are?
It’s the troubling and mysterious way teenagers are, but much of that bizarre insensitivity is based on physiology (and a soft frontal lobe). Ask any pediatric surgeon: Kids recover from even the most severe traumas about ten times faster than adults. Hence their cavalier bounce-back from events that leave you laid out with worry and despair.
TALES FROM POST-TEENS
I was a pretty good kid. I didn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or miss curfew. I did my homework without being asked and other than choosing to talk back to everything my mother said, I think I was probably an easy teen. But for some reason I really wanted to drive before I was 16 so I decided to steal cars. Two, to be exact.
The first time I did it, I was with my friend Claire. We were in the drama club and at a meeting with our drama teacher about a theater festival. At one point, the teachers were all supposed to talk. Since Claire and I were the only students who had come along and it was a Saturday, we didn’t have anything to do. So we told our drama teacher that we left my sweater in her car and asked for her keys. We then decided to drive her car around the parking lot. Well, to make matters worse, when I was driving I got so freaked out that I peed in my pants and wet her seat. We told my drama teacher that we spilled a coke on her seat when we were reaching for my sweater. Nice, huh?
Unfortunately, I didn’t learn my lesson. Later that year, my dad was out of town and my mom was in DC with a friend and stupidly left me home alone. I invited Claire over to spend the night and we decided to rent a movie. Since I lived all of 1.5 miles from Blockbuster, we decided to take my dad’s car. (In neither instance did I have a license.) My dad’s car was a stick shift and since I didn’t know how to drive it, we went the entire way there in first gear. We got there fine (despite numerous stall-outs at various stop signs) but on the way home, I had a mishap. As I was backing out of the parking space, I hit another car. Somehow the gods were with me and no damage was done to the other car, but my dad’s headlight was broken.
That night a freak snowstorm hit. I thought I’d have a reprieve of a day or two (until my father came home) to figure something out. But my mother decided to go out and clean off his car when she got home. So Claire and I are in the front yard building a snowman and I’m starting to freak out, when my mom exclaims, “Girls, look what the storm did to your father’s car!”
To this day, my father thinks the storm broke his headlight. My mother, who died five years ago, must have figured it out by now and will likely ground me when I see her in heaven.
One of the most depressing aspects of parenting a teen is feeling as if everything that matters to you—like your kid living to adulthood, for instance—is of no consequence to your teen at all. The word “disconnect” was made for days like these. (And no, my mama didn’t tell me about them—or if she did, I was a teenager myself and not listening.) It’s difficult to plumb the depths, or shallows, of what your kid is feeling because, as we discussed earlier, most teens are not forthcoming about their emotions. The one thing I can tell you for sure is they aren’t feeling things the same way as you.
Teenagers think of themselves as immortal. Trying to impress upon them the risks and dangers of certain behaviors might as well be communicated in Sanskrit. Apparently, teens also hear things on a different frequency; one of the few decipherable sounds is the tone of another teen’s voice. Example: You give your teen hundreds of harrowing lectures about the dangers of driving without a seat belt, yet still have to remind her to buckle up every time you get in the car. Then one day your teen turns to you with eyes wide and says, “Dad, you know what Jamal told me yesterday? If you hit something at sixty miles per hour and you’re not using seat restraints, you’ll hit the windshield with enough force to splatter your brain into shards!” Then, she’ll carefully buckle herself in. Click! You are simultaneously immensely grateful to Jamal and totally resentful of the fact that he’s getting total credit for the seat belt tutorial. But that’s the way it goes.
The upside of teenagers not taking anything very seriously is their ability to instantly recover and move on from major disappointments—seemingly without a backward glance. All parents have had the disorienting experience of feeling buried under the weight of their teen’s emotions, only to find that his or her grief evaporated in a matter of hours whereas you end up carrying the load for days. I know it’s semi-impossible because you are a sensitive adult, but try to unload as fast as your teen does. Take heart in the fact that teens can bounce back from even major crises pretty darn fast. And most will live to adulthood, despite their best efforts to off themselves.
MAKING THE GRADE(S)
Ever since seventh grade when Lulu’s teachers told me I should let her “fail now, before it really counts,” I have been in a flop-sweat over her academics. Of course, she was nowhere near failing; she was getting Bs and the occasional C at a highly rigorous Main Line girls’ school. But in my mind, she was on the very precipice of disaster. I had no perspective on the situation then, and I have even less now that she’s in high school, when it all “counts.” Every time the college counselors talk about the importance of the SATs, class standing, and the mystical Grade Point Average, a shiver of panic shoots down my spine, although my fear has almost no basis in reality. Lulu has been on the honor roll or perilously close to it for most of her school years. She’s a great kid and she’s got a million friends. But why concentrate on all these astonishingly good things? Why not get depressed over the lack of total academic perfection and take all the other stuff for granted?
AGONIZING EXAMPLE
Tom’s daughter Julia came home last month with a mediocre report card that featured a preponderance of Bs and Cs. Tom was pretty disappointed because he knew she could do better. He was giving Julia a pep talk about trying harder and lifting her Cs, when she went ballistic. “Dad,” she screamed, “Cs are just as good as As!!” At that point, Tom thought maybe the Cs were a gift.
Naturally, Lulu has responded to this lava-like flow of anxiety by downgrading her interest in school performance to a studied indifference. She stonewalls me in every inquiry about her work, refuses to let me read her papers, and would rather pull out her fabulous long eyelashes than talk to me about anything intellectual. Opening a report card was a trip to hell for me, until I realized that I had to get myself under control or I was very like to ruin my relationship with my daughter. As my husband repeated endlessly, I’m the one who needed to back off and let go. I was driving her crazy in my insistence that she adopt my sky-high academic expectations as her own. Which, to put it mildly, they aren’t.
Right now, like a lot of teenage girls, Lulu is not particularly driven to excel scholastically. She’s driven to get her work done and get back to her far more important social life. She’s not in love with learning; she’s barely even embraced it yet. Because I was raised in an insanely competitive academic family, I didn’t understand how she could be so casual about her grades. Being “smart” was an integral part of my identity through college and I wondered who she’d be without that label. Of course, when I stopped obsessing I could plainly see that Lulu is plenty smart and knows exactly who she is with or without the validation of a bevy of As.
In truth, maybe I’m jealous of that. That is the brilliant hypothesis of Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues. She loves teenage girls for their furious independence, wild spirits, and rebellious attitude. In short, she loves everything about them that we can’t stand. And she suspects that deep down, mothers resent their teenage girls because they embody everything we gave up as we got older. Our crazy impetuousness. Our loud voices that we were so in love with. Our insistence that we were special, unique, and diamond bright.
She’s got a point.
Lulu’s not a stressed-out maniac like me, and that drives me nuts. Whenever I start worrying about how she’ll accomplish the things she wants to do in life if she isn’t as neurotic and obsessive as me, I can’t escape the flip side of that question. What if I didn’t have to become this way? What if her amazing resilience, great social skills, and kind heart allow her to accomplish ten times more than I ever dreamed of? Wouldn’t that be ironic?
Hey wait! Is that a college admissions essay I’ve stumbled upon? I better get started right away.
WORDS OF WISDOM
Instead of the depressing scenario of fighting about homework every night, set up a system and enforce it. Ask for teachers’ help in making sure assignments are written down someplace where you can find them and check them with your child before work begins. Provide a structure of time every day when the child needs to be working, whether he claims to have finished all his work or not. By all means, take away distractions—the cell phone, iPod, and Internet—while homework is presumably being done. This systematic approach is a big pain in the butt to regulate and will be regarded by your teen as a POW camp, but it will help him to get organized and be responsible. Once you’ve set up the structure, however, you need to back off.
If you can’t stop the micromanagement, take yourself out of the loop and hire a tutor. It doesn’t have to be a million-dollar investment; check with the faculty or admissions department of a local college and ask for a great student in the subject required. Even at $20/hour, it’s good money for the student and a fantastic role model for your child. The tutor can help your kid with study skills, writing, and projects. Plus, anything he or she says will be about a thousand times more welcomed than if it came from you.
YOUR WORK HERE IS DONE
As the clock of childhood ticks down and you realize that you have less and less time left at home with your kid, it’s natural to try to jam as many critical life lessons into his cranium as possible. This is an almost entirely futile gesture, since at this point he’s pretty much cooked and you no longer have the ability to add any more ingredients to the casserole of his personality. For me, this ghastly realization presented an irresistible opportunity to whip myself into a froth about all the things I should have forced upon Lulu when she was young and would still do what I wanted.
I’m sure you have your own list (unless you’re in much better mental health than I am), but here are a few of the missing links in Lulu’s personal development with which I assail myself in the wee hours of the morning:
1. Latin (she took only two years and then I let her drop it)
2. Any kind of musical instruction (she can’t even read music!)
3. Dance (it’s only her favorite thing to do but did I force her to take lessons? No.)
4. Ditto with singing
5. Art (she’s super-artistic but I never made her take lessons in painting, sculpture, or ceramics because I was too busy working)
6. Table manners and/or etiquette classes (how did this slip under my radar?)
7. Girl Scouts (if only I’d volunteered to be the leader, maybe her troop wouldn’t have split up!)
8. Teen church group (I let her go to Mass with me instead—what a sin!)
9. Financial education (with no clue about checking, savings, credit cards, or investment, she’ll probably go bankrupt!)
10. Cooking (how the hell is she going to feed herself?)
What’s missing from this barrage of blame is the reality that Lulu absolutely refused to do most of the above, even when she was young and impressionable. But why did I let her get away with that? Now she no longer wants to get anything more from me than the keys to the car. She’s not going to permit me to enlighten her about posture, astronomy, gardening, college applications, STDs, 401Ks, ironing, tipping, or folding a fitted sheet. My only recourse if I desperately want her to gain this knowledge is to draft my friends to tutor her, try to force her to take classes (as if), or optimistically assume that somewhere along the road to adulthood she’s going to pick up what she needs to know and put it to use. Despite my ticking-time-bomb approach to parenting, there probably is time for her to learn most of what she needs to survive and God knows, she’ll be a lot more open to it when it comes from another source.
Recently, I was bemoaning my omission in teaching Lulu good table manners and the Pyrrhic victory involved in turning every meal into a Miss Manners diatribe. My friend Mimi sagely replied, “You can’t teach her anything at this point, Betty. But the first time her boyfriend points out that she eats too fast, it will change everything.”
True, that.
She’ll get her education from anybody but me, anywhere but here. As long as she gets it, I don’t care about the source. I’ll be off the hook!
YOU ARE TOO OLD FOR THIS
If you thought you were depressed before, this last one will probably send you right over the ledge. But hang on! I mean it in a nice, empathetic way.
If your kid is a late teen, then you are at least 40 (we hope) and that is way too old for the kind of exhausting daily drama that is inherent in life with a teenager. Chances are, you haven’t immersed yourself in a relationship so masochistic, painful, and conflicted since you were a broke and unemployed 23-year-old. Then you needed something bizarre and chaotic to fill the empty hours of the day, but now you’re juggling a hefty mortgage, an angry boss, a kitchen renovation, and a bad back. You are seriously too old for this.
Your teenager intuitively knows this, but he’s not about to let you use an age deferral to dodge this war. Any effort you make to bail out of the teen psychodrama will be met with an onslaught of histrionics meant to keep you knee-deep in it. At this point, you will realize that despite all his protestations and her screeching that you are the worst parent in the universe, your teen is heavily invested in keeping the insanity going, if only because he needs some company out there on the far reaches of adolescence. Either that, or she doesn’t know how to disengage. And let’s face it, it’s scary to be alone—scarier even than keeping her pathetic attachment to you, the dorkiest parent on the planet.
You may be too old for the battles of adolescence, but your teen is too young to face it alone. So you’re both in it together. And that’s not as depressing as it seems.