How to Drive Your Teenaged Boy Crazy, Part 4,567,832*

My little sister showed me this fun emoji app that I've been using fairly indiscriminately of late. You basically create your own little avatar person that somewhat resembles you, and then you can use her in any number of situations to express yourself. Those of you who are hipsters will know what I'm talking about and think I'm the biggest dork, and those of you who are still caught somewhere in the last century or even millennium will humor me and even share in my joy. The thing is that apparently it's unseemly for a person like myself to use this app or any emojis at all. I was apprised of this by my youngest son, Oliver, who is beginning to look like a young man and who is evidently the arbiter of all things cool and uncool. He takes particular offense to my constant stream of emojis.

What he doesn't yet realize is the more he protests, the greater my glee in using them.

One of the greatest things about parenting teenagers, and especially boys, is the almost script-like intensity of the disdain to which you are subject. Occasionally, this can cause a flicker of pain when you remember that you have literally given them everything and love them to the point of distraction, but mostly it's amusing. I myself find it highly entertaining to make them writhe in discomfort and embarrassment by acting as ridiculous as possible which can be as simple as using too many emojis to communicate. Other methods include purposely saying the wrong number for that Jackie Robinson movie -- I began deliberately calling it 41 instead of 42 (or was it the other way around?) just to get the predictable MOM! What is your problem? 

I am, to them, hopelessly old and utterly uncool and must be constantly schooled and reminded of that.

Seriously, though -- what's up with texting your mother when you're both in the same house, and the house is literally the size of Bilbo Baggins' abode? I think you deserve to be mortified in return.

* This post was approved by all parties involved. I don't want ya'll think I'm INVADING MY CHILDREN'S PRIVACY.

Gross Mom

Cesaria Evora

I think there are a bunch of blogs with titles like Gross Mom. I've seen Ugly Mommy, Vodka Mommy, Bad Mommy -- the list goes on, and they always sort of irritate me. I can't stand the word mommy unless it's used by a child toward his (or her) mother. I don't like to be called by any word that stands for mother by anyone, really, than my own children. That would include nurses and doctors and particularly young men or grown men when they use the word mama for me. You know who you are. Humor my little pet peeve, won't you? And I actually love being called baby by the right person. You know who you are, too. None of this sounds very pleasant when I read over it, and I really only wanted to tell you a funny little story that happened yesterday when Oliver and I were in the car driving about the city as we do. Given the fact that I'm sort of a Loser Mom, I had hooked up Pandora (evidently only losers listen to Pandora) and was listening happily to my Cesaria Evora station which included not only her magnificent music but other Latin American songs and instrumentation. What IS this? Oliver asked in his most annoyed thirteen year old voice. No matter that he is prone to fits of embarrassing air guitar to the excruciating sounds of Journey and Boston. I said, It's Cesaria Evora in a pleasant and indifferent tone. Do you even know what she's saying, Mom? Oliver asked. Not really, I answered, but it doesn't matter because she is amazing. Oliver probably rolled his eyes, although I wouldn't know because I was driving and I'm also a Loser Mom Driver. Why do you even like her? he asked. I love this music, I said. It's sexy. You can only imagine the reaction. Gross, Mom! That's just gross! he shouted.

I turned the music up and said, There's nothing wrong with that, baby!

Friendship, Drinking, Teenagers and Healing

Last night I walked around the corner and met two girlfriends for happy hour. I had the above drink -- some spicy concoction of ginger beer, vodka and lime juice. I had two of those -- a rare second drink kind of evening. We also ordered food -- mussels, french fries, arugula salad with fennel and parmesan, a grilled artichoke with aioli and some seared tuna with a sesame crust and shaved raw zucchini. We sat and talked about the daily grind -- what it's all for, whether it's mid-life crises -- and speaking of, why the hell are we not in menopause, yet? We talked  about our children, The Teenagers, about social media and sexting and their curiosity about our own teenage and college years. When does all that start? my friend with younger children asked my other friend and me. We told her that it starts now, the curiosity, the questions. I told her that earlier that day at Target, as I perused the aisles with my older son who recently got his driver's permit and now believes himself to be mature, asked me, When's the last time you got drunk, Mom? He's been asking me questions like this a lot, lately, out of earshot of his younger brother but enough to make me realize that it's happening, he's getting older and curious and what I say is as important now as it's ever going to be. You know, Henry, I said, sometimes your questions are a little too personal, and I want to say that it's none of your business, but I actually haven't gotten drunk in so many years that I've forgotten. I was never a person who drank enough to get drunk. Maybe I had too much to drink in college every now and then, but the feeling the next day was horrible enough that I never really kept at it. I see that he literally digests what I say and chews on it. My friends and I agreed that it's more difficult today to be a teenager with social media, with the threat of complete and irrevocable exposure hanging over you. We agreed, too, that our children are so much more open with us than we were with our parents and that that's a good thing. We discussed our boys and the #YesAllWomen campaign, how nervous it all makes us. We agreed that the relative boldness and ease of young women today compared to when we were young was both positive and a tad scary. We agreed that our boys are both dopey and clever. We laughed a lot. After a few days of horrible news and attendant anxiety, much of it self-inflicted, I'd venture to say it was a healing night for me, that I'm somewhat righted -- shored up.

Onward, as one of my writing teachers used to say. Onward.

Fishing and Plumbing

All this waiting and talk of miracles makes me nervous, so let's bring it back down to the everyday.

I'm enjoying going back through photo albums, of which I have many, and especially as my boys get older and bigger and more -- let's say it -- teenagerish, I'm trying to remember what it was like back then -- in the olden days. Those two boys right there are growing up, and they're taxing me more than I can elaborate on the old blog. Let's say this, too: they don't kiss each other anymore, and their interaction with Sophie is minimal. I think about it every single day but write about it even less -- the toll the seizures have taken on those boys.

Wouldn't it be incredible if Sophie's seizures stopped? I said to Henry yesterday as we got ready for dinner. (By the way, she only had a scattering of seizures yesterday and was otherwise quite calm, if a bit sleepy.)

 I want her to talk, Henry said. He hasn't said that in a long time. When he was small, he wished on birthday cakes and threw coins into fountains with that wish. He whispered it into my ears and probably Santa's. During the first couple of years of Catholic school, when he got a bit Jesusy, he told me that he prayed every night that Sophie would talk. When she didn't talk, he told me that he didn't believe in God, and I told him that I understood but that we don't ever really know why things happen and why they don't. I don't know when the desire for her to talk or the wish that she'd be "normal," began to fade for him, but I imagine it's happened as subtly as he has grown up and away from the boy you see in that photo.

Do you want her to talk so that she seems more like a normal person? I asked him. Asking questions of a fifteen year old boy is like fishing or maybe even plumbing. You put the bait on the line and fling it out, far. Then you start reeling in, slowly, before you lose your concentration or nod off. When things get stuck, you need to put your hands on your hips, cock your head and just look around, first. There's no telling whether it's just stopped up from everyday stuff or there's something more insidious, like tree roots and dirt in the mainline. I can fish and plumb with line and snake.

Sort of, Henry answered. I really just want to know what she has to say.

About the marijuana? I asked, or whether the seizures bother her?

About everything, Henry answered. I want to know what she thinks about it all.

Empathy***

It's already been a hell of a week, and I'm dragging. I feel sort of done. Done with all of it.

Do you want to know the only thing that's keeping me going?

There's this test you can take on the New York Times website. It's called Can You Read People's Emotions? Well, I do love a personality test -- can still remember how avidly I participated when they were published in Teen Magazine or Young Miss back in the dark ages.  There's nothing like the self-satisfaction gained when you find out whether you're an INFP or an EJFX or whether your breasts can hide a pencil and are therefore sagging too early or perky enough that a pencil drops to the floor. I dropped a lot of pencils in my teen years, and when I stood with my legs together, there were three distinct triangles of space from my thighs to my ankles. Remember those markers, all you ancient comrades?

Anyway.

I took the reading people's emotions test and scored a whopping 35 out of 36 which evidently makes me some sort of mind reader, and all week I've been wondering how I can parlay this new-found skill into an occupation. Someone suggested the FBI, but my absurdist streak is too high for such an earnest position. Someone else suggested poker, but the last time I played cards I won sort of effortlessly because I'm lucky, and I pissed off the Card Powers That Be which kind of bewildered me. Today, I actually read an article about some study that found that those who read literary fiction were more empathetic than those who read popular or regular fiction. Examples for literary fiction were the obvious: Don Delillo, Chekhov, etc. Examples for popular or regular fiction were Danielle Steele and, not surprisingly to me, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (a book that I read and felt insanely jealous about, again, that such pablum was devoured by so many). See those glasses in that photo above? Well, I'm a literary snob, and I don't give a damn about claiming that.

Given that I scored near perfectly on the reading people's emotions test and am an unapologetic reader of literary fiction, my empathy skills know no bounds. Dump it on me, people. I can empathize.

Oh, and see those breasts up there? They're currently holding a Kindle Fire under them, so don't be imagining that my head is getting too big.









***First person to guess my emotions when I took that selfie up there gets a cupcake.

.

Parenting, The Internet, Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll

I know it's probably not in good taste to post a photo of myself in front of the vodka display at my local grocery store, however facetious, but I just wanted to let ya'll know that this is what I look like after an emotional discussion with my teenager** about the internet, Facebook, bad language, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Those of you who have a child with severe disabilities AND a child or two or three or more without might think with a teeny tinesy part of yourself that you're going to get a pass, perhaps, on the more uncomfortable parts of parenting a normal teenager. There might be a teensy tinesy part of yourself that thinks the Universe is sometimes ordered or that you have a divine sort of perspective, especially given the shit you've been doing or going through as an extreme parent. You might even think -- with a teensy tinesy part of yourself -- that the good lord above will give you a break and your non-disabled children are going to be a piece of cake. At least I did. Well, a teensy tinesy part of myself.

Call me silly, call me naive -- hell -- call me an incipient alcoholic.




**No need to feel alarmed. All is well and neither of my boys are in any trouble whatsoever (other than the damn laundry basket filled with their clothes is still sitting on their bedroom floor and not put away).

Saturday Night West Coast RePost, #2

In case you weren't here last week. I inaugurated a tradition of posting something from the old blog archives every Saturday night. Since I posted the following last year, I came upon this photo of myself (above) in the described bedroom. I was actually only ten or eleven in this photo, apparently still wearing Danskins and not yet a teenager, but the canopies had come off the bed, and the decor coming was only a twinkle in my eye.

Teenage Bedrooms
10/24/2011

Mine had green and white shag carpeting and two single beds, canopied, with green and white polka-dotted bedspreads. I hid racy books under the mattress that I found lying in my parents' room or den: copies of Jaws by Peter Benchley, books by Harold Robbins andLooking for Mr. Goodbar. I had a record player/stereo with a smoky plastic cover that sat on a low chest in the bay window (one of the perks of being the oldest of three daughters was getting the room with the bay), and I'd lie on the rug and play music for hours, The Carpenters and John Denver, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas -- later the Beatles and Van Morrison and Boston and Fleetwood Mac. I'd lie on my back with those huge squishy black headphones on.

Oh, the seventies.

I was powerfully awkward, a bookworm behind glasses, sweet and smoldering all at once. The photo above is around sixth grade, so I was on the edge of being a teenager, still confident, for the most part.  I think that's a Holly Hobbie necklace, and I must have taken off my aviator framed glasses for the picture and endured the giant blur.

On one wall was a giant cork bulletin board, filled with photos and awards, swimming ribbons and magazine covers from Teen and Seventeen. On the back of my door was a life-size poster of Clark Gable. Weird, right?I think it had something to do with living in Atlanta and being enamored of Gone with the Wind for a time. I had my own bathroom then which was also carpeted in shag. I had a bookshelf in the bathroom, and on top of that resided my owl collection. Over the bookshelf and all those owls, I hung a circular hook rug that I'd hooked myself -- a large owl. It was green and orange and spectacularly ugly. I wish I still had it -- I could probably find something similar, though, in Anthropology. On the bathroom sink lay an array of big, fat Bonne Bell Lipsmackers, a Clairol hot roller set, my rouge (that's what we called it, then) and mascara, Love's Baby Soft and Jean Nate.

I was reminded of all of this when I stumbled upon this website:

http://teenagebedroom.tumblr.com/

What did your teenage bedroom look like?

Raising Teenagers: An Interview with Dr. Dennis Coates about the Teenage Brain

I recently read a book by Dr. Dennis Coates, Conversations with the Wise Uncle. A book for middle-school teens, it's a series of entertaining stories about a young boy and his uncle who mentors him throughout his teen years. The purpose of the book is to give young kids wisdom and advice when they need it most -- early in adolescence. It has given me some good ideas for talking to both Henry and Oliver, aged 14 and 11. Coates also has a similar book for young girls, Conversations with the Wise Aunt. Denny happens to be the husband of Kathleen, a blogger whom I've read for many years, so I contacted Denny to find out why there's so much on his blog and in these books about the teen brain.

 Whether you write for parents or for teenagers, you seem to talk a lot about the brain. Why?

Denny: I've been involved in learning and development for over 25 years, and early on I realized that learning is something that happens in the brain. So I've had a passionate interest in brain development and brain function –how the brain learns and how habits and skills are formed.

Not long ago I came across some new research about the brains of teenagers that has changed what we understand about the teen brain. The research explains the strange behavior of teens and what’s happening in their brains during adolescence. The long-term consequences are enormous, and if parents understood what’s happening, they could help give their child a superior mind. My work these days is to tell parents what I've learned about this.

What have you learned?

Denny: Brain scientists used to say that basic development of all areas of the brain was complete well before puberty. This new research proved this assumption to be incorrect, that one last area is still under development during adolescence—the lobes of the pre-frontal cortex, the area in charge of critical thinking and judgement.

Why is this important to parents?

Denny: The consequences for the teenager are huge. In the near term, the area for rational judgment is “under construction,” so it’s hard for teens to use it. This is the real reason why teen behavior is sometimes unpredictable, emotional or risk-taking. Several books have been written that explain this. What these books don’t explain are the long-term consequences, and what parents can do to make sure the basic wiring in this area is extensive.

What long-term consequences are you talking about?

Denny: Parents have always known that a child needs lots of stimulation during infancy and encouragement to learn to sit, crawl, walk, talk and other basic skills. What they didn't know is that the child’s efforts cause the brain to wire itself in different areas. And they don’t know that one last area still needs to be wired—the area involved in critical thinking and judgment. And this has to happen during adolescence. Like other brain areas, there is a sensitive period of development, when the child has to do the work to make the basic wiring happen. But the wiring won’t happen if the child doesn't exercise critical thinking and judgment during adolescence. The long term consequence is that a child will become an adult with a superior mind, or a mind with limited capacity for thinking and learning—for life.

What then should parents be doing?

Denny: First, parents need to learn what’s going on in the teen brain. They need to understand how this area of the teen brain develops and the payoff if the teen does the work. And they should share these insights with the teen.

Also, most parents think it’s their job to criticize, lecture, solve problems and give all the answers. The problem is this approach doesn't require the child to think for himself. Parents need to learn a new way of communicating with the child that stimulates him to think.

And they need to do whatever they can to encourage their teen to avoid alcohol and drugs during adolescence, which is a sensitive period of brain development. Substance abuse during these years can derail development in the prefrontal cortex. I know getting teens to stay away from alcohol and drugs has always been a tough challenge, but the stakes are high and the kids need to know about it, too.

Parents shouldn't feel it’s all on their shoulders. They ought to seek other teen mentors who can encourage the kids to think for themselves—relatives, counselors, teachers, employers, program directors.

A lot of what you’re saying seems like new information. Where can parents go to learn more?

Denny: The first thing I’d advise a parent to do is to read the eBook, How to Give Your Teen a Superior Mind. It explains the teen brain issue in non-technical terms, and it has some good how-to advice. They can get it free on the web.

My books for young teens are another good resource. Conversations with the Wise Aunt and Conversations with the Wise Uncle are available on Amazon in Kindle and paper formats. Also, adult discussion guides for these books are available free on the web.

Unconditional love is essential to parenting a teenager, but anyone who has done that knows that love is not enough. It takes a lot of strength and some key parent-child communication skills that most parents don’t have. For parents who want to work on this, there is an online system for personal development for parents called Strong for Parenting. A similar system is available for young adults – Strong for Success.

And I have a blog for parents:  HowtoRaiseaTeenager.com, which features new articles weekly and connections to resources from other parenting experts. 

Thank you so much, Denny! I know this information will be useful to my readers, and I really appreciate you reaching out to me on this blog.

To all my blog readers, I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments here, as would Denny. I'm generally not one for parenting advice from books, but I found his research and ideas, as well as books, compelling, and they're really helping me with my own boys. 

Teenage Bedrooms

Mine had green and white shag carpeting and two single beds, canopied, with green and white polka-dotted bedspreads. I hid racy books under the mattress that I found lying in my parents' room or den: copies of Jaws by Peter Benchley, books by Harold Robbins and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I had a record player/stereo with a smoky plastic cover that sat on a low chest in the bay window (one of the perks of being the oldest of three daughters was getting the room with the bay), and I'd lie on the rug and play music for hours, The Carpenters and John Denver, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas -- later the Beatles and Van Morrison and Boston and Fleetwood Mac. I'd lie on my back with those huge squishy black headphones on.

Oh, the seventies.

I was powerfully awkward, a bookworm behind glasses, sweet and smoldering all at once. The photo above is around sixth grade, so I was on the edge of being a teenager, still confident, for the most part.  I think that's a Holly Hobbie necklace, and I must have taken off my aviator framed glasses for the picture and endured the giant blur.

On one wall was a giant cork bulletin board, filled with photos and awards, swimming ribbons and magazine covers from Teen and Seventeen. On the back of my door was a life-size poster of Clark Gable. Weird, right?I think it had something to do with living in Atlanta and being enamored of Gone with the Wind for a time. I had my own bathroom then which was also carpeted in shag. I had a bookshelf in the bathroom, and on top of that resided my owl collection. Over the bookshelf and all those owls, I hung a circular hook rug that I'd hooked myself -- a large owl. It was green and orange and spectacularly ugly. I wish I still had it -- I could probably find something similar, though, in Anthropology. On the bathroom sink lay an array of big, fat Bonne Bell Lipsmackers, a Clairol hot roller set, my rouge (that's what we called it, then) and mascara, Love's Baby Soft and Jean Nate.

I was reminded of all of this when I stumbled upon this website:

http://teenagebedroom.tumblr.com/

What did your teenage bedroom look like?