Five years ago I wrote an essay that was published in my friend Andrea Buchanan’s anthology, “It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons.” The essay was titled “The Teenage Boy,” and it was about how scary it was for me that H – my oldest – had turned 13, and how I knew that as he grew into adolescence, I would be unable to protect him in the way I had before.
As it turns out, I had no idea how right I was. No idea at all. But reading this essay now makes me wish I could turn back time and get a do-over with him. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. I would work even harder to protect him. I would do a better job. I wouldn’t let this happen…
But I don’t get a do-over, and neither does he. H and I instead have to live with what is, what was and what will be, whatever that may be.
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The Teenage Boy
by Katie Allison Granju
2005
My eldest child is officially an adolescent. He has put away his action figures and his Legos. He now loves his electric guitar, the band Green Day, and his vintage Ramones t-shirt. He and his middle school friends are starting a band, they say, but thus far, no one can play their instruments very well. Still, he perseveres, diligently plucking out the same chords from Nirvana songs again and again in his bedroom until he’s almost got it right. He reminds me that Sid Vicious and Courtney Love couldn’t play their guitars when they were first in bands either.
“Do you know who those people are, Mom?” he asks, eager to explain if I were to tell him that I didn’t. Sometimes I do encourage him to tell me things I already know because I enjoy his explanations so much.
He suddenly worries about the way he looks more than he did even six months ago, and he takes a loooooong time to get ready for school in the morning. I can’t quite figure this one out, since he wears a uniform, but he insists that it takes time to rumple his khakis and blue oxford button down into the perfect state of insouciance without crossing a line that will cause the dean of students to admonish him to “use an iron next time.”
He has a glorious head of thick, lustrous brown hair—the best in our familial gene pool, as I’ve been telling him for years—and he has let it grow to the very limit of scholastic allowability. It’s collar-grazingly long and perfectly wavy, and it looks like former teen idol Robby Benson’s hair on his best day,circa 1977. It’s so beautiful that I sometimes give it an involuntary run-through with my fingers, the way I couldn’t stop myself from kissing the top of his head over and over when he was a baby. Now, though, he
grimaces when I do this, and then heads back into the bathroom to shake it back into his preferred state of studied disarray.
Unlike all the friends and acquaintances who have warned me that adolescence is the worst part of parenting, I’ve looked forward to this. My son is interesting and self-sufficient and very, very funny, and I like hearing his take on politics and world events. His talents and deepest passions are blossoming, and he surprises me on a regular basis with things he knows or wants to know.
Raising a child is a bit like painstakingly unearthing a precious object over many years. As you carefully chip and brush away,
the object slowly reveals its nuances and contours—some of it comfortingly familiar, but much of it a completely unexpected surprise. The surprises have come more frequently lately.
Along with the delightful parts of early adolescence come its horrors. I remember all too well the acute, existential pain of being thirteen years old. Often, lately, when I see my son’s clear angst at the end of a long, tiring day of navigating the social minefields of junior high, or as he hangs up after a long, mumbled conversation with someone who sounded female when I answered the phone, I long to do something . . . anything to make him feel better.
“She’ll call you back,” I want to tell him. “Really, and someday you won’t even remember her name.”
But when I do say things like this, he doesn’t believe me, and mostly he doesn’t even hear me. It was so much easier when I could gather him up in my arms and rock him and sing to him, and then see him palpably relax and melt into a needed nap as a result of my efforts. We both knew that when he woke up, he would feel all better. The sense of omniscient power that comes with mothering babies and young children was heady for me. I loved having the ability to make the world of someone I loved safe, warm, and intellectually stimulating. Back then, all it took was patience, crayons, and plenty of baby-proofing supplies—like electrical outlet covers. It was easy enough to create our own self-contained happy, happy universe, where he knew that all was right with the world and my worries were minimal.
Now his world is becoming increasingly beyond my control. I can’t prevent cruel kids from saying what they will say or chronically unhappy teachers and coaches from venting their adult pain onto my son. I know that his heart will be broken, sooner rather than later, by some girl who has no idea what she’s doing. I know that far too soon he will see the first of his friends make choices that threaten to ruin their lives and that he too will be faced with these choices.
These are things that I know with a great deal of certainty will happen to my son, and for the most part, they are completely beyond my ability to prevent. But I’ll continue to try. I hope that the years we spent together in the warm cocoon of his early childhood offered him some immunization against the slings and arrows of adolescence. I hope that the slips of the hand that I’ve made in unearthing the man he is becoming haven’t banged him up or scarred him too terribly. Mostly, I hope he will continue to talk to me and tell me or show me what I can do—or not do—to support and guide him in finding his own way. Really, I think that’s increasingly all that’s left for a mother of a teenage boy to do.
Copyright Katie Allison Granju 2005-2010
