Loco Parentis: The Long Goodbye

‘‘I’m not doing any interviews,” my high-school-junior son Jake announces, out of the blue, months before we’ve even gotten to that point in the college application process. We’re driving in the car — just about the only place we actually interact with one another anymore — and I glance over at him:

“Why not?”

“I’m not good like that. Talking.”

I think about it. True, he’s not good talking with me. Our conversations have a way of turning into bouts of mutual frustration, our voices and blood pressures rising as we mishear and misinterpret and misjudge each other. It’s pretty amazing to think that we’ve lived together for 16 and a half years and still can’t discuss such seemingly neutral subjects as, say, the fluoridation of drinking water without ending up shouting. I used to think this was because we were so different. More and more, as my son gets older, I realize it’s because we’re so alike. We both want to be right, both need to have the last word, both tend to think we’re the smartest person in the room. Lately we’ve discovered we hardly ever fight if we text one another instead of talking to each other, even if we’re under the same roof. We’re less likely to trip wires in the terse, emotion-stripped language of texting:

when iz supper?
10 min
good

Jake’s older sister Marcy dreaded her college interviews, too, but at least she was willing to practice with me. Jake can’t be bothered with practicing for them any more than he can be for the SATs. He’s Popeye-like in his belligerent “I yam what I yam.” I haven’t figured out yet if this is because he’s possessed of preternatural self-confidence or because he’s just too busy playing World of Warcraft online.

“You know,” I tell him, quietly, gently, because I really have come to believe this, after living through the college-app process with Marcy, “you just have to be yourself. There’s no sense pretending to be someone you’re not.”

“It’s all someone I’m not,” he says, and I know what he means. His mission at this point in life is to figure out who he is, which is more easily defined by negatives — I’m not a geek, I’m not a freaking phony, I’m not the kind of guy who aces college interviews — than positives. He lives life day-to-day; there isn’t any master plan. And he wards off the adult world with a thick shell of sarcasm and cynicism that makes it impossible to offer direction or help. Not long ago, my husband Doug and I watched The Graduate again for the first time in decades. Somewhere about two-thirds in, as Anne Bancroft was dicking with Dustin Hoffman’s mind in a hotel room — again — Doug and I looked at one another.

“I don’t remember this being so dark,” he said.

“I remembered it as a romantic comedy,” I confessed.

The difference, of course, is that we now have a son nearly Benjamin Braddock’s age.

As I write this, Jake’s in Europe, on a trip with his high-school A.P. European history class. It’s costing us way too much money, but we sent Marcy when she was taking A.P. Euro, and even though that was back before the bottom fell out of America, how could we not send him? So he’ll be touring Florence and Rome and Paris for the next week or so while I’m driving back and forth to work on the Schuylkill Expressway.

He’s been as blasé about this trip as he is about applying to college, and while I haven’t rubbed his nose in the expense, I was … disappointed that our only conversations concerning his Grand Tour consisted of me saying things like, “Did you pack the extra copy of your passport page?” I would have liked to discuss the de’ Medici with him, or how Michelangelo leaned backward atop a scaffold to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But when he’s not in school or with the football team, almost all his waking hours are spent playing on his computer, and I’m forced to utilize the rare instances when he surfaces for important tutorials on how to wash all the food off plates.

The weekend before he left, Jake and I were at a college-graduation party for the son of family friends. It was sort of a nightmare scenario for us — enforced socialization, together — but the buffet was good. We sat at a table across from a 40-ish husband and wife we didn’t know from Adam, and I made conversation with them while Jake sucked down chicken wings. Somehow the subject of his impending trip to Europe arose, and the wife’s face lit up. “Oh, are you excited?” she trilled to my son.

There was a pause. I realized I was holding my breath, waiting for Jake to make some cutting response to her enthusiasm — such enthusiasm being anathema to the world-weary mind-set he and his friends cultivate.

Instead, he put down a wing. “I’m really excited,” he said.

I’m still surprised whenever I hear the deep, rolling rumble that Jake’s postpubescent voice has become. I was even more surprised at his admission. I hadn’t known he was excited about the trip; he surely hadn’t told me. For a moment, as I looked at him, I saw him as the friendly couple had to see him: a massively built young man of gargantuan appetites and enthusiasms, a traveler, an explorer, a positive life-force. In fact, the farthest thing conceivable from the black hole of negativity that sits at my supper table. Is it true that perception is reality? If so, my vision of my son is hopelessly skewed by the fact I must perpetually nag him to get his goddamned sneakers out of the middle of the living room floor.

It’s easier to love him in his absence. I try to imagine him in Rome. We went shopping the weekend before he left, and in the Nike store in the outlet place in Limerick, he seized upon a t-shirt, size 3XL, that was neon green highlighted by swirls of baby blue jewels. “I’m wearing this on the plane,” he said with relish, and he did.

Marcy hated her trip to Europe; she felt everyone she encountered was judging her, and finding her lacking. (It is true she tried speaking Spanish in a pizza shop in Paris, despite explicit warnings from the tour guide that Parisians don’t cotton to that.) I don’t anticipate that Jake will suffer from any such feelings of inadequacy; Rome and Florence and Paris, like the teachers at his school, can take him as he is or be damned. Jake’s been different from the rest of the world for so long that it no longer even registers with him when people look at him askance — which they do, inevitably. My son sticks out in a crowd because he’s big and muscle-bound, but also because he doesn’t give a hoot. If he feels like farting, he’ll fart. If he feels like dancing, he’ll dance. So much of my parenting effort has gone to trying to get him to fit in, go with the flow, cause less general ruckus and distraction. He’s never seen the point in any of that; why should he, when inevitably, eventually, the world adapts to him?

And with that, suddenly, I can see him: pirouetting along the cobbled streets of Rome in his bejeweled green shirt, a 330-pound Colossus singing Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” in his high, clear falsetto, really excited to be on his way to view the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

I think he’d be great at college interviews, actually. I hope I can convince him of that.

“MOM?”

IT’S MARCY calling from college, at midnight. “Is something wrong?” I ask anxiously. She mostly calls when she’s overwhelmed with homework and tests and her job; she unloads and then goes on with her life, having handed all that angst to me. The recent college grad with whom I share an office at work has overheard a number of these conversations. She told me the other day that she’d called her mom and apologized for having done the same thing when she was at Villanova; she’d had no idea, she said, of the stress those calls caused at the other end.

“No, everything’s good. I just finished a paper I’m writing for my Women in Literature class. I wondered if maybe you could read it for me.”

“When’s it due?”

“Tomorrow morning at nine.” She hears my sigh. “I know. If you don’t have time, that’s okay. It’s just … I think it’s pretty good.”

“Go ahead and e-mail it to me,” I say in resignation.

“I already did.”

I turn off my Cold Case rerun and carry my glass of merlot upstairs to my office.
I boot my computer, log onto my e-mail, find the document she’s sent, open it, and begin to read:

“In Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, she neither pities women as victims of male-dominated society, nor blames the individual man fully for his position as dominator. Rather, she examines the complex forces behind our society’s dualities of ‘natural’ versus ‘other’ and ‘dominant’ versus ‘submissive’ in relation to man and woman historically, and in the context of her time.”

Whoa.

I’ve been proofreading Marcy’s papers for years, all through high school and her freshman year at college. They’ve been well written, well researched, pretty much grammatically correct — but they were written by a girl I knew. This paper — it goes on to apply de Beauvoir’s theories to the characters in Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, which happens to have been published in 1956, the year that I was born — was written by someone I don’t recognize at all. I pore through it in astonishment: Where did this come from? Whose brain thought this up?

I’m used to Marcy spouting ideas that spring out of what we’ve been through together — the town we live in, the elementary school she went to, the friends she made in Girl Scouts and playing lacrosse. Suddenly I find that other people, utter strangers to me, have been putting notions into her head — Simone de Beauvoir, and a crazy music-theory professor, and the widow she lived with during her semester in Mexico, and her roommate Susan, who grew up on a farm in Kenya. I’m no longer in charge of the show. In fact, I barely play a cameo role.

She has a new boyfriend. He is, once again, Latino. I haven’t met him yet. She’s being cagey this time around, which makes me think he must be highly inappropriate. I’ve only seen him once, through an open door in his red sports car. The windows are tinted black; my daughter vanishes when she steps inside.

She’s come to that stretch in life where I’m an embarrassment, a reminder that she used to come home crying when her lacrosse coach yelled at her, and loved wearing Aéropostale clothes. Other people, abruptly, are wiser than I am. She can be new with them, her own creation, free-falling just like Jake in Italy.

I guess I realized on some level, all along, that this loomed in the distance. But knowing something doesn’t make it easier to face. I give myself stern talking-to’s: Remember that kid from high school who still lives with his mom? Do you want them to wind up like that?

Well, yeah. A little bit, I do.

The midnight call from Marcy is unusual, I realize as I read through her paper. She doesn’t need me as much these days, is handing off less of her strife. My children are becoming themselves. They’re less knowable to me, but the surprises they reveal are like a Christmas gift you don’t realize you want until you open the box.

Yet it’s not all good. I know from dealing with my own parents that I’m destined to become even less of a confidante to my daughter, and inevitably to morph into an obligation, an item jotted on her weekly to-do list: Call Mom. Oh, there will be flurries of closeness, near her wedding, near the births of any children she has, times when she again needs my help or money or advice. But she’s catapulted from the home parapet now, and it won’t be long before Jake’s gone, too.

What will become of me then? What will I write about? How will I spend my days?

The same way I do while Jake’s abroad and Marcy’s at college: wondering where they are, trying to picture them, imagining what they might be doing and seeing and experiencing out there without me. Hoping for the best, and the occasional postcard or call. Worrying about them. Missing them — even the sneakers, and the angst, and the crusty food on plates. We were never meant, evolutionarily, to survive for half a century or more after we launch our offspring into the wide world. Our hearts would have grown smaller if we were, and our memories less tenacious, so that we could relinquish the smell of their hair as we rocked them, and the way their fists curled tight around our fingers in sleep.