Oedipus in Suburbia

So it’s summertime and everyone is out of school, which is great.  Secretly you welcome the built-in excuse to get very little accomplished, though you suspect that this summer might be easier than others…after all, the children are getting so big!  You live in a town where it is possible for kids to be very independent–they can ride their bikes everywhere, they can go to the pool and stay for hours unsupervised, they can get themselves over to their father’s house and to friends’ houses without any help from you.  They get up in the morning and go off to half-day camp–the younger is a camper, the older a counselor–all by themselves.  You’ll have them with you every afternoon and every day for lunch–you’ll have to make sure you have milk and sandwiches around, that sort of thing–but honestly, how hard is that?  It’s not like having babies or toddlers, for crying out loud.  In a way, you feel kind of guilty, like you’re not really doing enough to hold up your end of things.  Just because they’re independent doesn’t mean you should necessarily ignore them, tempting though it may be.

You decide that this will be the summer you make a real effort, instead of taking the path of least resistance (reading magazines at the pool day after day after day while the kids do god knows what, for example).  This summer, you’ll plan educational and enriching activities–picnics, museums, concerts.  You’ll take the kids hiking, even camping.  After all, your fifteen-year-old is overdue to turn all remote and teenagery, so your days of sappy, happy togetherness are numbered.  Remember the summer you were fifteen?  You spent it sneaking out of your parents’ house, smoking pot, and kissing boys.  So far your son seems innocent and pure, but perhaps your parents thought the same thing about you.  Maybe your son is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, up to no good behind your back. Maybe he’s just on the verge of turning wolfish.  Either way, if you keep him busy with lots of high-maintenance wholesome activities, he won’t have time to look for trouble.

The week after school lets out, your teenager certainly seems to be around a lot. When you wake up in the morning, the minute your feet hit the floor, he wanders into your room. (He’s used to getting up early for school, you suppose.  But why is the eight-year-old still asleep?)  He shadows you as you stumble around the house doing what you do every morning–measuring coffee grounds and turning on the machine, groggily unlocking the doors to the porch, shuffling out to get the paper.  The few seconds it takes to walk to the end of the driveway and back are more peaceful than the rest of your routine, and it takes you some time, in your sleep-addled state, to figure out why. Your son, who is disinclined to follow you outside, waits at the front door till you get back, at which point he picks right up wherever his morning monologue left off. He is full of news and observations. He would like your opinion about things. He would like to recount the plots of various television shows, the high points of South Park and Tosh, never mind that the two of you watched these television shows together the very night before, and that you are therefore up to date. Those seconds walking down the driveway, you realize, when his voice is coming from inside the house, are the quietest moments you get until he hops on his bike and pedals reluctantly down to the corner, calling an extra, wistful goodbye over his shoulder, and rides off to his job at camp.

You are not, nor have you ever been, much of a morning person.  Your ex-husband didn’t talk much at any time of day, and you’ve gotten rather used to easing into the day with a few minutes, even hours, of quiet.  During the school year, your older son gets himself up and off to school before you’re even awake, and your younger son prefers to get up at the absolute last second–he’s got it down to a science–that allows him to dress, bolt a bowl of cereal, grab his backpack, plant a kiss on your cheek, and tear down the street to the bus stop as the bus rumbles around the corner.  Not much time for chit-chat, which is just fine by you.

But now your mornings are uncharacteristically noisy. Your older son has beautiful blue doe eyes; they follow you adoringly as you pour out cereal and attempt to read the paper. You are like some cartoon from the 1950s, with you as the grouchy husband and your teenaged son as the talkative wife; in a vain effort to cut off conversation by cutting off eye-contact, you hold the paper directly in front of your face as you read. Your son is not deterred. He reads whatever headlines he can see out loud, and muses over their significance. What do you think, he would like to know? Your younger son, munching his cereal in silence, looks at you expectantly. You grip the paper tighter, mumble some reply, fight the urge to slam your hand on the table and hiss, through clenched teeth, that BREAKFAST is not an appropriate time for TALKING.

Finally, they leave. God, it’s peaceful. You repair to the porch, where you squander your precious child-free two and a half hours reading in an ecstasy of silence.

At eleven forty five exactly, your spine begins to tingle, and your shoulders hunch with dread. It is some sort of atavistic response–you remember the feeling vividly from your younger son’s babyhood, when it came on like a case of hives right before his never-more-than-forty-minute nap came to an end.  Forty minutes is not a lot of time.  You used to go and stare at your older son while he slept for hours and hours every afternoon, willing him to wake up already so you’d have an excuse to quit pretending to work on your dissertation. But the minute your younger son’s eyelids fluttered shut you’d fling yourself into naptime with panicked frenzy.  You’d inhale lunch while reading the paper, one eye on the clock, your nerves on fire.  When he woke, as he always did, by summoning you cheerfully, your heart sank.

This is exactly how you feel now, as you hear your kids biking happily up the hill to you. They call out from the corner, bursting with news. Well, the older one calls out. The younger one is busy fussing with the gears on his new bike, the first bike he’s ever had that isn’t a hand-me-down, and you get the impression he would wheel it into the kitchen and sit next to it at the table if he could. Your older son couldn’t care less about his bike, which is actually your old bike, come to think of it. He’s a good kid, to ride his mom’s bike without complaint. A very good kid–and a very fast kid, too, because he’s somehow managed to make it from the driveway to your side, all sweaty and shiny and talking a blue streak, while his younger brother is still pedaling dreamily down the sidewalk.

Lunch is a social event, during which you hear all about the kids your older son supervises at camp, while your younger son eats his sandwich according to his particular ritual, taking it apart and putting it back together before biting into it, humming to himself. Your older son narrates his morning in real time. It’s not enough simply to listen, though frankly you have a hard enough time just doing that. You are also expected to respond. You are meant to react. To laugh, to enquire, to take part. It’s what you’ve always tried to tell your kids to do–they have a social obligation to feign interest when a boring adult or teacher or even another kid engages them in conversation. It’s part of being a human being, you’ve told them, being polite and considerate even if you’re not terribly interested in what someone else is telling you. You are not terribly interested in what your son is telling you.

Well, you say to yourself, it’s only June. This is some weird transitional phase–it’s got to be. Remember how the transition from half-day kindergarten to first grade meant you got a wiped out, grouchy, weepy, starving child delivered every afternoon? Remember third grade? Remember the first summer after the divorce? There are bumps and stumbles, hills and valleys, and this one, though annoying, is certainly not the worst thing that could happen.

On the Fourth of July, you find yourself on a blanket with consoling-windows friend and her husband and son, along with your boyfriend and his daughters.  It is hot. Too many children want to sit next to you. Your boyfriend’s daughters want to braid your hair; your younger son wants to lie across your lap. Your older son, peeved, settles for a spot leaning against your knees, and the very close, sticky presence of so many children makes your skin crawl.

Consoling-windows friend snickers from her lovely, child-free side of the blanket while your older son presents every single firework as an object for discussion. Mom, did you see that one? Mom? Hey, that one was green. Whoa, that was a big one! Mom? Mom? Consoling-windows friend’s giggle is devastatingly infectious; when your son turns around to make sure you are right there with him as far as the latest explosion went, he catches you wiping away tears of suppressed mirth. His face falls into his shoes. “Am I bothering you?” he asks plaintively. “I just wanted to make sure you saw that.” No, no, you say, I’m just–it’s something else I’m laughing at, honey. It’s not you. Consoling-windows friend snorts. She has three sons, older than yours; you distinctly remember times when she could not so much as walk to the kitchen without being shadowed by some gangly, chatty, shaggy-headed creature in oversized clothes, who would stand behind her as she answered the phone, or wait patiently, mid-sentence, while she finished writing something down, or bend over to put his enormous unkempt head on her shoulder while she stood with her teeth clenched, trying not to flinch.

“They need girlfriends, or something, but they don’t have them yet, so it’s like we’re their girlfriends,” your brilliant wise editor friend tells you on the phone. Her middle son is also fifteen.  “It’s worse than just the talking, though the talking is pretty bad. They also want to TOUCH you all the time.”  You shudder. This has recently become true. Your older son stands too close to you, always, and at the pool he has taken to occupying the lower half of the very chaise longue you are trying to stretch out on. Every day you attempt to foil his nearness by commandeering several lawnchairs, arranging them around you, and piling them high with pool-related detritus, to no avail. Your brilliant wise editor friend is nonplussed. A back injury forces her to work lying down in bed, and every night after supper, while the rest of the family disperses with their laptops or goes off to watch TV, her middle son follows her upstairs and mopes around until he makes his move. “He won’t go so far as to actually lie down on his father’s side,” she says.  “Instead he scootches into the eight-inch space between me and the edge, and then throws his arm across my waist.” You chuckle indulgently–so far, thank god, your son draws the line at getting in bed with you.

He has, however, no qualms about summoning you to his bed–where he calls every night for you to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight, as if he were a toddler. He wants you to sit with him a while, chatting about this and that, rehashing the events of the day. Because you are seldom apart, these bedtime confidentials tend not to break a lot of new ground. But they’re not, truth be told, unpleasant. You lie across the foot of your son’s bed in the dark, half listening to him describe his second at-bat in today’s baseball game, or articulate some half-baked theory about why communism actually makes sense. Sometimes he talks about school, and sometimes about soccer, and sometimes–rarely–he asks you to weigh in on an issue he’s anxious about, and then listens carefully to your response. You remember your mom telling you that bedtime was when all the skeletons came out of the closet, that it made sense to sit with your kids for a few minutes every night, even if you were exhausted, even if you were desperate to get away. Kids will open up at bedtime, she said, in a way they won’t during the day. Getting your son to open up does not seem to be a problem, at any time of the day or night, but it’s actually quite relaxing there in the dark, and your son’s monologues are oddly soothing. And amusing, come to think of it. Perhaps you’re finally cracking under the pressure, identifying with your oppressor. He is the Symbionese Liberation Army, and you are Patty Hearst.

But if this is so, there’s freedom in your oppression. Driving to New Hampshire for a week in a cabin with your boyfriend and all four kids in the car is a veritable sitcom of delight. The teenagers are like some sort of vaudeville act–the younger kids goggle with admiration, while you and your boyfriend laugh and laugh. The whole week is like this. No one argues or sulks. The weather is beautiful. There are no petty squabbles, no quarrels, no conflicts. Your son is the funniest person you have ever met in your life.

This was last summer. Since then, he has turned sixteen, grown about five inches (he is now taller than you are, and you are reasonably tall), and started (unnecessarily) to shave. His voice is deep. He texts you from school, calls you from the bus, saves his best stories for you. When you laugh, his face lights up. He teases you for being his biggest fan; you tease him by saying he’s definitely the coolest person in the family, a popular crowd all to himself, and you’re a wanna-be, a mere hanger-on. “You’re so good for my self esteem, Mom,” he says, laughing at you laughing at him. “If a joke doesn’t go over at school I always say to myself, ‘Screw you guys, my MOM thought that was hilarious.'”

You remember the terrible twos, the even-terribler threes, the fucked-up fours. All in all, you vastly prefer the sweet sixteens. Turns out you and your ex-husband have managed to raise a nice kid, after all. You worried so much, and everyone warned you it would be awful. “Just wait till he’s in high school,” they all said. “It only gets worse.” And look what happened instead. It gets better and better, and although you suppose the tide could turn at any moment, you’ve given up fretting. Why sell your kid short? For now you’ll take him at his word when he tells you, as he does at night when you go in to kiss him, that he’s happy, that school’s excellent, that everything is actually (here he yawns, and turns over on his side) really great, Mom, it’s all good.

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