On Friday, my husband and I toured the middle school our fifth-grade son will be attending next year.  I recognized parents I hadn’t seen in years, since our kids attended different elementary schools.   We had chatted at the playground as we pushed our babies in swings, or may be we had crossed paths at Mommy and Me Music Class.  All had larger waistlines and more wrinkled foreheads than I remembered.   

We listened politely to the middle-school principal.  She didn’t have the soft, sweet voice of an elementary school principal.  She told us how important it was to check our kids’ agenda every day, since our kids might lie to us as to whether they had homework or not.

I stopped listening. 

Walker would never lie to me.  I know Walker will never go near alcohol, or marijuana.  His cheeks will never grow rough whiskers, nor will his armpits stink.  My little boy has only been with me ten years and I’m not ready for him to change into a lying, odiferous youth who would rather hang out with other lying, odiferous males than me. 

I refocused once we started the tour.  We stopped by the gym first, where the eight graders were playing basketball.  Many of the kids seemed tall enough to touch the basketball hoop. Several of the girls were already one or two bra cup sizes beyond my chest.

We moved to sixth grade language arts class. I was relieved that the boys looked like kids, although the girls still looked like teenagers.  The principal asked the students what they liked about middle school.  One freckle-faced boy said he liked having several teachers and moving from class to class, because the day wasn’t so boring.  A girl with long-blond braids said she liked how she met so many new people from the other elementary schools. I asked the kids if they had any advice for us parents.  One brown- haired boy said to tell our kids to do their work, because now they had to get real As, Bs, and Cs: not 1s, 2s, and 3s. 

I gulped. 

I hoped my Walker’s somewhat laissez faire attitude towards homework wouldn’t result in a 2.0 grade point average.

That night, I read Greek myths to Walker.  He positioned his head in the crook of my arm.   I wonder how much longer he was going to do this.   I thought about asking him, but I didn’t want to make him aware that our nighttime ritual will be something he will outgrow. 

 That’s the one advantage I have in this growing up thing.  I know for certain he is going to change, but I don’t think he really believes it is going to happen.

By Beth Touchette

Labels: basketball, Beth Touchette, bra sizes, elementary school, grades, gym class, middle school, Mommy and Me Music Class, principals, teenagers

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Binkley was a mean cat, the kind who lives forever out of spite.

When my husband mentioned in passing, “Binkley’s limping a little,” I did not expect a cat that dragged her leg bone behind her like a scavenged drumstick.

When the vet’s x-rays revealed a shattered leg in the hardest place to fix, I learned about feline osteoporosis. Binkley’s usual hop down from the bathroom counter would cost at least two thousands dollars, with no guarantees, not counting follow-up visits and medication.

The vet assured me I could pay on the installment plan.

“Absolutely not,” my husband responded. “She’s old, she’ll scratch us to a bloody pulp when we try to give her pills, and even if she makes it, what happens the next time she takes a drink from the sink? It’s time to put her down.”

Our youngest daughter, Ally, was easily persuaded. She was tired of fighting her way downstairs past Binkley’s claws every morning. I hesitated, but only out of guilt for my wish to be free of litter boxes and shredded pantyhose.

Emma, fourteen years old, was the lone hold out.

“I’ll pay for it!” she sobbed; surprisingly loyal to the cat I had to nag her to feed. “She shouldn’t have to die just because you don’t like her.”

Immobilized but far from terminal, Binkley purred between hisses as we debated her fate. The vote was three to one. Logic trumps passion, particularly when it holds the purse strings. Really, though, I agreed with Emma.

I remembered my own devastation when I was not quite her age. We had to give away our cats because my father’s allergies landed him in the intensive care unit for a week. He would have died had he tried to stick it out another day. Even so, the family joke was that it took twenty-four ballots to break the tie in my father’s favor.

With Binkley, no lives besides hers were at stake—just money and convenience. Still, spending thousands of dollars on a nasty, old cat seemed absurd. I admired Emma’s passion, though, and wondered where mine had gone. Did I misplace it somewhere among piles of bills and laundry? Maybe it was just another permanent casualty on the long and compromised road to maturity.

As the arguments and tears crescendoed through the weekend, I worried what lesson we’d be teaching our children. At the very least, I imagined that Emma might someday pull the plug on us at the nursing home because she had better ways to spend her time and money. This struck me as only fair.

I despised my husband for his unsympathetic resolve. He despised me for my waffling. “You’re just making it worse,” he accused me. Secretly, I knew he was right, and how relieved I’d soon feel if we put Binkley to sleep. On Monday, I called the vet.

Emma refused to go to school that morning until I promised to schedule the appointment for the late afternoon. When she came home, she gathered Binkley in her arms and barricaded herself in the bathroom.

“I won’t let you kill her,” Emma screamed.

But what could she do in the face of my treachery? Defeated, Emma relinquished her grasp a few minutes before the vet closed.

“I hate you!” she choked between sobs as I fled downstairs.

I eased Binkley into the cardboard carrier for one last trip.

I eased her out again onto a fluffy towel atop the stainless steel exam table. Votive candles glowed from two crystal orbs while Windham Hill played softly in the background. As Dr. Griffin slipped the needle through fur and skin, she assured me that she would make the same choice, too. Stroking Binkley as her feistiness drained away for good, I half let the music lull me into agreement.

“That wasn’t so bad,” I thought wearily on my way home from the vet. But as Lady MacBeth discovered, a murderess cannot long enjoy peace.

The garage door clattered open on what looked like a crime scene. Bikes lay helter-skelter on the cracked concrete. The trashcans were upended, their rank contents strewn from corner to corner. Drifts of kitty litter crunched underfoot. I slammed the door and sprinted upstairs.

“Emma? Where are you?” I beseeched the silent house.

I never should have left her alone. It was bad enough murdering Binkley—what had I done to my own daughter?

Under normal circumstances, Emma was a steady child, but her calm demeanor masked a fierce will. When I praised the drawing she brought home long ago from her second-grade art class, she took a pencil and scribbled out her masterpiece. It was ruined, but at least it was hers. Now, frantic about what destructive self-assertion I might discover beyond the trashed garage, I searched the house from top to bottom.

I found Emma at last, crumpled and crying in a corner of the basement. She let me hold her, and we rocked together for a very long time. I stroked her soft hair until her sobs drained away. I, too, felt bereft. Not so much for Binkley, but for the girl I no longer was who now inhabited my daughter. I admired Emma’s rage: I wished I still had her passion, her conviction, her noble heart.

We buried Binkley on the hill.

When we were finished, I said, “Let’s clean up the garage.”

By Lorrie Goldin 

Labels: grieving, husband, Lorrie Goldin, sick cat, teenagers

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The gap between my children has never seemed as large as it does now. I intended to have them three years apart, but infertility interrupted my plans and my son, George, came along nine years after his sister, Venny. 

Labels: children's age differences, kids, Patricia Ljutic, teenagers

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Ten years ago I learned that one key to successful parenting was consistency. When my boys were three and five I found myself completely overwhelmed.  I took a Positive Discipline workshop with other consoling miserable parents, most of whom had teenagers and these parents were really not loving life. 

They told wonderful Afterschool Special-worthy horror stories, but then they would cry. At least my two whirling dervishes were in bed by eight, and I still outweighed them by fifty pounds if things got ugly.

Ten years ago all my fears were homegrown: holding onto the banister, keeping cleaning supplies out of reach, wearing sunscreen, standing up in the tub, jumping off the top bunk, wearing a helmet, asking before you pet a strange dog. 

The controlled substances were sugar and videos.

But now I have teenagers and I feel anything but consistent.  

I am three different mothers.  

I have three kids and each needs their own mom. I am a different mother in my thirteen-year old’s bedroom than I am when I cross the hall into my eight-year olds, and a third when I go downstairs to discuss Driver’s Ed with the fifteen-year old.

With adolescence comes the top-shelf fears: driving with idiots, indulging, enlisting, bailing on college, federal prosecution for illegal file-sharing or tattooing their band’s name on their forearm.

I haven’t even started dealing with the girlfriends yet. 

But if we are consistent, we three moms, it is that we morph like the beach. We receive the gifts and the wreckage from the ebb and flow of each child’s triumphs, insecurities, accomplishments, and frustrations. 

The tsunamis of adolescence can trash us.

We often look like a disheveled wreck even if we’re smiling. 

My mothering will never be mistaken for a balmy beach in paradise, and like that beach, I look better in the soft indirect light of a sunset.

By Mary Allison Tierney

Labels: Mary Allison Tierney, teenagers

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We don’t have a strict curfew for our seventeen-year-old daughter, but we do have one rule: she must wake us up whenever she comes home.

I demand more than the rumble of the garage door opening, more than a breezy, “Hi, I’m back!” from the hallway. I need skin-to-skin contact, to have her shake me awake, to hear how the dance was or what kind of sushi they ate.

“But you’re asleep. I’ll just turn the hall light out instead,” she protests. “What difference does it make?”

“I like to hear about your evening,” I say.

I don’t want to tell her that one difference is smell: illicit smells of pleasure and danger, like alcohol or cigarettes or marijuana or sex.

Another difference is sight, a once-over for pupil size and red rims.

Is it vigilance in the guise of love? Or love in the guise of vigilance?

Yes and yes. Perhaps they are no different.

But I know I will sleep more soundly after the exquisite pleasure of hearing about her evening, kissing her goodnight, and knowing she is safe.

By Lorrie Goldin

Labels: Lorrie Goldin, teenagers

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I was not always in favor of a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. Here’s what changed my mind.

Three years ago a colleague shared that his friend's fourteen-year-old son, traveling between school in San Francisco and home in Marin County, got off the bus one day after school and walked to the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. Some things were troubling him, and he put his leg up over the railing, preparing to jump. Then he took his leg down, caught the bus home, and told his mother, who sought help immediately.

He's fine now.

My daughter was fourteen at the time I heard this story. Any lingering ambivalence I felt about the barrier evaporated. So much of the barriers to the barrier have to do with our failure to identify not only with the person who is suffering, but also with the hope that lies beyond one moment. A bridge barrier will not save every life, but it will buy precious moments that will save many lives.

The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of people who are stopped from committing suicide do not go on to kill themselves. Some will, but most do not--impulses pass, circumstances change, help is found, the balance toward affirming life over death shifts.

A barrier will save not only most of the would-be jumpers, but the families, friends and communities who are always devastated in the wake of a suicide.

If the choice were between spending forty million on a bridge barrier versus forty million on excellent mental health services, I would choose the latter so that more people could be helped. But it's not as if there's an existing pot of money that will get transferred back and forth between important competing causes. Both need commitment and will, and right now the time is ripe for the commitment and will to erect a suicide barrier.

Refusing to do so out of a false hope that the money will reach those in need some other way is misguided

Several years ago, a toddler tragically fell to her death from the Golden Gate Bridge in a freak accident. She had somehow slipped through a narrow gap between the curb and the roadway. Funds were immediately found to close the gap, although this was the only such death to have ever occurred and there was almost no chance it would happen again. Arguably, the money could have been better spent since it was unlikely that more such tragedies would occur. Nonetheless, an infinitesimally small risk was quickly remedied.

True, this remedy did not obscure any views. Nor did the loss of life involve mental illness or teenagers or difficult or impulsive people.

It was a matter of will and empathy.

So is the bridge barrier.

Suicide is not a freak accident, but a real and preventable risk. Imagine if it were you or someone you loved about to swing a leg up over the rail. You might then find the money and the ability to get used to a slightly different fabulous view.

By Lorrie Goldin

Note: The Bridge District is accepting comments on the five options for a bridge barrier until August 25. I encourage you to go to the Bridge District Website and vote in favor of a barrier (not the net, which poses its own risks and extra costs). The site is http://www.ggbsuicidebarrier.com/. On the right side is a link for "Comments to the DEIR/EA" (Draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Assessment). Click on the link, and then enter your name and your choice.

 

Labels: Golden Gate Bridge, Lorrie Goldin, Suicide, Suicide Prevention, teenagers

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“Did you make the appointment yet?” asks my 16-year-old daughter.

She’s not talking about a trip to Planned Parenthood, so I have deliberately ignored her request for awhile. But since this is the third time in a month she’s inquired, I guess it’s not a passing fancy. She really, really wants her mole removed.

Some people regard their moles as beauty spots. My daughter does not. Particularly the big, raised one that sprawls out from under her spaghetti straps.

“I’m so self-conscious,” she moans.

“Did you even listen to David Roche at your assembly?” I want to scream. David Roche, who grew up with horrific facial disfigurement, is a revered speaker who motivates kids to rise beyond their preoccupation with appearances. Apparently, his inspirational message failed to inspire my daughter.

So has our own example. We drive dented utilitarian cars and never shine our shoes. We give money to Oxfam, the Democratic Party, and other hopeless causes. How could we have raised a child with such appallingly shallow values?

“It’s so expensive,” I say. “Think what else that money could buy.”

“You waste all that money highlighting your hair, and you have to keep doing it! This would just be a one-time thing!” she argues.

As usual, I am speechless. No doubt she’ll some day have an illustrious career as a cutthroat labor negotiator and be able to afford all the cosmetic surgery she wants, along with a personal secretary to book her doctor’s appointments. In the meantime, what’s my defense? Why didn’t I go to law school so I could whip out a killer rejoinder? Instead I became a therapist. I am deeply mired in the skill of listening without responding, hopelessly empathic to all points of view.

For that matter, why didn’t I have children sooner? Then I wouldn’t have to subject my faltering mental acuity and graying hair to her nimble adolescent scrutiny. It’s so unfair!

“It’s so unfair!” she echoes. “It’s not my fault I have moles.”

“It’s not my fault either,” I think. “Blame your father.”

Lamely, I defend spending a small fortune at the hairdresser’s when I could instead be saving whole villages of children from the ravages of malaria.

“I earn this money. And besides, there’s lots of things I don’t do for the sake of vanity.”

But I’m losing the battle. Not because words escape me, but because I know what it’s like to be 16 and self-conscious. I know what it’s like to be 52 and self-conscious.

And I know that once in awhile, indulging in a remedy for a problem that is not really a problem is not that big a problem.

By Lorrie Goldin

Labels: Beauty, self-absorbed, teenagers, utilitarian

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