Mid-CenturyModernMoms

Who’s the Rebel Now?

by Laura Benedict

Just now—no lie—Pomegranate came in to say that she knows that just because she doesn’t do drugs or have sex doesn’t mean she’s a good person. Also that it scares her a little because God gives her pretty much everything she asks for now, and does it mean her life is going to suck later, or will she suddenly die in a tsunami or something.

Our discussion veered well into the religious and philosophical, so I won’t delve into it here. But I will say that she is a good person. She’s nice without being sappy or condescending; she’s one of those kids who doesn’t just hang with one group of friends, but floats. She works very hard for her grades and the solos she gets in choir performances. She’s almost always kind to her unpredictable, emotion-driven little brother. And she’s occasionally grateful for what she has.

How in the hell did this happen? Where did this angel-child come from?

Oh, I have my exasperated moments: When she says, “Why do you hate me?” after realizing that I’m not going to change the whole family’s travel plans so that she can go to a party. Or when her father replaces the five gajillion gigabyte video Ipod he bought her “just because” with a refurbished one because she carelessly lost the one he gave her. Or when she asks me if she can pretty-please drive on her own to meet her boyfriend a mere three days after we revoked her driving privileges for an undetermined amount of time—and you would’ve done the same if you had seen her pull out in front of a school bus, nearly killing herself and her little brother because she hadn’t bothered to wipe off the passenger window. Or when she hurt my feelings last week, making me want to cry.  But, I digress….

Sometimes I get a little suspicious of the goodness of her in much the same way she is suspicious of the bountiful circumstances of her life. Does that sound ridiculous? I don’t understand how she is the way she is, and I certainly don’t deserve to have such a well-behaved child. It freaks me out.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I was a nightmare of a teenager—that girl who was always getting other kids into trouble, that girl that no mother of a son wanted to see show up on her doorstep. Ah, those were the days. I’m so tame now. For a long time I looked back on those years with intense mortification. But I confess that I’m just a smidge proud of that rebel girl who got a job taking clothes at the dry cleaner’s counter at the age of fifteen so she could support her clothes, gasoline, concert ticket, boyfriend, and—not long after—beer and Jack Daniel’s habits. My parents were generous with their car and made sure I had all the necessities and lovely vacations. Plus, they loved me. I was never grateful, though, and I treated them badly.

My father keeps warning me that Pom’s going to go off the rails someday and rebel in some catastrophic way. Presumably it’s in the genes. Maybe she will eventually rebel. But I don’t think it will be in any way that I’ll immediately recognize.

Or maybe Pom missed the gene. Maybe it’s her brother who has inherited the nightmare-teenager gene. I hadn’t thought of that. Damn.

Oh, No--The Possibilities Really Are Endless!

by Laura Benedict

The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom...
        -Bell Hooks
        American critic and writer

Just last Friday, I watched as Pom drove away with only Bengal in the car for the very first time. It was also the first time she drove the car without me, her father or her grandfather with her. I had been anticipating that day for many months—okay, many years—okay, since I lay on my side in my bed one dark night, newly pregnant with her—but the depth of what I’m feeling has me completely overwhelmed.
I imagined I would be fretful about her being in an accident, or parking in dark, scary parking lots, or being carjacked, or getting lost and having to ask directions from the only house for miles around: that of a backwoods meth dealer with a predilection for blue-eyed sixteen year-old girls. I know things will happen about which she’ll say to her brother, “Mommy can never, ever know what just happened!”  I make my living with my imagination. It knows no bounds when it comes to tragedy. Other moms have covered such fears beautifully here--rather they have written beautifully about adjusting to them. As I read Nina’s wonderful post about her son’s gaining confidence and independence when he mastered public transportation, I quailed a bit. I felt a little ashamed—perhaps I’m one of those “parent-as-bodyguard” moms. I’ll have to ponder that.
But all those fears are buried for the moment as I am now buzzed on the adrenalin of a new worry: Pom doesn’t need me so much anymore.
It first hit me when my DH and I watched Pom back out of a parking space near the restaurant where we’d all just had lunch. “Remember when they let us leave the hospital with her?” DH said. Now THAT was a weird moment. I gave birth at a hospital two hours from our home and, three days later, the nurse just checked that we had a car seat and waved us off. About ten minutes into the trip we said, almost at the same moment, “Can you believe they let us just drive away with her? With no one to supervise?” But it hit me harder these sixteen years later when I returned to our empty house and realized that I wouldn’t have to hop back in the car a few hours later and pick up Pom and Bengal at school. (I had dropped DH at work.) It was just me. In the empty house. Alone with the dog. In the empty, quiet house. The rather messy, empty, quiet house.
Worse, there was a student government meeting after school to which Pom had to drag Bengal. Then DH and I had a function to go to and wouldn’t be home until almost 10:00. It felt like a very long day.
I haven’t been so great at building up Pom’s independence. She’s as responsibility-lazy as I let her be. Thank goodness she’s academically ambitious and is highly self-interested. I’m a big fan of enlightened self-interest. It’s what saved my naïve little rear end a thousand times before I turned eighteen. I wouldn’t be surprised if, now that she has a taste of independence, she’ll develop a real taste for it. She’s my daughter after all.
Writing this, I realize that the half-stunned, untethered fear inside me right now isn’t so much that my children won’t need me—it’s the realization that I need to be needed. Oh. It feels weird to say that. I’ve always prided myself on my independence, and have been—for almost all of my life—fond of the phrase, “No, thank you. I can manage just fine all by myself!” But, apparently, that’s not quite true. I can’t get by so well without someone else to focus on. I love to fuss-over, feed, cuddle, love, nibble, tote, fetch, yell, and provide-for. I love to button-up, zip-into, tease, tuck-in, and listen. These things have filled my life for so long, I don’t know what I’ll do without a steady diet of them.
I know I have a few years left, particularly with Bengal. And there is my long-suffering DH to tend to. We don’t date often, though we talk, talk, talk and laugh a lot. Our plan is to be here for one another long after both kids drive away.
As Pom and I stood in line waiting to order lunch that afternoon, she (in most dramatic Pom-fashion) threw her arms wide and said, “The possibilities are just endless!” I wish you could have seen her smile!
Maybe her new driver’s license actually means the same thing for both of us: freedom. I wonder if she’s as scared as I am.
Yeah. Right.

Skin Hunger

by Laura Benedict

The year before Pom was born, I began writing my first novel. I finished it eight years later and called it SKIN HUNGER. It was never published, but I still love the title. Now there’s a YA novel of the same name that’s all about wizards and such, so it may be a while before I use it myself.

I picked up the title from a paragraph in a parenting book I’ve long forgotten. Skin hunger is such an evocative phrase, isn’t it? It’s exactly what it sounds like it might be: the elemental emotional and physiological need for human touch.

How we love to touch our babies. They seem to bloom at our touch—and they really do! When children are not touched, they suffer. If you know much at all about the history of WWII, you’ll remember the stories of the German children taken away by (or given to) the Nazis to be raised as Aryan exemplars: they were considered too precious to be sullied by the touch of other humans. Most of these children either died before adolescence or suffered severe emotional problems.

We need to be touched. We crave to be touched. We cannot live unless we are touched—frequently and lovingly.

The other night, Pom’s boyfriend, Ruger, was visiting. I think we were watching Pinky and the Brain or some other edifying cartoon on television. The two of them were sitting on the couch, and Ruger had his arm around her; she was completely relaxed with him, her head against the front of his shoulder, one of her feet up on the coffee table, and she was holding one of his hands. I had never seen her so physically close to a guy besides her father or grandfather ever before, and I was a little startled. (Bengal, my eight year-old son was scrunched companionably against Ruger’s other side, too.) But of course she’s going to eventually be physically close with people outside our family. It’s the healthy thing.

Pom is sixteen. We have very frank discussions about her father’s and my expectations for her dating behavior. Remember, this is the girl who called us last year when she got her first kiss. She told me just the other day that she laughs every time a doctor asks her if she’s sexually active, and says they always look at her like they don’t believe she isn’t. She takes her (Christian) faith commitment very seriously and it is essential to her attitude toward her sexuality.

Teenage sexual promiscuity is certainly nothing new. Our generation didn’t invent it. Our parents didn’t, and their parents didn’t. But I wonder how much teenage sexual activity isn’t simply a replacement for the touch these kids are craving, the touch they’re no longer getting from their families.

I touch my kids a lot. Pom still holds my hand sometimes when we’re at the mall, and now that Bengal is taller than he was even six months ago, I can rest my arm around his shoulders as we walk (I know this isn’t going to last long, so I’ll enjoy it while I can.). They still occasionally wander into our bedroom on a Saturday morning and pile onto our bed. I can’t pick them up anymore, but I can still be near them—for a while, anyway.

It’s appropriate for my kids to extend that touch outside our family. Pom is very physical with her girl friends, too. There are “no touching” rules for boys and girls at her school, but the girls are very cozy with one another. (Pom jokes that it would be a great school in which to be a lesbian, but, oh my, her little school is so not ready for that!) I’m glad that Pom is comfortable enough in her own skin to be appropriately close to other people.

I didn’t handle my own teenage skin hunger very well, which is what that first novel was all about. I’m very proud of the way Pom is handling hers. Bengal is more of a work in progress, and we’ll give him all the cuddling he needs for a long time to come—though given his comfortable attitude with Ruger, I’m not too worried.

Go hug your teenager. Go! Now!

ENUF W/ THE TXT MSGS!

"R U Picking up Pom or are gparents bringing her home?"

This is the text message I received from one of Pom’s friends the other day, asking if I was going to pick up Pom after her European trip with her grandparents. I did not hit “reply” on my cellphone. I’m not a text message kind of person. I’m a talking kind of person.

We purchased our last batch of cellphones—three of them to be exact—almost two years ago. At our house in the country we can only get Verizon’s signal. No Sprint. No Alltel. No Virgin. And Verizon isn’t cheap. But I sprang for the giganto bucket of minutes plan, thinking that Pom would be burning up the phone lines with her brand new friends after having spent three lonely years homeschooling with her boring parents.

In common parlance: Duh! What was I thinking?! I doubt she’s actually used a hundred minutes talking on her phone. Most of those minutes were spent talking to me—or her dad. Who needs talk minutes when everyone texts?

What’s with the unlimited texting thing? Her friends text while they drive, text while they eat, text from their beds, their bathrooms, their basketball games. Every time I see them in the hallways after school, they’re punching their little number pads—many even have entire tiny keyboards.

How many times in the past year did I hear, “Mama, why can’t you change our plan so I can get unlimited texting?”

I went into the Verizon office for something else about six months ago, but inquired about texting as well. The guy told me that for five bucks a month, she could have 250 text messages. So I called Pom (who actually answered her phone) and asked if she’d give up five dollars of her twenty-five dollar a month allowance for 250 messages. She was thrilled!

You probably can guess what happened next. It worked out fine for a while. But then came the bill with an extra fifteen dollars tacked on. Then thirty-five. Finally, she had to hand over almost seventy dollars of her babysitting money to Verizon and me. I did not bail her out! I was surprised, however, that she handed it over without even a whimper.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, it was time to get new phones, and a new plan. Pom didn’t get a phone with a keyboard. I got the fancy phone—and it has a video camera, which is cool. No keyboard. Like I said, I don’t text. But we also got her a ten buck a month plan that gets her all the in-Verizon texting she wants and 500 non-Verizon texts. Should be enough, and she can afford it.

So what did her friend really want to know? I called her back immediately. It took a minute to get her attention because I could hear her texting on her keyboard even as my call went through. “Hell-ooo, hell-ooo,” I kept saying. Finally, she came on.

Seems she imagined that I would be thrilled to take her with me to the major metropolitan airport where I’m picking up Pom today. I mentioned that I would be staying overnight at my parents’ house the previous night, that I really wasn’t comfortable with having her along, that—uh—she would miss two days of school!

“But what if my mom says it’s okay?” said she.

**sigh**

I laughed and said, “I don’t think so, honey.”

What I should’ve said was, YGTBKM! YCMU G/F!

Separation Anxiety

Pomegranate, my fifteen year-old, is off on the trip of a lifetime this week: three weeks in Europe with my in-laws. A mini Grand Tour.

I’m a wreck.

Pom is the child who didn’t speak a word or phrase of whose origin I wasn’t completely certain until she was three years old. This is the girl who, last spring, called me within twenty minutes of receiving her first kiss. She used to talk about how she wanted to build a house in our backyard where she could live with her husband and children—a detail she now denies, of course, but that’s probably a healthy thing.

The first leg of her trip was a one-hour, direct flight, and the airline people were kind enough to let me see her to the gate. When we got there we found that the flight was delayed an hour and I was tempted to hang around. But something told me that it was important that I leave her there, alone. To say there was a knot in my stomach would be an understatement. Of course, I was the one who had to fight back tears (and didn’t do such a great job). She hugged me and told me that everything would be okay with condescension befitting a queen.

I want to believe that, when she’s in Europe, she’ll always get on the right trains, she won’t go off sightseeing with some nineteen year-old cad named Paolo, she won’t leave her purse on the back of her chair and have her passport stolen, she won’t be run over by a fruit truck, she won’t be kidnapped and sold into slavery because of her beautiful blue eyes. My in-laws will be nearby, but they are not worriers. When their own children were young, they encouraged them to have their own adventures when they traveled in foreign lands.  Pom is thinking a lot more for herself these days, and I can tell that she has that same certain feeling of ultimate invincibility that all teenagers have.  It would stun her to even know that I know she has that feeling.

I am exhausted now. I know this is an important step for both of us. She needs me to trust her, and needs her independence. I know teenagers who have gone on trips without their parents that were filled with much greater risk: mission trips to China and India, mountain-climbing in Switzerland, building houses in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. A trip to Europe with Grandma and Grandpa should be cake of the most delightful sort. And it is, for her.

Who knew that separation anxiety wasn’t just for three year-olds? I need to remember to breathe. Breathing will be important, too, when Pom turns sixteen and gets her driver’s license next month. (Uh, two weeks after her birthday because she stopped at but then turned left on a red light with the whole family in the car!) I have a feeling that this is just the beginning.