Kelly Poe Wilson

As anyone who has children can tell you, one of the hardest things to find is a decent book of parenting advice. This is probably because most parenting books were written by people who—although perhaps were successful in parenting their own children—almost certainly never successfully parented yours. If they had successfully parented your children, then that would be a different story. Those books would not only fly off of the shelves, they would single-handedly save the publishing industry.

And who knows? Perhaps one day we’ll have the technology to make this possible; perhaps one day every parent will be given the opportunity to sit down and write their younger selves a “how to” guide to parenting their own children. Then again, we might have this technology already, and the government is just preventing us from accessing it out of fear that we’ll use it to dispense advice on how not to be a parent at all. Perhaps they are afraid that, after times of great parental stress (like Christmas Eve) the population might drop below sustainable levels. I know that there have certainly been times in my parenting life when I would have gladly gone back to a period, oh, say, ten months before my daughter Clementine was born and left a note saying, “A word to the wise: three shots of whisky is sufficient. No need to drink the whole bottle.”

Unfortunately, however, (or perhaps fortunately), we don’t have access to parenting books from the future. What we do have, though, is the next best thing: the world’s best parenting book from the past. It’s true. You might not have noticed it before, because, for some reason, it’s not filed under “Parenting Advice,” but rather under “Military History,” but there really is a perfect book of parenting advice on the shelves right now.

It’s called The Art of War.

I’m not sure who this Sun Tzu is, but he really knows his way around children. (Even though, amusingly enough, he refers to parents as “warriors” and children as “the enemy.”) Inside the pages of this slim volume, he packs in one piece of excellent parenting advice after another. Take the part about plans and planning, for instance. In that section he directs parents/warriors to “lay plans, but not be a slave to them.” Ain’t it the truth? I can’t tell you how many theories I had about raising children—before I actually had them, that is.

Next he suggests that, in order to maintain your army’s core strength, you should limit the amount of conflicts you engage in. Otherwise known as “pick your battles.”

The he suggests that when you must battle, you be the one who chooses the battlefield. In other words, wait until you get home from the mall.

Other valuable pieces of advice include knowing the art of strategic retreat, attacking as a unit (Mom and Dad on the same page), defending existing positions before seeking to win new ones, exploiting the enemy’s weakness, and, whenever possible, outmaneuvering them.

The beautiful thing about this book is that even the advice that seems far out now will eventually, the more you engage your enemies in battle—I mean, raise your children—start to make sense. Take one of the last rules, the importance of developing a good spy network. While this might seem ridiculous when your kids are five, it’s the best advice ever when they are fifteen.

Which is why I still haven’t discounted one of the other odd pieces of advice in this invaluable book: attack by fire. I’m not saying I think I’m going to be using that particular piece of advice any time soon, but just in case, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. And, of course, fire extinguishers. Lots of fire extinguishers.

I’ve always been conflicted about exactly how much I should scare my kids. I don’t mean the jumping out of closets type of scaring: as far as I’m concerned, you can never have too much of that sort of thing. Prepares them for future zombie apocalypses, and all that. No, I mean the type of scaring that involves things that are far worse than zombies in the closet, if for no other reason than that they are more likely to happen. Things like chopping their fingers off with that butterfly knife their crazy uncle gave them for Christmas, or having to work jobs that require them to wear funny hats for the rest of their lives because they majored in keg tapping in college.

The question is: should you simply tell them to be careful waving that stick around because they could hurt somebody, or should you tell them to be careful waving that stick around because your best friend in grade school put his eye out playing with a sharp stick that looked exactly like that one. (Even though he wasn’t your best friend. And he didn’t exactly put his eye out. But he did get hurt. And dammit, just put down that stick already.)

In other words, is it okay to go overboard a little when you’re trying to warn them of the potential consequences of their unwise choices?

Which is better? The light touch: “If you run out into the street without looking you might get hit by a car, and it will be like the worst ouchie you have ever had. Ever. Plus you’ll miss the party.”
Or the heavy-handed approach, otherwise known as the “James Joyce describing the torments of hell” touch: “The next time you run out into the street without looking a ginormous truck is going to come along and squash you like a bug and you’ll be in the middle of the street, screaming in agony for hours until you finally, gratefully, die.”

In years past, I was always a fan of the former. My reasoning was: why scare them into potential squirrelishness? In other words, why take a chance on creating one of those flinchy kids, the kind that are afraid of everything and everyone, and who, unfortunately, usually end up being the kind of kids that other children delight in tormenting (thus perpetuating the cycle of flinchyness)? Those kids—the ones who go to the pool but won’t get wet, or who scream when they see a strange dog across the street—kind of drive me crazy. Seeing one of those kids hyperventilate because a bee landed on the picnic table next to them always makes me think: take it easy, kid—the world’s really not that scary. Or at least, it used to. Then my first child turned into a teenager. And I realized that, for one thing, the world actually can be a pretty scary place, and for another, to a teenager, the only good warning is a terrifying warning.

Our parents and grandparents knew this. They didn’t show us “safety clips” in driver’s ed—they showed us “Blood on the Highway.” And after that, when we finally got our licenses, they didn’t just tell us not to pick up hitch-hikers—they told us awful stories that made “Texas Chain-Saw Massacre” look like a public service announcement.

And the thing is, maybe they were right. Not about the guy with a hook for a hand who hangs out at make out point to harass/dismember unwary “parkers,” but about the necessity of a really good scary story to make a teenager sit up and listen.

Who knows? Maybe it really does take all of those years of flinching to remind you to wear your seat belt and drive the speed limit. And watch out for zombies, of course.

Okay, fair warning: this is going to be one of those, “Back when I was a kid . . .” columns. Anyway, back when I was a kid, we actually went to school. Well, okay, not really—but at least we had the common decency to pretend we were going. We got up in the morning, put on our school clothes, ate a healthy breakfast, grabbed our backpacks, kissed our mothers goodbye and then headed down the street to the bus stop—whereupon we climbed into the back of a Bronco filled with teenagers and cheap beer and spent the day goofing off at the river, only to show up back at our houses at approximately the same time school let out sunburnt, dehydrated, and full of “learning.”

Today’s kids, however, will have none of that. When they don’t want to go to school they simply stand in the kitchen and say things like, “I’m not going to school today (this week/this month/ever again).” And then they turn around and go back to bed while we are still standing there, all dressed for work and gibbering.

The ensuing battle usually ends up with them being resentfully deposited in front of the school, us being late for work, and everyone else looking up “gibbering” on their iPhone. (“Oh, I see: ‘to speak inarticulately or foolishly.’ Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”)

Those of you without school-age children (the non-gibberers) are probably reading this and thinking, “Well, so what? At least this way they actually end up going to school; they actually end up learning.” Which, in a way, is true. They do end up in school. They do end up learning. Unfortunately, though, what they end up learning is only the stuff that can be found in books.

Hey, I’ve got no problem with the stuff that can be found in books (see gibbering, above). But on the road to adulthood there’s quite a bit more to be learned than how to use the subjunctive (as it were). There’s other stuff, too. Important stuff. Stuff like, well, how to ditch school. And when they stand in the kitchen and announce their intentions not to go to school they certainly aren’t learning how to ditch. (True, you could argue that they are learning how to argue, but saying a teenager needs to learn how to argue is like saying a fish needs to learn how to swim. Learning how to ditch, however, is another matter entirely—that’s more like teaching a fish how to get the worm and still spit out the hook.)

My worry is that we are raising a generation of kids who have no idea how to malinger; kids who don’t even have enough sense to hold the thermometer on the lightbulb when they pretend to have a fever. Who don’t know how to create convincing cover story for a fake sleepover. (“No one answered when you called the number I gave you? Yeah, that’s because they’re super religious—they’re not allowed to use technology after midnight on Saturday. Midnight in the Old Country, that is. So, like 6:45 here.”)

I am sure there are some people out there who are still saying, “But why would we want our kids to learn how not to go to school?” For those people, the answer is this: because the kid who doesn’t know how to get out of school (without whining to their parents) grows up to be the adult who gets every crappy assignment at work because they never learned how to “ghost” out of the boss’s way. Or worse yet, gets the crappy mission during wartime because they were the only soldier in line who didn’t know to step back when the call went out for volunteers to “step forward.”

Actually, that last reason is really all you need.

In the past I’ve written columns about how living with children is worse than living with the most disgusting college roommate I ever had, and when I wrote those columns it was true. The other day, however, a friend of mine posted a list of all of the places he had ever lived in Flagstaff; this, of course, inspired everyone else (including me) to post back all of their Flagstaff “residences” in turn. (I put “residences” in quotations here because I’m not sure that “under a camper shell in so-and-so’s backyard” and “on Dennise’s couch” really count as “residences.” More like way stations.)

Anyway, the point is that when I listed off all of my old Flagstaff abodes (only one couch, I’m proud to say), I suddenly realized that not only had I totally forgotten one of my former residences, but also one of my former roommates. (I say “forgotten,” but it was more like “repressed.”) While I was remembering that uber-disgusting roommate from years back I finally realized two things: one, that post-college roommates can actually be more disgusting than college roommates, and two, there are worse things than living with children—like living with teenagers.

Of course, in the case of the roommate, the main problem was that he was a tweaker, and, at the time, I hadn’t yet realized what the full effects of meth were. (Just like, even now, I haven’t yet fully realized what the full effects of being a teenager are.) And yet, I think I’ve seen enough of both of them to know that things are probably going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Which is why, in honor of all of my disgusting roommates, both past and present, I am hereby presenting my list of the six reasons why I’d rather live with a tweaker than a teenager:

1.)Sometimes tweakers go on cleaning binges.

It’s true: when this guy wasn’t out stealing stuff to try and support his habit, he was obsessing over the grout in our bathroom. And lining up the cans of food in our pantry (both of them) by size. And picking invisible pieces of lint off of his face (when I could redirect this one to the carpet he was better than a Dyson.)

2.)They don’t break your stuff.

Also true: tweakers treat your stuff very nicely, because they never know when they are going to need to steal it and pawn it. You’ll never find a tweaker listening to your ipod in the bath tub (“I was afraid I might drop mine.”), or playing basketball next to your new flat screen TV. True, they might wreck your car, but then again, at least that’s because they were high and not because they were texting. I don’t know why the one is more annoying than the other—it just is. Maybe because nobody ever gets high and tweets “Oh Em Gee!”

3.)When a tweaker tells you they hate you (or some other hurtful thing) you know it’s really the drugs that are talking. With teens, it’s their hormones. Which, really, is still them.

4.)Tweakers always have a lighter. Okay, so that’s not really an advantage, but it’s still true.

5.)You never have to take a tweaker to the orthodontist. You can’t straighten teeth that aren’t there.

6.)The worst thing you’ll ever find inside a yogurt container tossed under a tweaker’s bed is yogurt. Or maybe a cigarette butt. Definitely nothing that brings to mind that old “Saturday Night Live” sketch “It’s not yogurt.” And definitely nothing that sends you running out the door screaming and gagging at the same time.

Which reminds me: I really need to find out if Dennise’s couch is open.

Once upon a time, I moved to a town called Flagstaff to go to school. After I had been there for a few weeks I realized that carrying my books, papers, pens, and liquor bottles around would be a whole lot easier if I had something to put them in, and so I bought a backpack. It was a good backpack, made by a local company on South Beaver Street. (Of course, like every other downtown business of the past, this place is now a bar.)

Over the years, this backpack and I have had a generally pleasant relationship. Sure, just like with any other relationship, ours has not been without its share of ups and downs. And I wouldn’t be completely honest if I didn’t admit that there were a few times when I thought that it was all over. There was the time the zipper broke (twice) and had to be replaced. And the time when a ballpoint pen contracted the pen version of ebola and bled out in the back pocket. And once I even made the mistake of lending it to my daughter, Clementine, and she decided it was easier to cut the back pocket open than to unzip it.

But other than that we’ve had a good life together. It’s nothing special—just a plain red color—so it’s never had to suffer the indignity of, say, a Hannah Montana backpack, and go out of style. And it’s not trendy, so I don’t have to worry about people looking at all the carabiner clips on it and thinking, “Right, like you’re going to climb El Capitan anytime soon.”

True, our relationship is probably not as exciting as the relationships Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have with their backpacks, but then again, at least I never have to worry about my backpack “accidentally” going home with Jennifer Aniston. The fact of the matter is, there’s a lot to be said for safe, solid, and secure. Or at least, I thought there was—right up until I saw the relationship my daughter has with her backpack (or should I say backpacks), and I realized how lame our relationship really was.

For one thing, with me and my backpack, there’s no drama. Unlike Clementine, I have never left my backpack on a bus, a train, a plane, or a boat. I have also never left my backpack somewhere where the police have to come and investigate it. I have never left it behind when I got out of the car, never left it under my desk when I left class, and never left it sitting, forlornly, by a frozen pond.

What this means is that, unlike Clementine, I don’t get to have the joyful reunions that she and her backpacks share—those tender moments that only come after the break up. (Mmmm—make-up backpack.) I also don’t get that thrill that comes from starting a new backpack relationship—those first few giddy days when you are still discovering secret cell phone pockets and hidden lumbar support. (Or even better, the thrill of starting a new backpack relationship and then still getting to make up with your old one. Also known as—“Oh, I guess it wasn’t stolen. I guess I just left it in Lauren’s car.” )

Also, unlike Clementine, I don’t get to go backpack shopping every few weeks—except, of course, in my mind. (Oh, like you’ve never fantasized about bringing home a strange backpack—maybe one of those little leather numbers.) But then again, even though I don’t get to have the backpack drama that Clementine does, I do get to have a special relationship with each and every new backpack that she will never have—at least not until she’s out on her own.

That’s right: I get to pay for them.

I am always amazed at the things we have to teach people, or, worse yet, remind them of. Take last month, for example: while I am always happy to see NFL players running up and down the field in pink shoes, it does make me wonder if they believe that there is really anyone left out there who doesn’t think that breast cancer is a BAD thing.

The same goes for last month’s Wear Purple Day, which was a day where everyone was encouraged to wear purple to show their support for all of the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered teens in their lives. As I put on my purple shirt, I couldn’t help but thinking thoughts similar to the ones I had had about National Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Really? There are people out there who don’t think that bullying is a BAD thing?

And then I started checking the news, and I was appalled at the number of people who were not only denying that there is a problem with bullying GLBT teens, but would actually prefer that there be a little bit more of it. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Clint McCance. (In case George Takei hasn’t shown up in your inbox to bring you up to speed, Clint McCance is the Arkansas school board member who posted a message on Facebook stating his wish for even more GLBT teen suicides. Nice. Perhaps we should have a separate social network for people like that—may I suggest “Douchebook?”)

And yet, it’s not people like the aforementioned Douchey McDouche that are the real problem. At least he was upfront and honest about his hatred. (And probably always was and always will be—turns out the same people who shoved you into the lockers when you were seventeen are the ones who won’t let you into the hospital room to see your life partner when you are seventy-two). No, the real problem is the people who hide their hatred behind a facade of “protecting our children,” which is ironic, because they are the ones who are refusing to take the steps necessary to ensure that all of our children are protected. Steps like teaching respect for other people’s gender and sexuality choices as far back as kindergarten.

Take for example what happened last summer in Helena, Montana, where school officials suggested new tolerance guidelines that taught first graders that “human beings can love people of the same gender.” This was anathema to a local pastor, who complained from the pulpit that “We do not want the minds of our young polluted with the things of a carnal-minded society.” Yeah, better not teach six year olds to be nice to each other—because who knows better than a christian how crazy talk like that can get people nailed to a couple of pieces of wood?

Or what about what just happened in Michigan, where a teacher was actually suspended for taking a stand against anti-gay bullying at school? (And where a totally awesome openly gay fourteen year old went to the school board with his plea that “just like Dr. King hoped that one day his grandchildren would be judged by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin, he hoped to one day be judged by who he was, and not by who he loved.”)

Actually, it was that fourteen year old boy who got me thinking about what the real purpose of those pink shoes was: they were about hope. And my hope is that one day, NFL players will be running down the field with purple shoes on their feet. And that people everywhere will look at them and say to themselves: “Wait a minute: is there really anybody left who doesn’t think that bullying is a BAD thing?”

One time, when my daughter Clementine was little, she tried to cut off her own eyelashes with a pair of sewing scissors. I can still clearly remember seeing those sharp, sharp blades rushing toward her eyes, and the awful visions of the future that followed: the blood, the crying, the desperate trip to the emergency room, and then, finally, standing next to her as she picked out her new glass eye. Of course, I didn’t say any of that to her—at that moment it was all I could do to gasp out a tortured, “gah!” while I snatched the scissors out of her hand, so incapable was I of fully articulating the horror of what I was feeling. She, of course, at age two, was also incapable of articulating what she was feeling, and so had to be content with howling her displeasure at me—her own version of “gah!” I suppose.

Now, of course, she’s much more articulate about expressing her displeasure with me, whereas I am even less able than I was before. It’s true: although a dozen or so years have passed since the scissors incident, when confronted with the spectacle of Clementine putting herself in danger I can still say little more than “gah!”

“Gah!” I say when I see her jump out of a truck packed full of teenagers, “gah!” when she posts a questionable picture of herself on Facebook, “gah!” when she brings home a bad grade and dismisses it with, “School is all bullsh*t, anyway.”

Gah.

I was watching an old episode of Star Trek the other day; it was the one where the crew was trapped in a time loop, doomed to make the same bad decision over and over again. And even though they eventually figured out what was happening, they were still unable to send back a message in warning until, finally, in a bit of “Data ex Machina,” Data was able to get the message back through to himself, and they escaped.

If you were to take out the part about Data, and escaping, then that is what it is like to raise a teenager. You can see that you are both trapped in an endlessly repeating time loop; you can see that the same mistakes are being made over and over again, down through the generations, and yet, no matter how desperately you try and shout back a warning through time, it never seems to work. No matter what you say it always just seems to come out as, “gah!”

I wish I had a Data around, someone who was capable of taking the “gahs” and translating them into the words that somehow got through. Words like, “You know, it seems like somebody dies in a car accident in every high school class—please don’t let it be you,” and, “Friends will come and go, but the internet is forever,” and even, “You’re right—school is all bullsh*t, but guess what: so is everything else. Get used to it.”

But I don’t, and I know that my voice, if it comes down the generations at all, comes out all feeble and weak, like the voice of the Incredibly Shrinking Man trapped in the spider web of time.

I’ve heard that there are places on Earth where instead of telescopes gazing deeply into the outer reaches of space, there are ones that are listening intently for the slightest cosmic murmur. Knowing what I know, it won’t surprise me at all if it is actually one of the listening telescopes that picks up on intelligent life long before the seeing ones do. Nor will it surprise me when that first contact sounds an awful lot like a more advanced version of ourselves, and that what they’ll be saying will be suspiciously similar to “gah!”

When I was in eighth grade, there was a girl who rode my bus named Shelly. Shelly made it her mission in life to methodically torture everyone on the bus by singling them out one at a time and then meticulously listing each and every one of their faults. She was kind of like the Simon Cowell of Gilbert Unified School District, except that on American Idol people actually sign up for that kind of torture—nobody chooses to ride the bus. Ever.

Shelly’s preferred method of torture was as follows: once she had singled out her victim du jour she would plop down on the seat in front of them, spin around (in retrospect I’m sure that her entire body spun around, but at the time it seemed like it was only her head), and then proceed to verbally flay her victim alive.

Her delivery was merciless, and her vision all-seeing: I remember that one time she picked a girl that had been a good friend of mine for years; almost immediately she pointed out a small bump on this girl’s left eyelid. Now, like I said, this was a girl I had known for a long time: I had spent nights at her house, jumped on her trampoline, swam in her pool—and I had never once noticed this little flaw. Shelly, however, had picked up on it instantly, as she would, through the course of the year, eventually pick up on every single microscopic flaw each one of us possessed.

For nearly my entire eighth grade year I dreaded the moment when she would turn her Evil Eye my way (no one knew how she picked her next victim: was it where you sat? What you wore? Or was it simply alphabetical?). And then, one inevitable day, it happened: Shelly parked herself in the seat in front of me and began. Her dissection (or rather, vivisection) of me was just as painful as I had feared: I think she even managed to notice a zit I had on the inside of my ear. But then, mercifully, it was all over. The bus arrived at school. We all got off. And the next day it was somebody else’s turn. I would never have to endure another such attack ever again.

Or at least, that’s what I thought. Then I had children.

Today my daughter is in the eighth grade, and while I used to be afraid that one day she would have to deal with her own, personal “Shelly,” it turns out that all my worrying was misplaced: what I should have been afraid of was her turning into a “Shelly” herself. Because, actually, that’s what has happened.

Don’t get me wrong: she’s not a bully towards other people. Who knows, maybe she would like to be, but the fact is that while she does ride a bus, it’s the city bus, which is filled with people who are on their way to work (and grumpy about it), and those people would likely squash an impertinent little critic like a bug. So instead, she has turned all of her attention to me.

“Why do you buy this kind of milk,” she says.

“Why don’t we live in a better house?”

“Why do have to constantly call me and ask me where I am and what I’m doing? Don’t you have any friends of your own?”

And all of a sudden, there I am, right back on the bus. And there is a zit on the inside of my ear.

My only comfort is the knowledge that, eventually, even Shelly grew out of it. In fact, at our twenty year reunion she was very cordial to all of us. And we were cordial back. Once we’d snuck outside and let the air out of her tires, that is.

I used to wonder what what kind of mom I would be when it came to dealing with my daughter’s boyfriends. Would I be the type of mom who introduced myself to each one by sitting on the couch with a forty bottle between my legs and a shotgun on my lap while tossing out conversational landmines like, “Did you know that it’s legal to kill your daughter’s suitor in over twenty different countries? Oh, and by the way, do you have a passport?” Or would I be the harried, disinterested kind of mom, the one who glances up from the newspaper and says, “Didn’t you used to be taller? And blacker? Oh, really? Well, excuse me. I certainly didn’t mean to offend you, Ming.” Or maybe I would even be the private detective mom, the kind who obsessively googles each new boyfriend for their credit scores, arrest records, and hate-filled blogs by former girlfriends.

Eventually, I decided that I would probably end up being a mix of all three. I’m much too nosy to ever be the disinterested type, and yet not quite nosy enough to be a cyber-stalker. (Really: pay no attention to those court orders.) And, of course, I don’t even own a gun (I own plenty of knives, but that’s another story). In other words, I decided that what I was going to do was strike a balance between aloofness and intimidation. Because, like it or not, I was going to have to do something. No matter how much I might wish it otherwise, the future was inevitable: Clementine was going to bring home a never-ending stream of disagreeable young men (and maybe even a few disagreeable young women), and we were just going to have to deal with it.

My husband and I even had a game—the “that’s who Clementine is going to bring home,” game. We’d see some guy walking down the street missing all his front teeth and mumbling to himself and my husband would turn to me and say, “There he is: that’s the guy that Clementine is going to bring home for Thanksgiving. We’ll have to put the turkey in a blender.” Then I’d look around and see some guy with dirty blond dreadlocks, a vacuous expression and a mangy dog on a string and I’d say, “Uh-uh. There’s the guy she’s going to bring home. We’re going to have to cook a tofurkey.” The game would usually end when one of us would take it a little bit too far and point out some guy with the collar popped on his Hollister shirt and say, “No. That’s the guy. We’re going to have to get matching plates,” and then the other one would shudder and say, “Take it back, take it back!”

But then, something completely unexpected happened. Clementine brought home a nice guy. A smart guy. A funny guy. A guy we all like—even Clyde. And suddenly I was really worried, because now, instead of thinking up new ways to get the boyfriends to go, I started wondering how long they’re each going to get to stay.

Look, I’m not saying that I have any idea how this particular relationship will turn out: the last thing I claim to be is an expert on relationships, especially those involving other people. But if I know anything, I know that people always change. Sometimes they change together. Sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, somebody usually ends up saying goodbye.
What this means for me is that, unfortunately, this whole dating thing is turning out to be a lot more complicated than I had originally anticipated. In other words, it is nothing like the mid-season sitcom script I had previously assigned it in my head.

But then again, real life usually isn’t.

It struck me, the other day, when I was standing in the kitchen being yelled at, that the one thing I have never heard an adult say is, “Stop treating me like a child!” I don’t know: maybe there’s a group of adults out there that say this all of the time, but as for myself, I have never had one say it to me. I have, however, had plenty of children say it, which leads me to offer up the following piece of advice: if you find yourself saying “Don’t treat me like a child!” on a fairly regular basis, you might want to take a moment to glance down and check. You may, in fact, be a child.

I’m just sayin’.

Things I’ve also encountered from children as opposed to adults is having someone interrupt me to tell me I’m not listening, having someone yell at me to “stop yelling!” and having someone tell me they’re tired of being ignored as they walk away from me.

Sometimes, when I’m dealing with my teenage daughter, Clementine, I feel like I’m trapped in a game of “No means yes, yes means no: do you want me to hit you again?” Or worse yet, a game of, “I know you are, but what am I?” As in, when I say, “I’d like you to be a little more respectful of my things,” and she replies, “Well, I’d like you to be more respectful of my things!” And all I can think to say is, “Gee I’m sorry—did my antique bathtub get in the way of your blue hair dye again?”

Then there are the times when I’m having a “discussion” with her and I feel like I’ve been dropped into the midst of somebody else’s drama. Like I’m the only actor in a David Mamet play who didn’t get the memo about the script changes. Or I’m the only character in a Quentin Tarantino film who doesn’t realize that they’re about to get shot in the back of the head. In other words, having a discussion with her means that, no matter what, I will have no idea what the discussion is actually about.

I’ve been tempted to get a white board, just so I can keep track of things, because, from where I sit, one topic seems to segue into another like so many conversational pin balls: “Wait a minute: I thought we were discussing a new curfew; why are we now talking about the “A” you got on your French test? Unless, this is a test. Hang on: are you speaking French right now? I’m so confused.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that even the white board would help; it would probably just end up looking like a verbal reconstruction of chaos theory.

It’s like we’re each pulling phrases out of a hat and reading them at random. “I’d like to talk about school,” I say, and she replies, “They cut down another ten thousand acres of rain forest today.”
Um, okay—are you saying that the butterfly whose wing-flapping was supposed to bring home your math homework never had the chance to be born?

“You never listen.”

I wish I never listened. Like my husband. Safe in Guy Land, he is content to wave hello and good-bye to her out the window every few days—it is only me who insists on the details. And gets stuck playing the dim-witted tourist mistaken for an international spy.

“You came home twenty minutes past curfew last night.”

“Twenty percent of Mensa members never graduated from high school.”

“And this means . . .?”

“You never listen.”