Twelve Again

All along, I think, I’ve been trying to parent with compassion. Trying to listen to what the kids were telling me, what their frustrations were signaling, what it felt like to be struggling and learning like they were. Maybe not all of of my on-the-spot reactions have been perfect, but I’ve been able to pretty quickly recognize the blessedly infrequent melt-downs as signs that my kids either needed rest or food or a change of environment or that they were struggling to break through to a new stage of development and it’s helped me be a little more patient.

But this twelve-year-old stuff is different, because I look at my kid and I see myself at that age, remember this as a place where the divide opened up between my insides and my outsides, between the way I intended things and the way they actually came out. This is the age where I would try to be sweet, try to be good and be so irritated that minutes later I was again fighting with everyone in my family, the age where labels of “sensitive” and “princess” were sort of teasingly given, only they still chafe like scratchy tags sewn inside tight shirts. This was the age when it felt like something was really wrong with me, that things weren’t ever going to be okay, the age when I ached with being misunderstood. It was the dawning of self-consciousness, of looking around at how everyone else was doing things and realizing I didn’t measure up, that my clothes were wrong, my body awkward, the braces, my skin…

So when my sweet first-born does start doing the things that are tormenting his brothers — teasing or taking things — it isn’t that I see him as blameless. I see his threshold for tolerating them acting like, well, themselves, doing things that shouldn’t bother him, but do, tremendous crimes like chewing wrong or licking their drinking glasses, lowered, see how this builds up into the explosion when he tells a brother to stop, the brother screams in indignation, it escalates. And I haven’t figured out how to make the conflicts, torturous as they are, go away. But I know that I cannot tolerate how much it hurts him when he feels like everyone in the world is against him. I don’t want to endorse his prickliness, but I think he needs someone on his side. Of course he seems to recover much more quickly than I do, I’ll still be brooding over a conflict when he’s moved on to another mood entirely.

We go for walks. He talks about feeling excluded at school — not actively excluded, just more, not-included, and this one I remember too, feeling like everyone else was spending all of their time with everyone else outside of school and I never got to see anyone. That I was safe, sure, invisible, on the fringes of a large group of safe friends, but it was not the same social order I had known before and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it. I wish I could hand him the books that helped me survive it all, but he hasn’t found his way back to books that way yet. (Anne Frank that’s what he needs! And then maybe Catcher in the Rye before it’s assigned in school and an English teacher has the power to ruin it for him.) He’s got music. I miss him when he retreats into headphones, but I’m so grateful he’s found something he needs there.

At his cello recital I watch the high school seniors play, seeming like grown-ups next to him, five years older, the assurance they project, their comfort with themselves up on stage. I sort of long to see him safely through to that point already, to skip all of the agony between here and there — except, of course I keep being hit with how quickly it’s all going and how I don’t want to miss a second of it. It’s the knife-twist of birth order, everything is the most intense with him, his capacity to surprise me, my anxiousness about the next stages, the blind spots I’ve got, the tremendous amount I still have to learn, the difficulty in untangling myself from him.

I write things down, partially I want to convey this amazing unfolding to the grandparents, aunt, uncles who don’t get to witness it first hand, but also for myself, knowing I take it all for granted but I won’t remember this stuff clearly by the time I’ve been through it three more times. He’s so quick-witted, he notes a traffic sign “Construction Zone Fines Double” and says “Sometimes life is like a giant board game.” That he combines a wit( which I’m not completely recapturing here) with a serious-mindedness, a commitment to justice and projects and idealism seems to me the loveliest combination of qualities. I am simultaneously charmed and exasperated by his insistence on wearing the same corduroy jacket and hat all year, regardless of the weather. And touched that he wants to wear fingerless gloves like one of the cellists in the band Apocalyptica, which — oh it seems like the marker of a new kind of having a hero for him. A year ago everything was superlative “best movie ever” “favorite place to go for dinner” and since his birthday it’s all just “it was okay.” He is cool. Or he wants to check what all of his friends think. And yet he does think for himself, is independent-minded. None of this captures him, of course, but I don’t stop trying. I hold on in order to let go.