Late at Night

It's nearly midnight and I'm starting in on Staying Connected to Your Teenager. Recommended by my friend Maggi, checked out with the best of intentions, and due back at the library a month ago, this book (by Dr. Michael Riera, M.D.), has sat unopened on my bedside table for weeks now, even as I have begun to notice telltale signs that one of these alarming creatures is now living among us.

I don't mean so much the bras and makeup brushes strewn all over the bathroom counter or the muffled ping of texts steadily arriving late into the night, or the way she'll whisper loudly, "Can we go?" every ten minutes when we drag her to a party with us. It's more the flashes of irritation -- and sometimes rage -- that pop up in me when I'm confronted by even minor examples of thoughtlessness or disrespect or entitlement. Like when I interrupt my work day to run home and give her a ride somewhere, because she's running late after spending way too much time choosing an outfit and matching it to her makeup, and then when we get there she thrusts her phone at me and tells me brusquely to hold it for her because she doesn't have any pockets, and I refuse, even more brusquely... And then reach into my pocket an hour later to discover that she has slipped the phone in there while ostensibly giving me a hug. And instead of chuckling or sighing, or even scowling or grumbling, I want to kill her. Yeah, so maybe it's time to brush up on the whole Staying Connected thing.

I've reached Chapter One: "Late at Night." Dr. Riera is explaining all about how teenagers' circadian rhythms somehow create this magical window of energy and openness between midnight and 3 am, which is unfortunate given their school schedules, but also extremely enlightening for a parent willing to stay up late -- he describes one mother who actually set her alarm for 1 am so she could get up and chat with her daughter once in a while -- when I hear this little voice from down the hall: "Mom?"

It's Josie, of course -- and yes, Dr. Riera, this late night summons is a fairly frequent occurrence, now that I think about it. Mostly she wants me to tuck her in, or close her curtains. Sometimes she needs to have a "Math Buddy" conversation, or get me to sign her practice log for the music teacher. Once in a while she's freaking out about a homework assignment or stewing over a problem with a friend, or wants to open up some thorny question or other: Why were the Nazis so mean, Mom? One night in January of 5th grade when everyone in her class was deciding where to go to middle school, she piped up in a trembling voice: "Mom, if Maggie applied to two private schools, and Juliana applied to three private schools, and each private school accepts 1/4 of the people who apply, what are the odds that I'll have a best friend at Orca next year?" We did the math the next day (it was somewhat encouraging, actually), but that night I just held her hand in the dark.

I've often wondered why she always seems to want to delve into heartbreaking probability problems, Nazi atrocities, and other emotional traumas at exactly the moment when a rational person, looking at the clock and counting backwards from first period Spanish tomorrow, would prescribe bedtime, ASAP. Well, according to Dr. Riera, it's a physiological feature of adolescence, and I should be milking it for all it's worth.

So I bring the book in to Josie's room and show it to her; she looks amused, but interested. "This guy says teenagers' brains are especially active late at night, and that they're totally open and willing to share all kinds of things they'd never tell you in the light of day. So here I am. Tell me everything."

"Everything?" She grins. "Okay. I'll start at the beginning. Two plus two is four. Three plus three is six. The capital of Alaska? Is Juneau." She pauses. "Do you really want me to tell you everything? Or just the things that pertain to me?"

I assure her I'm pretty solid on basic arithmetic and state capitols.

"I know. I'll tell you all the weird things guys have said to me this week on the bus." She's been taking Metro home from drama camp in Wallingford every day, and has discovered that at 5' 10" and counting, she is frequently mistaken for someone considerably older than thirteen -- someone, evidently, who might be in the market for companionship of one kind or another. She recites a few of the more entertaining lines she has been handed -- along with her own internal commentary:

"You're doing a great job holding up that lamp post, there." (Um... Thanks?)

"Are you a string bean?" (Oh-KAY. I have no idea what you mean by that, but I think I'll pretend you don't exist.)

"It's a nice day for a long walk." (Oh no! That can't be good.)

"Can I give you a ride?" (I would pay more than the bus fare not to get in your car, dirty old man!)

"You dropped this!" (Huh?! OH!)

This last was apparently shouted out the window of a speeding Jeep on Genessee, followed by the abrupt arrival of a purple sweatshirt, flung into the street. By the time she registered that it was in fact her purple sweatshirt, the car -- and its load of shrieking, cackling passengers -- was gone. This doesn't exactly qualify as a pickup line, I suppose, but it certainly provided entertaining conversational fodder.

Half an hour or so later, after we have pondered the question of what these guys are thinking when they try to talk to her, and does anyone ever actually get in a car with someone like that, I head back to my own bed, Staying Connected tucked comfortably under my arm. Dr. Riera is a genius! Staying up late talking is way more fun than nagging about bedtime -- and so edifying! (We'll ignore for now that as a way of life it won't be particularly sustainable come September.) And even though I'd rather raise my girl in a world where she can stand at a bus stop for ten minutes without being approached by strange men, I'm more reassured than alarmed by her stories: it's clear she doesn't feel threatened by these guys. She can handle them: she has thought about what to say to put them off, where to turn if they persist. Which they don't seem inclined to do -- I flash back briefly to the mortified looks on the faces of the three teenage boys who stopped to offer me a ride once on Beacon Avenue in Boston when I blurted out, "Guys. I'm twelve."

I plow through the rest of Dr. Riera's book the next day and return it to the library, all charged up with sensible advice about Listening, Letting Go, Setting Limits, Not Lecturing, and so on. All good stuff, for sure. But somehow the whole thing still feels hypothetical, aspirational -- an act I'll put on but haven't really internalized -- until I pick up the next book in my bedside stack: Whatever, Mom: Hip Mama's Guide to Raising a Teenager.

As I'm finishing up the chapter entitled "Waiting Up" (in which Ariel Gore weaves the hows and whys of curfews into the all-too-familiar internal monologue of a mom whose daughter is late coming home), I'm hit by a wave of liberation I remember from birth class thirteen years ago, when, after showing us a series of gorgeous sitar-soundtracked birth videos featuring deep-breathing, hot-tubbing, Lamaze-entranced women meditatively opening their cervixes and calmly, gracefully expelling perfect pink babies from their glistening bodies, the instructor popped in a video of her own labor. What a relief! "Hang on!" I wanted to shout. "Why didn't you tell us we're allowed to grunt and howl and wail? For heaven's sake: I can do that." Don't get me wrong -- I knew I'd have to learn to relax and breathe and open up too. It's just that I had to find a way to do it that came naturally to me.

Similarly, Gore's actual advice isn't all that different from Dr. Riera's; it's just that her attitude -- irreverent, confessional, potty-mouthed, full of self-doubts yet confident of her underlying truths -- resonates a little more with my own approach. (It's hard, for instance, to imagine Riera writing a chapter called "Why Do I Bother?") But underneath, she's mostly saying the same stuff about recognizing and accepting your kid's moods and hormones, not taking offense at her developmentally-appropriate narcissism, and honoring her halting, painful struggle to achieve independence from you -- her mom (who will, after all, always see her as that perfect pink baby who came grunting and wailing out of your body... just last week, wasn't it?). Both authors talk about helping teenagers develop their own intuition and integrity, even though they may conflict directly with our own beliefs. They both subscribe to what Gore calls the Chaos Theory of Adolescence: growing up is a complicated, unpredictable process that may be influenced -- often by freakish, indirect butterfly flappings we may never fully understand -- but not controlled. Finally, they both remind us that we all went through this crazy crucible, difficult as it may be to remember. And while nobody emerges from adolescence unscathed, we mostly make it out alive.

Yes, adolescence is a painful place to live. But some of us might do well to revisit its lush, lawless, uncharted territory once in a while. I was reminded of this recently during a visit to my therapist from 20 years ago. After we had talked for an hour she pulled a tattered scrap of paper off her office wall and handed it to me. I recognized the handwriting immediately -- mine:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Adolescence is full of questions like this, of course -- ones that won't have answers until you've lived your way into them: "Who am I?" "Where do I fit in?" "Does God exist?" "Am I gay?" "Is this true love?" "Why am I here?" Staring down at this little message from my barely-post-adolescent self, preserved on the wall of a therapist's office awaiting my return, I had the happy realization that in twenty years I had found at least a few answers. But I had to admit some pretty big questions were still hanging around, and I'd gotten a little lazy about living them.

It's true that some questions will resolve themselves if you just wait them out: over time the landscape shifts, different doors open and close, and things become clearer -- or get decided for you. But the really big questions aren't like that. Oh, you can put them on the back burner for a while, while you raise your kids or get that law degree, or drink yourself into a stupor, or whatever -- but when when the kids are grown and you're a federal judge at last, when you sober up and lift the lid -- there they'll be, simmering away. And if you're lucky, Rilke will be there to hand you a spoon and tell you to dig in.

So what does it mean to live a question? Being patient and trying to love it isn't enough, I've found. You have to name it: look it in the face, put it into words -- ask it, at least in your own head. And then you have to take it out into the world: share it, engage it, test out possible responses, learn from what transpires. Living it means acting on it in some way that gets you closer to an answer.

A few days after our late night conversation, Josie and I are skating out at Alki. It's a Friday evening, nearing sunset, and we're attracting a certain amount of unwanted attention. (I don't mind the occasional honk from a passing truck, but when someone drives by screaming something incoherent about pussies, I get a little irate: Hey! That's my daughter you're talking about, dickweed!) In between derby lessons (she's trying to teach me the Hip Whip), we resume our conversation about guys who talk to women they don't know, and pretty soon we're talking about how people meet each other in movies, and from there she starts telling me about some of her favorite romantic scenes.

I'm fascinated -- I feel like she's imprinting now on a romantic ideal that'll be with her for the rest of her life, and I'm curious to know what it looks like. For a long time it's been Jim and Pam from "The Office" (and you could do a lot worse than this adorable, understated, utterly devoted pair). Recently we watched "(500) Days of Summer," which struck me as a remarkably honest depiction of the whole she's The One concept hitting the wall. Josie describes the final scene as one of her favorites: our hero, having scraped his heart off the pavement and pulled himself together, meets a new girl and asks her (somewhat gingerly) to go for coffee. He's learned, the narrator tells us, that "there are no miracles. There's no such thing as fate; nothing is meant to be." But, Josie points out, it's also clear that this realization isn't going to stop him from loving someone new -- "only now he can get to know her as a real person, not some dream girl in his head."

So far so good, I'm thinking. Then she tells me about her all-time favorite romantic moment, from a television show called "Community," about a group of students at a community college. In this scene, Jeff is torn between two different women, and he's describing his dilemma to his friend Annie.

Slater makes me feel like I do when I write my New Year's resolutions -- she makes me feel like the guy I want to be. And Britta makes me feel like the guy I am three weeks after New Years, when I'm back to hitting my snooze button and screening my mom's phone calls, back to who I really am. So do you try to evolve? Or do you try to know what you are? 

Now this strikes me as the kind of question that really has to be lived -- quite possibly for a lifetime -- and I'm a little skeptical that this half-hour Hollywood comedy show is going to do it justice. But Josie is way ahead of me. "And then," she says, "he's looking at Annie, and they start kissing! Because she's the one he can share both sides of himself with -- the guy he wants to be, and the guy he is! Isn't that great?"

I don't know if "Community" has the capacity to take Jeff and Annie's relationship that far, but I'm delighted and impressed that Josie already recognizes the appeal of someone who lets you live your questions instead of answering them, someone whose heart can hold all kinds of different possibilities for you. Someone who invites you to explore your wildest aspirations and your true, flawed self. Someone who loves them both.

People like that don't grow on trees, babe. You have to look out for them, and be open to them when they appear. They may sneak up on you in the guise of old friends. Sometimes you really do meet them at the bus stop (when you're older!). I can only imagine the lucky, lucky people who will get to love you like that in the years to come -- and I can only pray you'll know I'm among them, always. But whoever they are -- friends and lovers, men and women, kith and kin, your dorky mom -- I sure hope you'll have lots of them in your life. Because the one thing I've learned about living the questions -- aside from the undeniable fact that nobody else can do it for you -- is that it's a hell of a lot easier if you don't try to do it all by yourself.