“Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious, obviously isn't obvious...” - Michael Stipe
The words leapt out of my mouth before I could catch them. “Because I said so.”
Huh? Did I just say that?
Yes. That would be me. Expression number two of the four thousand, three hundred, seventy two things I promised myself I would never say if I ever became a parent.
I’m sensing a theme here. There’s nothing like wandering in the wilderness to make you realize just how little you really know for sure.
I’m thinking I need a personal parenting assistant. Someone that can walk around right beside me and give me advice about what to say and do in those occasional moments of indecision in the parenting of a teenager that occur, oh, say, every 5 minutes or so.
Like the other day when a G-I-R-L came over.
Huh? Yep. You heard me. One of them.
“This is good for him,” the principal said.
“Umm hmm, “ I mumbled.
“He’s a seventeen year old boy,” he continued. “You were on, like, boyfriend number 11 or 12 by the time you were his age, weren’t you?”
“Umm hmm,” I mumbled again. Actually, I was only on about number 6 by then, but my fickle romantic exploits were not something I was interested in debating at that exact moment. I mean, we had a G-I-R-L coming over. There wasn’t a moment to waste. We needed to prepare. There was the small matter of taking the underwear off the line and vacuuming up the week old dust bunnies and wiping off the ½ layer of breadcrumbs by the toaster. We wanted to make a good impression, didn’t we? Never mind that he let us know exactly one hour before she was set to arrive.
“She's coming over in an hour?” I shrieked. “Are you kidding me? A little more notice would have been helpful.”
“Why?” he asked, blankly.
He has so much to learn.
“Well, what if we were going to go somewhere?”
“Were we?”
“No, but what if we were? What if we had something we wanted to do?”
“Did we?”
“You’re missing the point. We need to talk about the rules.”
"The what?”
“The rules. You know, the expectations. The parameters. The guidelines. Like no entertaining her in your bedroom.”
“Why not?” he said naively as though the mere thought had never crossed his mind.
The bedroom has long been a standard spot for entertaining. Lavish Lego fortresses have been constructed. Beanie Baby battles have been launched. Endless games of “Guess Who” have been played while lying prone on the bedroom floor. No entertaining in the bedroom? What was this new and clearly Byzantine dictum?
“No entertaining in the bedroom,” I repeated steadfastly.
“Why?” he pushed.
“Because it’s inappropriate.” I replied, sure that that would be obvious to his adolescent mind. I thought back to the days of Ralph Maffucci (Number 1) and the sound of my mother’s voice resonated in my head, issuing the same warning, ‘You don’t take boys into your bedroom.’ “What do you mean, it’s inappropriate?” he queried back. “Isn’t it more about what you do, not where you do it?
This is a game we play. It resembles a rally in tennis. You hit the ball over the net, trying to place it in the corner with just the right amount of backspin only to have it come back at you with a bit more speed and as deftly placed as yours. You have no choice but to fire it back across the net.
And so it begins.
After about 10 minutes of doing this, you realize that you are really tired. Really, really tired. The kind of tired where you find yourself falling asleep sitting upright on the couch, your mouth wide open and the tiniest bit of drool pooling in the corner. You’ve just run back and forth across the court, up and down to the net. The warm temperatures are starting to get to you, you're out of water and your opponent shows no signs of wearing down. You have nothing left. The gas tank is empty.
And that’s when it happened.
“Because I said so, that’s why.”
“What does that mean?” he fired back. Apparently, the exhaustion wasn’t a mutual thing.
I put my racket down. “I’m done,” I said. ‘To me, the reason is obvious. You may not understand it. You may not agree. That's just the way it is.”
Apparently the obvious, isn’t.