The Teens, They are a 'Changing

My son, Matt, is barely 15 and almost out of 8th grade.  Yet already he has a burgeoning social life, complete with coed get-togethers, lunches on the town with the guys, and thankfully, hours of pick-up ball at the playground.  I'm thrilled by his new-found independence, yet burdened by the thankless picking up and dropping off it involves for my husband and me.  Worse yet, I am worried about the amount of time Matt and his friends seem to spend "hanging out."  I'm nosy.  I want to know what these just-sprouted teenagers are doing for hours on the weekend afternoons and evenings.  A la Carrie Bradshaw: "What does hanging out really mean?"

When I was 15, my two best friends and I spent every evening of the summer between 8th and 9th grade riding our bikes to the middle school tennis courts after dinner.  Sure, we played some tennis although we were all pathetic, non-athletes who could barely hit the ball.  But the attraction were the boys playing basketball on the court just next door.  These shirtless, sweaty hunks of testosterone, jumping and dunking, swearing and spitting, had all our attention.  I had a crush on Tim, who was blond and surfer-ish, who had sat near me in classes all school year, and who surely didn't know my name.  Yet I believed myself in love, and after an evening of tennis and ogling, would rush home and write lavish poems of yearning in my flowered, spiral-bound journal.  Never once did we speak.

Last Saturday night, after hanging with his buds in the afternoon, Matt and two of his guy friends wound up at another 8th grade girl's house who was having a friend sleep over.  When he called to ask if it was okay if he went to this girl's house (yes, I am eternally thankful that he calls--most of the time), I asked him if her parents would be home.  There was a moment of hesitation.  "They're going to a movie," Matt said.  "But Mom, it's just down the street!"

And so I relented, figuring there was safety in numbers, I knew he wasn't interested in either of the girls romantically, and that we had already established a pick-up time of 9:30 as Matt had to get up early the next day for lacrosse practice.

I don't usually do the evening shift; my husband has an easier time staying up, but he was out, and so I found myself in the car at 9:15 on a freezing March night, headed to a girl's house whose parents I knew socially but not really, wondering all the while what the kids were up to there.  When I arrived, the house, which is large and fancy and takes up the whole block, was mostly dark.  Matt had just broken his cell phone, so I could not call to let him know I had arrived.  I struggled out of the car and up the steps to the house, located the doorbell in the dark and pressed.  Hard.  I waited.  Heard nothing, no bell, no steps on the stairs, no signs the kids were even there.  Shit, I thought.  They've changed locations without telling me, and who knows how I will ever find Matt.  I rang again, longer and harder.  Still no answer although I thought I heard dim girlish shrieking from somewhere in the house.  I started pounding on the solid wood of the door.  It had a high window, and I could look in but saw only a hall and staircase, no obvious signs of life.  I rang and pounded some more, thinking of who I could call, when finally the girl whose parents own the house appeared on the stairs, clad in jeans and a tank top.  "Matt," I mouthed through the window, as she appeared to have no idea who I was, although we have met.  "Matt," she yelled, "your mom's here."  My son appeared from a different part of the house, shoeless and disheveled.  "I have to find my shoes," he said.  "Find Eric, too," I told him.  "His mom asked me to drive him home."  

After much back and forth about shoes and jackets and the location of a third boy, all conducted while I stood on the doorstep of the locked house, the boys came out and tumbled into my car.  "We're taking Connor to Eric's," Matt informed me.  The car filled with a distinct feminine aroma.  "You smell like perfume," I told my son.  "Yeah," he said.  "The girls squirted us with perfume for some reason."  I asked what they'd been doing.  Watching a movie, they told me.  In different parts of the house?  No, Matt said, they were upstairs in Kristen's room.

So we have three 8th-grade boys and two 8th-grade girls upstairs in the girl's bedroom while her parents are out on a Saturday night.  Does anyone else think there's something wrong with this picture?  Or am I a horribly out-of-touch prude who doesn't get today's societal rules for teens having had a relatively stunted social life of my own at 15.  All I can say is I didn't smell pot or alcohol, and the boys have taken an extensive health course this year that covered sexuality, birth control, and sexually transmitted diseases.  So, maybe I am being overly protective; it's sure happened before.

Next year, though, when my daughter, Annie, is in the 8th grade, you can bet she's not having any boys over when I'm out on a Saturday night.  (Or if she does, and I find out about it, there'll be hell to pay.) 

High School Drama

The drama is finally over. Well, until the next drama starts. My son, Matt, who is 14, was just accepted into high school. Now those of you living in the suburbs or other places with perfectly lovely public schools are probably scratching your heads over this. Accepted to high school? You mean he isn't just going to the school that everyone else in his middle school goes to? Do you mean you're sending him away to a fancy-schmancy boarding school because he's some kind of legacy?

No, I am not. The fact is, both my kids have been in private school since kindergarten because we live in a city whose public schools kind of suck. Those schools are big and dirty and while wonderfully ethnically diverse, they aren't known for their stellar academics, at least not in elementary school, so we decided a long time ago to go private, and for the most part, we've been happy. Not with the horrendous tuition or the way that a lot of our kids' classmates seem to live and demand a pricey lifestyle, but by the overall sense of community that the schools provided, along with really good teachers and sports and art and music and all the other things you want for your kids to have at school.

But the price--figuratively--that you pay when your kid is in 8th grade is that you have to apply to the private high schools in the city just as you would to college. And when I say "just" I mean just. Like filling out lengthy applications complete with lists of activities and accomplishments and a personal essay. All of this at the age of 13 or 14. And you have to take at least one, sometimes two entrance exams. Well, they're standardized tests, but the scores count as do your child's report cards and grades from 7th and the first semester of 8th grade. And so does his or her conduct. These private high schools, some of them Catholic and some just independent, are so popular that they routinely get more than twice as many applicants as they can accept. So it makes things just a little bit tense in 8th grade. Like, you have to go visit the schools you want to apply to in the fall (again just like college) and then you have to interview, and all the while keep your grades up, and write the essay and answer the questions, and maybe play sports or an instrument and or go to religious school or maybe try to have a social life on the weekends.

Doesn't that all sound crazy for a 14-year-old teenager with vast hormonal surges and mood swings and the attention span of a housefly?

Well, it is nuts, but everyone here in private school in San Francisco goes through it, and as all the middle school deans and counselors tell you in the fall, all the kids get in somewhere, usually one of the schools they picked, and the story has a happy ending.

So my half-Jewish, half-Episcopalian, non-practicing, agnostic son is going to spend four more years in Catholic school and probably break my heart by going out for football, and I am just doing the happy dance because we like the school, and he likes the school, and I don't have to think about it again until August when his sister has to go through the same thing!