Life lessons from my teenage son
It’s fluid. Impromptu. From the outside, sometimes chaotic. My boy socialises spontaneously, glides through airports like a Zen master. Has moral rectitude to spare. I’m kind of inspired by him.
For a long time, my mother waited for the cosmic revenge of my teenagers being as terrible as I was in those years, but the cosmos did not oblige. I ended up with sweeter teenagers than I deserved.
But there are still times when their ways seem exotic, like I have a slightly different species, giraffes maybe, under my roof.
We usually feel the impulse to tame or civilise teenagers, but maybe that’s wrong. Instead of trying to teach or enlighten them, maybe we should be importing some of their seemingly chaotic and maddening traits into our own lives. Instead of making them more like us, we should be thinking about how we could fruitfully be more like them. Rather than feeling annoyed or amused or worried, we should be viewing their way of life as a gentle but powerful reproach of our own.
When I ask my 16-year-old son at, say, 3pm if he will be around for dinner, he looks at me like I am asking him where he will be in three years. His plans are always up in the air. Impromptu gatherings involving three, four, five people cohere instantaneously out of nowhere.
Like most adults I know, my dinners, drinks or lunches with friends are planned at least a week in advance, and usually weeks.
While I don’t think I would thrive in the total fluidity of teenage social life, maybe I could learn to see friends a little more spontaneously, to pop out for coffee or a walk with one of them on impulse. Wouldn’t it be kind of great to decide to meet someone for drinks in 20 minutes?
There is, after all, something staid and rigid about all of our hyper-planned socialising, a lack of naturalness. Our ahead-of-time scheduling doesn’t take into account our mood in the moment. Adults are busy, sure, but there are afternoons when I could suddenly see a friend, and my life would be enriched.
I have always taken the conventional view that it is my job to organise my teenager, but now I am thinking maybe it is his job to disorganise me. I am the kind of person who arrives at airports three hours in advance of my international flights, as per instructions from the airline. I also get nervous in security lines about whether we will miss our plane.
My teenager, on the other hand, is very Zen at the airport. He raises his eyebrows at my excessive worrying. I can suddenly see myself through his eyes, needlessly anxious, absurdly concerned with trivial and fabricated timelines, expending unnecessary energy on pointless things.
His way of moving through the airport seems preferable, wearing headphones, gliding indifferently, even if there is the slightest chance that, left to his own devices, he would miss a flight.
My son has perfected that look of pure contempt that may be familiar to parents of teens. The recipient of this look, which I think may exclusively be me, has no real choice but to wither obligingly into nothingness. This look often comes because I have said something mean about someone or gossiped in an unkind but maybe funny way.
I do think that my son will probably become more tolerant, more forgiving of my character flaws, when he is older, but maybe I could borrow a little of that excessive moral clarity and disapproval teenagers are known for.
I wonder if my own ethical relativism is a bit too convenient, lazy, morally slack. Maybe it is kind of awful to gossip about family members or to make fun of someone you actually like. Could I use a little of this teenage rectitude in my middle-aged moral lassitude? Maybe the look of pure contempt is actually a helpful reminder to be my better self.
My son recently had an assignment to write a speech based on a reading for his 10th-grade English class. He chose Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea about living “above time.” That is, the importance of not thinking about either the past or the future, leaving behind to-do lists and existential worries and goals and just living like a rose in nature.
As he was practising, I was thrown by the energy of his speech. I thought to myself, why is this so good? The talk was exciting because he actually opened up to the idea, which is a teenage thing. He had totally engaged with this whole other view of how life could be. He was able to imagine casting aside all kinds of habits and ingrained behaviours. It was not a detached intellectual exercise.
As a writer and professor, I like to think I am open to new ideas, but do I really get shaken up by anything I read? Am I radically open to new ways of looking at life? I would like to be.
If you have a more reserved teenager, maybe instead of trying to extract details about his day you can adopt the useful idea that you don’t have to talk about everything. Rather than see his lack of interest in narrating his day as aberrant, maybe it’s your desire to sweep everyone into even the most minor dramas of your morning that is the problem.
Can you borrow a little of his reticence? Would that be so terrible? I tried, as an experiment, not telling my teenager something I was gossiping about on a group chat, and maybe the conversation at our table did reach a slightly higher level.
There are, of course, some lines we probably want to draw, general teenage behaviours we wouldn’t want to indulge in. Like, I will never drink those mini shooters of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky they sell at bodegas, and I won’t be walking across the Brooklyn Bridge at two in the morning any time soon. I will never use six towels and leave five of them damply crumpled on the floor in my bedroom. My mind is open but not that open.
The Wall Street Journal
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