My son got invited over to a girl’s house. First time. According to the girl’s Dad, they talked and laughed the whole afternoon. A dazzlingly bright, warm Seattle day, a month before Seattle ever gets bright, sunny warm days, and these two holed up in her bedroom (door open, of course).
They had enough to talk about for the initial 2 hours he was invited for. They had enough to talk about for the 3 additional hours they spent together after the Dad asked if he wanted to stay and could his parents join them for dinner. They had enough to talk about for the 2 more hours they were together once we arrived and the grown-ups took to wine, grilling, conversation and, ultimately, prior glory Lieutenant stories (one Navy, one Army – for this night, rivalries laid to rest in support of the greater good – peace and friendship between what could become warring teenage nations).
As of day 1 of my son’s dating life, it appears the Lord of the Teenagers may be more merciful to my son than He was to me. I don’t remember a 7-hour first date that ended in my folks being invited for grilled, garlicky, lemon shrimp skewers. Let alone a bottle of wine. My tee totaling parents would have had much in common with the other suburban parents, but they would have found a way to work religion into that first conversation, forcing the differences to the fore, without any comfort of a cocktail or glass of wine. My Mother prides herself on her ability to make conversation with anyone, especially store clerks while on errands with me, so that I was forever rolling my eyes and shifting weight from foot to foot with impatience as her conversations with strangers tested even the stranger’s patience. My Father speaks the same one or two-word answers he has always uttered, finding very little to say. This talks-a-lot/eats-a-lot duo mortified me. Last night I worked toward a proper balance of conversation and morsels. My son is still speaking to me this morning, so he might have come through un-humiliated. We’ll see.
My first boy memory is Billy Dickinson. I asked him first (an uncanny parallel for my son?) Oh, Billy. He took me to my first dance, back in the years where middle-school dances were filled with pairs, two by two, just like on the Ark, most couples looking like they were MFEO (made for each other): same height, same build, same degree of dress-up clothes. Me and Billy? Mismatched – the stately beautiful peacock and its drab, brown peahen mate in a floor-length white dress with little blue flowers, something attempting dainty and graceful on a girl who was neither. I remember him being somewhat kind, but no girl wants kind at a dance.
In my day, the Lord of the Teenagers was a wrathful, vengeful God, one who appeared to obey the Laws of Murphy rather than benevolence. Most of my friends were boys, which meant that I heard about all the girls they had crushes on, but was rarely the object of their crush. And if a boy did like me, my innate visceral response was immediate repulsion rather than attraction.
I hope to have mercy on my son, regardless of which Lord – of Darkness or Light – is guiding any of his relationships from here on out. Mercy so that I don’t embarrass him with trying too hard to get his date to like me, still haunted by how hard it is to get in with girls. Mercy so that I refrain from saying or doing the things my folks did – ask intrusive questions, comment on my date’s ill-fitting clothes or scuffed shoes, asking what line of work his Father was in, announcing during dinner, “You’ve got another pimple right there” – a forkful of food or chicken drumstick the pointer so that none of the others at the table could possibly miss where on my face the latest gargantuan blemish had taken hold.
May the Lord of Midlife grant mercy to all beings in my household: the one who is gaining hormonal power and the two who are dwindling in ours. May my son be protected against repetitive stories of long-ago masculine glory, repetitive re-woundings from long-ago feminine catastrophe. May he grow into adolescence freed of the generational transmission of what it means to be a teenager.
Lord, have mercy.