By Donna Hruska

He moves in a cloud of music, steel guitars, fake folk singers and drums. Sometimes the music moves only in his head, transistorized as he is with the white cord running out of his pocket, around his neck and into his ear. The music gives his walk a curious beat, a kind of bending of the knees, almost a swoop.

For the first time, he admits to liking school. (He enjoyed it before but it was against the code to admit it.) He rises early without complaint, rummages through the kitchen for his own breakfast, and can be counted on to make it to the bus on time.

He even takes showers on his own. In fact, this turn-about on personal care strains the credulity of a mother used to driving sons to the bathroom door with threats of violence. The time spent in front of the mirror combing the hair that must not, by all means, be cut too short, (he has even been known to sleep in a stocking cap to get the right effect), the tooth brushing, rinsing, gargling, the minute examinations of the face, the trial smiles—all this murmurs a new social personality, a coming-out of the self-centered play of younger years into the larger world of girls and newspapers and Large Issues.

For this is my son’s first teen year—a year of double breasted sport coats and plaid pants, dancing classes, and base numbers in a math that I can no longer understand. It is a year of science projects, a social conscience and rooting for the school team—of opening jars and making repairs for a mother who used to be all-powerful, of over-night hikes, and his first jet trip alone. It is the last year being for bicycles and model cars, a time of embarrassed, but pleased, when girls giggle as he passes by.

All is not lovely in this first year of adolescence. There are tears, quick and unexplained, accusations, anger, revolt, rebellion, exasperation. We embarrass him, discriminate and plot against him. We take advantage of him, make too many demands, and never, never understand. He is sweet and loveable—nasty and mean. He wins praise from his teachers for his responsibility, but can’t clean up his room. He will be patient and kind with a neighbor’s child and hateful to his own brothers and sisters—yet, the next moment will find him explaining a scientific concept to an enthralled younger brother.

Like all parents we stand in frustration, wanting to assure him that we know, that we remember. We watch those emotions that surge unbidden, stirred by the ebb and flow of hormones newly released somewhere deep inside, and we want to pull him to our breasts and tell him what to do. We yearn to assume his pain, because our own adolescent memories still hurt, and we want him to be spared. But we only pass through the land of growing up once, and each one must travel alone. We can stand by, ready to assist. We cannot do it for him.

Someday, when all this is past, when he has reached the other side of the gap, he will remember that we stood by cheering him on his voyage, ready to throw a life line if he called. We hope that he will remember, and that he will understand that our firmness grew from love and our mistakes from weakness, but that we were always on his side.

As for now, he moves in a cloud of music that sings of love and anger, bitterness and elation, pleasure and pain. It gives his walk a curious beat and his heart an unsteady rhythm.

My son, who longs to leave childhood behind, but is not yet ready to be a man—my son, thirteen.

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Donna Hruska
2711 2nd Private Road
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422

Approximately 625 Words

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