There's a Teenager in My House
by: Karing Tuvuera-Pulotan
Until a few years ago, he was my son, but when he turned thirteen, he became also this tall stranger with new pimples around his nose and an insolence in manners. For nearly two years now, there's been an undeclared war between him and me. He wins the skirmishes but he loses the battles. I am always on the verge of strangling him and I am sure he has toyed with a similar idea once or twice. We are suddenly to each other two people we don't like very much
-- he has ideas that shock me and I have standards that appall him.
-- he has ideas that shock me and I have standards that appall him.
Once or twice, we manage to rediscover each other. After a heated argument over why he should roll up his bedding and pick up his soiled clothes and study his lessons, this teenager and I look into each other's eyes and it search for the baby I woke up each dawn for, thirteen years ago, whose plaintive colicky cries sent me into a panic; I do not know what he looks for in my face but he finds it there because he smiles. The anger vanishes between us although the issue is unresolved. Strewn on the floor of the study each morning will be his bedding and close by, like the molting of a snake, yesterday's clothes. He leaves a wide trail through the house the algebra lessons undone, the comic books well-thumbed, the messy bathroom, the weeping younger sister, and the unwatered lawn...
When I surprise him in his room, staring at the ceiling, there is the vapor of a dream vanishing through the window. I am reality, I am the enemy, with my rules and my impositions. Sometimes, I feel he and I will never reach each other again, not till he's twenty, twenty-five, perhaps not even then, surely not till he's a father himself and stands where I do now.
He says he will never marry, which is typically thirteenish. He says when he grows up he will get a good job and buy a fast car and take all the pretty girls riding. He goes to a school which is not a rich man's son's school, and not a poor man's either. He was doing better last year at his studies, passing by the skin of his teeth. I am not too sure he will pass this year, not even if he had two sets of teeth.
He barely opens his textbooks, he reads only what he likes: adventures, detective stories, aviation magazines, but he reads, thank God! He can sit for hours before that idiot box, the TV, mesmerized by even the most asinine programs. He needs a new pair of shoes badly; he has outgrown his school pants, but he wants me to buy him a set of drums ("Only P30"). A couple of years ago, I picked up a pair of bongos for him, which he never learned to play. He swears it will be different with these drums, he will master them, and to convince me, he goes about with a pair of sticks tapping out some crazy rhythm on tabletops and windowsills and, sometimes, even on the head of a younger brother.
He does not like Mr. Macapagal and he does not like the Catholic Church and he also does not like the police. I suppose his opinions of Mr. Macapagal and the police in general he culls
from me but his attitude toward the Catholic Church is entirely his own. He wants to be a Protestant.
He has his father's dread of snakes, my fear of darkness, but he has often asked to be allowed to come home late from school, which means walking a mile of dark, snake-infested road from the main highway to the house. He's not very brave but he once got into a fight with a group of three who wanted his pocket money. He brought home a blackeye and what I suspect but was
too polite to say was an exaggerated version of how he had beaten them off with judo holds that he sees on TV. His younger sisters were impressed, however.
He wants, like all his friends in School, a car and a pair of absurd-looking Spanish boots. He will not get either but I am trying to save for a miniature microscope he saw at Alemar's.
He does not lie very well. I sent him once on an errand and he was gone three hours, telling me when he returned that the man I wanted wasn't there and that he had waited, etc., but ten minutes later he was telling me the truth -- he had gone joyriding with a classmate who at 15, obviously with the consent and help of his parents, had gotten a license and drove a car of his own. I went to his school and sought out this license-owning, car-driving 15-year-old and found him nice and respectful. But since I will not hand over to this friend or to anyone else the responsibility for my son's safety, I asked him to stop taking my boy along with him on those rides.
I do not know if it will happen again. He brings home too many envious stories of too many cars on their high school campus. He wants what al his contemporaries want Noise, Speed, Glitter. He knows that if I catch him smoking and drinking, I will give him the hiding of his life. He claims the fourth year boys flash guns around - it could be a tall tale, I don't know.
Last week, on the eve of an induction party, I kept him home. He had made me believe it was a simple Boy Scout investiture ceremony with perhaps Coke and cookies later but it turned out
to be something more elaborate. They had to have sponsors and he had picked his out, someone much older, a sophisticate from PWU who smoked and drank and who expected him to call for her at her home and take her back. I was quite sure liquor would be sneaked in. If his fifteen-year-old friends could get licenses, bringing in a flask was no problem. It was just his bad luck that the day before the party, he handed a report card with four failing grades. I said simply, Stay home. Up to now, there's been no problem about obedience he obeys his father and me, not as promptly as we used to obey ours, but he obeys. I felt guilty about curtailing his fun but he was over his hum quicker than expected. At 7:30 p.m. when the party was beginning somewhere on Pasong Tamo, he had a bottle of Coke in one hand, a sandwich in the other, and he was horsing around with his brothers and sisters. At home.
Next year, I will send him to a school in the South, away from the city, away from souped-up cars and 15-year-old drivers and PWU students who smoke and drink at 17. I saw Silliman last
summer and was impressed. At first, he fought the idea but he's beginning to get excited. He will board at a place where he must get his own food and put his room in order.
I am not always right about him but I am right about the things I want for him -- all the virtues that seem to be going out of fashion: honesty, a respect for the law, compassion, and a curious intelligence. Mine is certainly not a modern attitude because I refuse to be his pal. I am his parent and I will not retreat from that responsibility. I will not renounce my parenthood, with all its difficulties and its loneliness (and its bills) to become my son's pal, encouraging him to think while allowing him his beatle cut and his passion for Presley. He must allow me my passion for his good future.
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