Day 50
This weekend I asked my son John to come for a walk with me, and to my great surprise he said yes. John’s a great kid, but we all know teens can be snippy. Teens can be tough. Teens can be hard to pry out of bed and wedge into their sneakers. Especially teenage boys.
But there are plenty of reasons to keep on trying, and not just because someday in our old age we’re going to need them for a ride to the airport, or for help moving the new couch.
Teens have great music on their iPods. If you can get ’em talking, teens can tell you all kinds of things you don’t want to know — like which plaid shirts are hip and which are dorky, or who the heck Minka Kelly, Justin Bieber, or Beth ditto are. They have a youthful view on life — ok, often their youthful view is cynicism, but it comes from the false notion that they’re going to be young and healthy forever and can afford to waste a few years snarling at the daylight. So we can forgive them, because we have the last laugh on that one!
But the best reason to take a walk with your teen comes from a woman I met years ago, when we were both students at NYU. Let’s call her Doreen. She was one of 8 children, and Doreen was very close with her mother. Closer than any of the other sibs, she said.
“In a family of eight, it’s hard to get one-on-one time with your parents,” Doreen said. “My mom used to walk around our neighborhood a few times a week, and when I was around 10 or 11 I started going with her. Nobody else wanted to go, so it was always just my mom and me. That’s how I got close to her. And it’s lasted.”
At a time when so many young women were at odds with their parents, Doreen talked about her mom with great affection. I’ve always remembered how she described her relationship with her mom as natural, easy, and companionable. I remembered it, and I envied it.
So I tried to ignore the little bit of sulkiness John brought into the car with him this Sunday. I tried to ignore the hints he’s been giving me for weeks about why he “needs” a cell phone upgrade, and I tried to cheerfully enforce the “We’re not talking about cell phones or convertibles” rule of walking with teens.
Because it was annoying (embarrassing?) him, I tried really hard to stop taking pictures of Hilltop Park — even though there were some pretty wierd and awesome things to see, like the Peace Trail.
I didn’t even ask him about school.
We walked. We talked. We relaxed. We laughed. We’d started out tense, and we went home happy. At least, I was happy. And as long as he gets all As and Bs on his report card, John’s getting that cell phone upgrade. So I’m pretty sure he’s happy, too.
Best of all, he’ll be able to take even better pictures from his new phone next time we go out walking together.
November 18, 2009 at 8:15 PM
great blog laurie!
November 19, 2009 at 8:36 AM
Nice story. I took my grand children for a walk (They asked to go.) last week. It was a tailored 1 mile route, so they would not get bored. Subteens are easier and they had a ball.
November 19, 2009 at 2:44 PM
I trained to walk a marathon with my teen daughter 10 years ago, at a time when we always seemed to be at odds with each other. Those long training walks gave us a chance to talk, share, laugh, cry, work some things out, and get to know each other better. We still had our tough times, of course, but it completely transformed our relationship. To me, that was even better than finishing my first marathon.
November 20, 2009 at 6:33 AM
…love this, Laurie. Sarah looks a lot like our sweet old Sophie, who died a year ago. When I saw the subject of this I was reminded of an immortal dog walk with you and Frank down Broadway years ago, with Kiwi too excited to stop running long enough to poop, so just going ahead and doing it at a full sprint. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my entire life; it was such a gift.