Guess Who?

When I went to watch my son’s first football game this fall, I felt like my thirteen years of motherhood was put to a test. I had to find my son among twenty-something players and it was harder than I had imagined.

Wrapped up in padded uniforms, faces covered with helmets, all the boys on the team looked the same to me. I wished I had paid attention to the number on my son’s jersey! Since I didn’t, I started playing a "Guess Who?" game with myself. Were his gloves gloves black? Did he wear leg warmers? Did he have white socks on? No, those cleats were too snazzy for his taste. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, I made my choice. It must have been him. Something about his laid back posture was familiar. But it wasn’t until he took off his helmet a few long minutes later that I got a final confirmation.

As my son’s fourteenth birthday was approaching, I came to realize that the football game test was actually symbolic of the entire year- his first official year as a teenager. My son has gone through so many changes that I struggled to recognize him.

And I am not talking here about the drastically changed appearance: the sprouting facial hair, broader shoulders, braces, pimples, or even the ridiculous growth spurt. The outrageous transformation that his body had undergone is undeniable, but somehow it didn’t come as a shock. It was the everything else that took me by surprise. His new lifestyle, if you will.

Until recently, my son’s choices had been our family choices. My son ate the food that we had made or bought, he wore clothes from stores we shopped in, and participated in activities we suggested or signed him up for. Now, my son snacks on foods I had never noticed in grocery stores (does Takis Fuego even qualify as food?). He listens to songs I had never heard of (the explicit lyrics in most of them make me cringe, but we added Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta” to our car playlist). He shops in stores I didn’t know they existed (Zoomies). Then there is an accent that I can’t recognize, slang I can’t understand, and acronyms I can’t decipher.

Every time this tower-tall teenager with stylishly unruly locks and oversized pants comes home from school and throws his giant sneakers in the hallway, I feel like I am back at the football game. As he drags his feet to the kitchen and, without a word, Airpods in his ears, helps himself to a bowl of milk and cereal just before dinner, I am back to searching for my son under the pads of teenage-hood. Sometimes, when he lets me to pull back his long hair, his hazel eyes give him away. Sometimes, when he calls me instead of texting, I can recognize him in his voice. Sometimes the confirmation comes at the dinner table, when he goes through the meal without furtively checking his phone. But most of the time, I just have to trust it is really him and one day he will decide to take off his helmet, and let me see him again.

Patience, I noticed, is the key when it comes to parenting teenagers. As our middle schoolers gain more and more independence, experiments, trials and errors and poor choices our bound to happen. It is easy to judge them too quickly, but it is important not to hold the mistakes they make against our kids. It’s a learning curve, both for them and us. In “14 Talks by Age 14”, Michelle Icard compares teenagers to toddlers. Just like toddlers fall while they learn to walk, teenagers fail as they learn to maneuver their young-adult world. Just like we cheer our toddlers in their process on their way to independent walking, shouldn’t we cheer our teenagers on their bumpy path towards adulthood? Why don’t we celebrate their mistakes? As Joseph Conrad put it, “It’s only those who do nothing, that don’t make mistakes, I suppose.”