Stages of Development, pt 3a

Stages of Development--part 3a

Age fourteen to seventeen

The teenager is on a quest, and deeply wishes to find some basic understandings relative to the riddles of life. He has an emerging sense of self that is interfacing with the world. He is trying to birth what is most individual, most essential about himself, and find the earthly path which is best suited to that essence.

I did find myself on a quest as a teenager, but my base coming out of early and middle childhood was so wobbly that in many ways I was just swimming and looking for the least bit of solid land to hold onto. My path was still very much about how to survive.

My previous biographical cycle (7-14) began with shocks (being molested and having my father exit my life). My fourteenth and fifteenth years would also bring events which were shocking, disturbing and destabilizing.

As I turned fourteen I felt pretty good about some parts of my life. Things were looking up in at least one important way. I had just recovered from pneumonia. Perhaps that doesn't sound so great, but the upside was that I lost twenty pounds and so all of a sudden the girls were much more interested in me.

My mom's new boyfriend had also moved into our house. I had mixed feelings about this. I didn't particularly like the guy and I had also become accustomed to being the man of the house.

Soon after he moved in my mom was telling me I couldn't do something that I really wanted to do. I was feeling sullen. The boyfriend was taking sides with her and lecturing me a bit about why hers was the best decision. I muttered, "F-you" under my breath.

All of a sudden he was up and on me, slapping me down repeatedly to the ground. "Don't you EVER say that to me, do you hear?" I was shocked, crying and ran from the house. I never called him a name to his face again. My mom stood by and supported his action. She thought I was unruly and that such measures as hitting were justified. In the past year she had begun slapping me from time to time when I defied her. Mom had previously prided herself on never using corporal punishment with me. She seemed now to be changing her mind on the matter.

In March, mom went on a trip to the British Isles and took me along. She was singing with a community chorus which had found a great excuse, a few concerts, to travel to a really cool place.

I was totally caught up in the experience. Just being there was the coolest thing I could have imagined. Even though I was only fourteen I could go into pubs while mom and the others were singing. I also stayed up late drinking with other singers and locals. I looked older than I was and was taking full advantage of the fact. Mom either wasn't aware of my drinking (when she was practicing with her choir) or wasn't able to stop me from doing what I wanted (a few late nights where I defied her and she gave up trying to control me).

Mom and I went to museums and plays in London and went to Stratford to see "Twelfth Night" at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Just walking around in London and other English towns was VERY cool to me.

As I came back I felt like a changed person, like my horizons had just been widened. My eyes had been opened to a world beyond the sights and attitudes of the small city where I lived. I went to school the next day, dressed in some clothes mom bought for me on the trip, and I could tell people were looking at me differently. I went over to a friend's house after school and was hanging out, quietly marveling at how things had changed and how a new cosmopolitan me was emerging.

"Phone for you." I went to the phone. It was my mom. She told me that my dad had died. I asked how. She told me she would tell me when I got home. It had happened while we were on the trip. Mom's boyfriend had gotten the call but waited to tell mom until she got home. When I got home mom told me he had killed himself.

We got on a plane the next morning and were off to the funeral. Dad had a relative who lived near to him even though he almost never saw him. The relative said dad had almost nothing in the apartment where he lived and his bank account was empty. They showed me the suicide note. It read, "I have found life to be utterly meaningless." It wasn't addressed to anyone. The few things he had reeked of pipe tobacco and pot. Like many suicidal men he had used a gun so the casket was closed.

As I returned again back home I felt like the space around me had drawn in and that my personal space was much smaller than it been a few days earlier. I was curled up in a ball even though I was walking around, doing the things I was supposed to. Life went on.

I previously had a hope regarding me and my dad. It was that, even though I didn't get to grow up with him, that some day I would go and live with him and get to know him. In my mind that would happen after I was done with high school. For several years I spoke openly of this with my mom and she usually cautiously agreed that such a thing might happen. It was an important dream of mine from the time I was seven to the moment I learned of his death.

That summer we moved to a more upscale neighborhood which was closer to my friends. Mom and boyfriend announced they would be married the following spring. I was playing sports, doing reasonably well in school. I was also sexually active, drinking fairly regularly, smoking pot, chewing tobacco and occasionally smoking cigarettes. These were all normal things for the crowd I was hanging out with. Mom was only vaguely aware of what I was up to.

When I was fifteen mom got married. I wasn't at all enthused about the wedding but went through the motions. They went on their honeymoon and soon after their return mom had a vision of guns going off. She was taken to the local psychiatric hospital in a psychotic state.

I went to see her a few times during the week or so she was there. The doctors and staff at the hospital never said a word to me. My mom told me on my first visit that she had been diagnosed as being schizophrenic; that she had, according to the doctors, two personalities: one which was an adult and the other which was a child. I was very numb during the visit. I went home and tried to forget what she had told me. Mom's husband was very freaked out and in shock himself. We pretty much avoided each other and didn't exchange more than a few words while mom was in the hospital.

The next visit, a few days later, mom told me that the doctors had changed the diagnosis. The new one was manic depression. She seemed to feel more hopeful about that diagnosis so I did too. Mom started taking lithium, came home and soon returned to work. It seemed like everything went back to what had passed as normal.

I got my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday. I had been driving for three or four years already, so I passed it easily. When I was twelve I would practice in the driveway, going forward, backing up, over and over. At thirteen I would take the car out for a spin in the neighborhood when mom was gone. At fourteen I got my permit and would then drive all over town in mom's car when she was gone. She never had (and doesn't today) any idea I was doing this.

A few months after she got out of the hospital, mom proposed a "youth group" she would facilitate for my cohort along with the mom of a friend of mine. They thought that having some spiritual guidance would be helpful for us and wanted to show us they cared about our moral development. Attendance for us was not optional. The group met once a month at my friend's house. We giggled all the way through the sessions that involved reading from the bible mostly. A few times we even got stoned before the group met. Today I can appreciate the effort the two moms made to some degree. Back then it was just a joke to all of us. I think both my mom and the other mom were in deep denial about the affects on their families of their "wanting to have it all".

My mom was not the only mother who had a demanding professional life and did not give much direction to her children's lives. All of my friends and I were suffering the affects of moms entering the workplace en masse. We called each others mother "mom" because we were each trying to get the nurturing none of us were getting at home. Maybe if we cobbled together all the mothering from all of the moms in our cohort, we could have more of our needs met.

The results of this seem clear to me today. All of our parents were professionals who gained status in their careers and succeeded beyond what their parents had done. In terms of career success, my childhood cohort and I have all done less well than our parents, in many cases achieving at a much lower level. None of us really had the platform, the structure to reach up from. The moms went to work and the dads did not pick up any of the slack. All the slack was absorbed by the kids.

We were all semi-orphans in a way and all of our parents required us to behave as if it were all fine. It's not that our parents didn't love us. They just didn't give us the parenting we needed and seemed to use the credos, "Kids raise themselves" and "Try to be your kid's friend". We weren't able to raise ourselves very well and we didn't need them to be our friends. We needed them to be our parents.

Professional parents give a lot of their sparkle at work and come home tired. The TV and the neighborhood kids end up giving a lot of the life lessons. In our case this became increasingly: tobacco, beer, pot, pornographic movies and before long experimenting in other drugs. And we all knew how to put on a great face for all of our "moms" so that they wouldn't worry about us. Now that we were getting into things they wouldn't want to us to partake in, we had to apply a tad bit of slyness. The moms seemed eager to take the bait and give us more freedom.

When I was sixteen a new drug was introduced into my cohort: LSD. It began to be a fairly regular part of my friends and my recreational activities. My mom had a pot pipe in her dresser (she said she hadn't used it for years) that we used on occasion to get high. One evening when I was sixteen a group of friends and I were at my house and I mentioned the pipe. She got a big smile on her face and started telling us about the times she smoked pot with her friends. Part of me thought it was cool and another part of me wished she would disapprove of our recreational drug use. I knew it wasn't healthy, even though it was fun. I had a friend the same age as me who had become a heroin addict and was living with her boyfriend who was in his twenties and a drug dealer. I could see she looked really bad and had changed a lot.

I was still doing reasonably well in school. In fact, the first thing I did when I got home was my math homework and then any other assignments that were due. One action of my mom that I still resent to this day was when she announced that she was going to start tutoring a friend of mine who was struggling in school. Like with the pot pipe, part of me thought it was a cool gesture. But a larger part of me felt deep resentment, because I had made myself independent of her help in terms of homework and many other aspects of life. I had experienced so much neglect from her over the years, and here she was showering attention on my friend. I can understand it in terms of her illness but it still makes me mad.

That year I made the varsity soccer team. I had friends encouraging me to go out for the varsity basketball team. I had girlfriends and was well liked at school. Everything looked fine.

As a senior I had two girlfriends and went to two schools. I had two girlfriends because it seemed I was able to do it; and went to a second school in the afternoon to take a math class I couldn't get at the other school.

A teacher at one of the schools I went to, who was also the head football coach, invited male students over to his house. He was single and would make coffee with a touch of Irish cream for his teenage guests. He would read our fortune in Tarot cards and talked about Jung, spirituality and other things that were very cool to me. I went with a friend of mine and after a while started going by myself. As I look back, I can see now that it wasn't that I was gay, just that I deeply longed for attention from a man I admired. This guy was one of the "cool teachers" in the school and the football program was doing pretty well.

As you readers will find as no surprise, he started making passes at me. I deflected his actions but continued to come to his house. The last time I ever went I let him kiss me. It wasn't my cup of tea. I just wanted his kindness and attention. I realized that if I went back he would expect more so I didn't. About two months later he was fired from his teaching job and left the state. Like a number of other things, this is something my mom has never been aware of.

During my senior year mom went on a two week trip to China with a group wanting to promote goodwill between the two countries. She was very excited about the trip for weeks before and after, and brought back a large quantity of goods she'd bought in the markets there. A few months after she got back she resigned from her job just as she was about to be fired.

Graduation was coming up. My class was talking about the ceremony and who would organize it. No one else volunteered so I raised my hand. I don't know what I was thinking! Anyway, it went off well, probably because a teacher or two worked behind the scenes in a major way to make sure it didn't flop. Each graduating senior (in a class of 30 students) was expected to give a brief speech as they stood up I was so caught up in the logistics of the event that I forgot to plan what I was going to say when I got up. I kind of stumbled and said something random as I came up. I remember looking at a video of me; I seemed pretty manic.

Life was very confusing to me. The one bright spot I saw was my pending departure to go on a foreign exchange and live overseas for a year. It became what I lived for.

That summer I was almost responsible for a head-on collision between my car and another, both of us going well over the speed limit. I was passing a car and did not see the car approaching in my lane. The on-coming car had to go fully onto the shoulder of the highway in order to save both of our lives. I wasn't trying to end my life. I truly just didn't see the other car coming.

I was going through the motions of my life as it was. I was deeply in need of a change of environment.

As it would turn out, the following nine months would be something akin to a miracle for me, and would help me find a positive footing in my life.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben