Learner's permit

My son Tim turned sixteen yesterday, and like at least two generations of suburban American kids before him, he celebrated the day with a trip to the Registry of Motor Vehicles for his learner's permit.

For the most part, I was pleased by his sense of urgency. Childhood, and even more so the teen years, have far too few rites of passage these days. With all the material goods and all the travel opportunities that so many privileged young people have access to, sometimes it's not clear to me what they have left to anticipate. I look at the teens I know locally who live in McMansions with swimming pools, billiards rooms, in-house movie theaters and vacation houses at the beach and wonder if they have any incentive at all to grow up and leave home. Do you yearn for your own little bachelor pad if your parents’ place has an in-house gym with a full basketball court?

So it feels right to me that there's something special and rare about turning sixteen, something cool and exciting that you get to do merely by reaching a birthday. But it’s not the de facto milestone that it once was. Articles I've read recently have supported what I've personally observed; when my generation were teens, we all wanted to drive, but now, with their overscheduled lives and their helicopter parents who are accustomed to driving them to every activity, some kids don't really care all that much about getting a license.

And it makes sense, in a way. Being able to drive yourself to SAT preparation class, math tutoring, or mandatory community service hours doesn't have quite the same allure as being able to take the wheel and go cruising with your friends on the strip. Moreover, new regulations that restrict whom teen drivers can take as passengers mean any possibility of cruising the strip -- wherever that strip may be, in our quiet semi-rural town -- still feels years away to a sixteen-year-old.

Tim returned from the RMV triumphant, permit in hand. It's definitely a rite of passage, and one he was delighted to undergo. I greeted his news with a little bit of ambivalence. First and foremost, there are the obvious worries about safety -- his own and those of other people with he could potentially collide -- but there's also the subtler sense that if he can drive, he's taking his first steps into not only the excitement and independence of adulthood but ultimately the drudgery as well. Welcome to errands. And having to be places on time. And dealing with car maintenance. And paying for gas.

But he's looking forward to it. He’s had plenty of opportunities to pilot various vehicles while working on his grandparents' farm; during the summer months he drove cars, trucks and tractors all over the fields and private byways on the farm. He knows the excitement of powering a large piece of machinery. Moreover, he's been driving a motorboat since he was about ten, and like a lot of kids, he just likes engines and speed and what happens when you get the chance to combine the two.

So I wish him all the best as he ventures behind the wheel. And I wish my husband all the best as well, because that's who will be overseeing Tim's driving instruction in these early days. I'll wait until he's a little more capable. Then I'll give him some errands to do. Because with freedom comes responsibility, and I'll be more than happy to pass on a few of my weekly trips to the town dump. Maybe that can be considered a rite of passage as well.

Turning 13

On the afternoon of Tim’s third birthday, I had to work, but my mother was happy to take Tim on a special birthday expedition. The two of them went raspberry-picking at a local farm. The preceding day, he’d received a cardboard crown at preschool, and he insisted on wearing it throughout that birthday, including to the farm. My mother regaled me with an account of how the only other berry-pickers that afternoon were a consortium of chefs from upscale Boston restaurants who were on some kind of group tour promoting local agriculture. As my mother told it, they made a big fuss over Tim at every turn throughout the raspberry patch, exclaiming, “Tim, you’re the birthday king!”

I thought of this story yesterday, exactly ten years later, as I waited for Tim to bike home from the bus stop. Buses, middle school, riding a bike, being outside by himself – all of these would have been unimaginable to me the day Tim went raspberry-picking as a 3-year-old, but all are commonplace matters in the life of a 13-year-old.

Contemporary American society doesn’t hold a lot of age-specific rites of passage for kids. In Carlisle, kids can leave campus on their own after dismissal as of fifth grade, and that tends to be a big deal to them; it means they can walk to the general store or the library by themselves or with friends. But after that, for a lot of kids there’s nothing specifically great about turning any particular age until they reach 16 and start learning to drive.

Happily, social media has changed that. By turning 13, Tim was officially old enough to open his own Facebook account, and he’s been looking forward to that for months.

Not every family upholds the 13-year-old rule for Facebook, since it’s essentially done on an honor system, and some parents don’t even know about the rule, as I discovered over the summer when I expressed surprise that a friend let her 12-year-old have a Facebook presence. But I felt pretty strongly about compliance. Partly it was that I believe it sets a good standard to assume rules exist for a reason, but I also liked the fact that here was an age-specific milestone at a time when those can be hard to come by. I was happy for the built-in opportunity to make something special about turning 13 for Tim.

Rick and I went over the ground rules during dinner: he had to friend both of us, so that we could keep an eye on what he was saying on line; and he couldn’t friend anyone who used inappropriate language. After dinner, Tim got to work setting up his account.

As promised, I was the first person he friended; then he found both his grandmothers and some cousins. Since he’s among the oldest of his friends, he didn’t find too many peers on Facebook, but in time he will. For now, he’s enjoying something special and new, granted to him because he reached teenagehood. It’s pleasing to find rites of passage where few exist. So far, Tim is taking it in stride – and joining Facebook was definitely less thrilling to him than other aspects of his birthday this year including his party last weekend in Maine and the apple crisp I made for his birthday dessert – but he’s having fun with it. And I’m happy in the knowledge that turning 13 does indeed come with some special privileges.

Slumber parties, sleepovers and other rites of passage

Holly invited her friend Samantha for a sleepover. As the hosting mom, I got off easy: we were all at the same multi-family dinner party earlier and didn’t get back until 9, so I didn’t have to plan dinner for them or any early-evening activities. Now it’s late-ish and they should be in bed, but I’m having so much fun listening to them chatter and play that I can’t bring myself to enforce any sensible rules just yet. They set up a spa of sorts (proving, I suppose, that the spa concept is archetypal, since I don’t think either of them necessarily knows what a real spa is) for stuffed animals. They laid out a bath towel on the hall carpet and arranged some jewelry, hair accessories and art supplies on it; now they’re giving each stuffed animal a bath in the bathroom sink. “You can rent towels, soap and Q-tips,” Holly told Samantha. “It’s $100; that’s all.” “That’s ALL?” Samantha gasped, certain that $100 was unreasonable for some soap, Q-tips and a crayon or two, even at an upscale spa. “Well, it’s only pretend money,” Holly said, showing Samantha a sheaf of bills that she’d removed earlier from the Monopoly game.

I know they should go to bed soon, but they’re having so much fun and it reminds me that for all the activities our kids do that I could not even imagine when I was their age – the Wii games, the movies-on-demand on TV and DVD, the Build-a-Bear workshops and pottery painting parties – there are simple pleasures that need no frills, and a sleepover is one of them. Girls are happy just to have the novelty of spending the night at each other’s houses.

I have wonderful, cozy memories of sleepovers from when I was growing up. I remember the homey security of my friend Carol’s house, where we’d play with her guinea pigs and be teased – in an altogether welcome way – by her brother. I remember my friend Jennifer’s yearly slumber parties, at which we’d eat mini Milky Ways from the freezer all night long and play Truth or Dare out on the lawn. (The other girls always chose Truth, because they had spicier tales to tell. I chose dare, because I didn’t, and usually ended up running down to the riverbank and back in my bare feet.) I remember sleepovers with my friend Julie in high school when we’d stay up so late and get so tired that we’d start hallucinating while we were talking, and other times when we’d get the notion to go walking in the woods behind my house in the wee hours, scaring ourselves with the strange shapes of tree stumps and branches. (Wandering around outside was not uncommon at sleepovers when I was growing up. That’s the one thing I did that I can’t imagine letting my kids and their friends do, but at the time, we’d never heard scary stories about kids getting hurt in the woods.) I remember the party when my friend Hope turned twelve: her mother brought us to the movie “Grease,” and then we stayed up all night watching Saturday Night Live and reading Seventeen Magazine and I was as happy as I could possibly imagine being.

So if Samantha and Holly end up with cozy memories, friendship memories, from tonight, it’s fine with me if they stay up a little later than they should. They can sleep late tomorrow. They’re still so young and may have a very long friendship ahead of them; if this is one of the steps along the way, I’m happy to be a part of it.

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Running Streak Day 769: I spent the whole day writing and finally fit in 1.4 miles, up to the soccer fields and back, at 5:45. Hoping for longer runs this weekend.