Between Mothers and Sons

Excerpted from
Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk About Having Sons and Raising Men
By Patricia Stevens

HE'S BEEN working on the 1964 Mustang, his first car, for several months now, rebuilding the engine, repairing the clutch, putting on new belts, new hoses, reconnecting loose wires. There are car parts everywhere. In the garage, in the driveway, in the yard, on the front porch, on the back porch, in his bedroom, in the living room. Spark plugs lie dead and partially buried in the grass; the original left fender, dented beyond repair by one of the three previous owners, sits in the middle of the driveway; four hubcabs have become metal shrubs on both sides of the sidewalk. Inside, while watching TV, he's rubbing down rusted metal car parts with sandpaper. The air cleaner that goes over the carburetor, which he plans to spray-paint, is now a sculpture sitting on a bed of newspaper in front of the couch.

His fingers look dirty all the time now, even though I've bought both Lava soap and a half-pound tub of Goop. When he's off at his part-time job at Econofoods, where he cashiers or works behind the service desk, the customers can see his oil-stained fingers when he's counting out their change or checking their IDs. When I remind him of this, he rolls his eyes at me. His younger brother, Jordan, who's also in the room and has no interest in cars but does have an established interest in sibling conflict, says, "Yeah, Michael Panic is in my history class and asked me if you ever take showers."

"Dirty fingernails. It's a turnoff for the girls." I can't help myself either.

Jeremy shrugs. "It doesn't come off," he says. Sometimes he says, "Would you get off my back?" He's heard about the fingernails before. I'm on him again. I'm always on him, it seems, for something.

He's blowing off his senior year, and I'm on him for that, even though he earned most all of his credits for graduation in his freshman, sophomore, and junior years, plus he's going to the university in the fall, has been accepted into the College of Engineering, and has earned a grant that will pay his tuition. He's not affected by peer pressure; he isn't obsessed with his hair or clothes; he works hard, earned $5,000 last year, has friends I approve of, doesn't drink or do drugs, knows how to fix things, loves the outdoors, can take care of himself. I'm proud of him. Still I'm on him: for not studying, for not cleaning his room, for working too many hours at Econofoods, for having dirty fingernails, for not getting a haircut (but when he does, for getting it cut too short), for not having enough social life (Don't you like girls.'). He can't win. "It won't stop," he tells me.

He's right. When I wake up in the middle of the night (which is when I have the most time to think), I say to myself, You're on him too much. Why are you doing this? I'm cramming, I tell myself. There's a last-minute desperation to turn him into everything I expect him to become before he leaves home in a couple of months.

But if I'm honest, I have a second motive: in my relationship with Jeremy, I'm often run by guilt. For years now, I have tried to amend for all I took from his childhood. I'm on him all the time because I think that if I can just make him more daring in social situations, more confident in intellectual pursuits, and less tight with his feelings, then I will no longer be guilty of having wrecked his life.

From behind the kitchen window, I can see him out there on the oil-blotched driveway, leaning his lanky six-foot-two-inch-plus frame over the innards of the Mustang. Next year he'll grow another half inch. He towers over me. His brother will just reach six feet. When I walk with the two of them, I am a dwarf. I'm just over five-four. Their father is a hair over five-ten. All four grandparents are shrimps. Jeremy's height, we believe, is a throwback to his maternal great-great-grandfather, who was six-foot-four back in the mid-1800s.

He's got his shirt off, revealing a long, smooth back, which is smudged with grease and curved over the car's engine. He has a project. He's happy when he has a project. When he was two and three, it was the bright orange Fisher-Price bulldozer or the bright yellow backhoe. Instead of his stuffed rabbit, he sometimes took the box that once housed the backhoe to bed with him, so he could fall asleep dreaming of owning all the other Fisher-Price equipment that was pictured on the back-the steamroller, the dump truck, the crane. Then there were his Legos, which occupied him for hours at a time, and each year the structures grew more and more elaborate. There was also a lot of digging in the backyard-the squirrel trap that was never really meant to catch a squirrel but was a pit so well camouflaged with twigs, clippings, and leaves that it accidentally trapped the housepainter's left leg. Sometime after that there was the wood phase: the tree house in the backyard, the cat feeder, and much later the book holder, the chessboard, and the oak plant stand he gave me as a birthday gift. There were trains-HO- then N-scale-the work on his bicycle, the repairs around the house. Why wouldn't cars be next?