Raising Teen Sons

Excerpted from
Oh Boy! Mothers Tell the Truth About Raising Teen Sons
By Maryann Bucknum Brinley

I was outside the Budget Print Center on the corner of Cooper Avenue and Valley Road in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, when I stopped to reconnect with a friend.

"Oh boy," she says. "Wait until you hear what's going on."

Her son is fourteen years old, six feet one, 180 pounds, a sturdy, big boy and on the freshman football team. She picked up the thread of a story from school about some boy who peed into an empty beer bottle and then offered it to a ninth-grade girl at a party. (Yes, word is that the girl drank it, which could certainly make a body very sick.) This mom is worried about her son's inability to think clearly. He's made some pretty screwy choices in the past. Was he the boy who gave the girl the tainted beer bottle?

"'Aw Mom,' was all he could say in defense at first," she laments. "His tone of voice just reeked with denial, but you never know. I had to push him and dig hard to get the truth."

Here in her life are the real secrets of parenting boys through the amazing and turbulent teens. There are no formulas. There is no standard practice. Each son and each mother is an individual, and what happens between them is art, by even the most dictionary-like definition available: "Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature (a boy]." Or, on the other hand: "A specific skill in adept performance, conceived as requiring the exercise of intuitive faculties [by a mom] that cannot be learned solely by study." We may not always like the process or the outcome. It may not be pretty at all. But, oh boy, is that mothering. Ah yes ... and every mother knows so.

At the ice hockey rink in the early morning cold or after a freezing late-night game, my conversations with other mothers of teen boys are priceless. "Listen. Listen," my conscience demands. Here are important insights from artful mothers who have been badgered too often of late. These secrets are not sanitized. These boys are not depressed or destined for prison. These mothers are artists. Their stories are gratifying-especially if you are also the mother of a teenage boy. "So ... you've been there too," they say.

When I e-mail friends who are struggling with murky mothering issues regarding boys thirteen through eighteen and even nineteen, I see what it feels like to mother a pubescent child of the opposite sex. "He nearly killed his younger brother. He put his hand through the wall in his bedroom. His father doesn't want to deal with this issue."

In empathy, when I dial the number of a mother whose son is currently the butt of a soccer team joke and afraid to go to school as a result, I try to reach for intimate wisdom; not the kind delivered dispassionately by someone with letters that follow a last name. "Did this ever happen to Zach?" she asks. Zach is my own son, who is now twenty-four. "Well, sure ... sort of... I know how you feel. High school hallways can be emotional minefields."

Sharing stories and secrets with women who are right there with us doing the psychological and physical "dirty" work of raising teenage boys reinforces a truth I learned working with Kay Willis of Mothers Matter in Rutherford, New Jersey. "Following an expert's advice," says Kay, "doesn't make you an expert, it just makes you a follower." In other words, real experience, expertise, and the art of mothering can be found in the lives of real women. This is what I am trying to capture in Oh Boy.

We parents of adolescents have heard a lot from Harvard psychologists, from fathers, and from boys themselves, as well as from legions of university-trained scholars. I've read the best-sellers and wise books about boys, from Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Michael Thompson, Ph.D., to Olga Silverstein and Beth Rashbaum, authors of The Courage to Raise Good Men. All these books are beneficial, of course, but isn't there more to be shared from women themselves? How to take your male child through the turbulent adolescent years and arrive together safe, sane, and secure on the other side of twenty-one has been such a hot topic. Sometimes the advice is wonderful and deeply reassuring. We need it. Sometimes the wordy discussions never even enter the realm of reality for the mothers I've met. As one friend insists, "I'm tired of experts telling me what I'm doing wrong. I just want a book to keep nearby so I can see that other mothers are experiencing the same ups and downs."

I wrote this book because mothers of adolescent boys need to know that they are unsung heroines. In order to reap any insight from this book, you ought to:

Stop feeling guilty.

Expect to find reassurance or a few laughs.

Pat yourself on the back and say, "Aw Mom," you are doing a good enough job.

Take some time off for your own good behavior. Being the mother of a teenage boy seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day can tip the balance of your sanity scale. To be on top of his game, you need to be in good shape mentally.

All stories are pulled from real life, hundreds of interviews, and encounters I've had with mothers all across the country. I'd like to think that the incidents are universal and that they cross cultural and geographical lines, and I have purposely avoided using pseudonyms for my moms and sons. Instead, I simply refer to them as "she" and "he."

In order to protect these good and sometimes new friends, as well as their remarkable sons, from further exposure or ridicule down the road, identities and anecdotes have been merged and altered. These topics are delicate and I would never want to be the catalyst for a confrontation between mother and child. At a time in life when privacy can become an integral part of growth, let's face it, "You told her what?" could easily turn into a battle cry.

Yet I'd be a cad if I didn't show some recognition in print for all the honesty I heard in my research in Montclair, New Jersey; State College, Pennsylvania; Wallace, North Carolina; Boise, Idaho; Edinburg, Texas; Kirkwood, Missouri; Atlanta, Georgia; Sanibel Island, Florida; Vashon, Washington; San Diego, California; El Paso, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana; Norfolk, Virginia; Fort Madison, Iowa; Livingston, New Jersey; Villa Park, Illinois; Hubbard, Iowa; Brooklyn, New York; Laurel, Maryland; Calama, Washington; Indianapolis, Indiana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Boston, Massachusetts; Quechee, Vermont.

I begin each anecdote with a brief introduction to the art of mothering. In these sections are tips, voices, quotes, and even a few old news clippings I've collected along the way to my own son becoming twenty-five this year. You need all the help you can get as a mother and, for me, that means picking up signs of my superiority when I see them in print or in some researcher's evidence. You may feel some of these ideas are quirky. Skip over them when that happens. Some are serious. Feel free to jump around in this book. And forgive me if anything I say comes off as expertise. I am no expert. I've just spent years interviewing the people who like to call themselves experts.

Each introduction should lead you into the nitty-gritty encounters and the earthy truths that emerge when you are on the front lines of life with big boys. They are big boys with little boys' brains, and isn't it true that as grown women we sometimes wonder how tar we should go, what we should do, whom we should call? You may not find any encounter that matches your own experience as a mom. Sorry about that. I also decided to steer clear of really heartbreaking or life-threatening incidents. I did find a few stories of suicide, accidental death, and serious mental illness, but my light-touch format in this book couldn't do those mothers' tales justice.