13 Is the New 18 (25 page)

On the one hand, I understand that it's normal for kids to push their parents away as they grow up. On the other hand, I wasn't willing to accept being cut off this way from my own son just because he had turned thirteen. I actually missed spending time with Taz. I was starting to feel like I didn't know who he was. One day I realized I couldn't even remember the last time we'd done something simple and fun together.

I decided we needed some mother- son quality time. I offered to take him to the beach, the pool, the bowling alley, the mall. I'd play cards, or even the dreaded Monopoly. How about a bike ride, or maybe a jog in the park?

“Nah, that's OK,” he'd say, no matter what I offered to do. “I got some people I gotta hang out with today.”

I sometimes heard other parents describe what sounded like idyllic family outings to museums, historic
sites, and other attractions. It made me wonder what was wrong with me that I couldn't get Taz to go places with me.

Then, one day, I dropped in on a friend who'd recently renovated her home. She wanted me to see the new cabinets, tiles, and paint colors. But when I got there, I witnessed firsthand just what these allegedly idyllic family outings I've been jealous of are really all about.

It was 11 a.m. on a Sunday and her thirteen- year- old had just been awakened by his little sister. He was not happy about it, because, apparently, he believed he was entitled to sleep all day.

Not so, said his mother. They were heading out to a museum to see a spectacular exhibit about the evolution of modern architecture, and she wanted to leave within twenty minutes. It was a beautiful day, so they were also going to be picnicking in a park en route. She had a lovely basket all prepared, with his favorite ham-and- cheese sandwiches. As a special treat for him, she had even gone to the trouble of purchasing sour cream and onion potato chips.

Well, all that might work on an eight- year- old, but, apparently, it wasn't enough to get an adolescent out of bed on a Sunday morning.

“I'm not hungry,” he moaned. “I don't care. I just want to sleep.”

“Well, that's not happening,” said the mother matter-of- factly.
“You need to get up, brush your teeth, and get dressed so that we can go.”

“I'm not GOING!” the kid screamed. “I TOLD you, I don't WANT to go!”

“Well, it's NOT UP TO YOU!” the mother screamed back. “This is what we're doing today, and YOU'RE coming whether you like it or NOT!”

“I HATE you!” came the response. “I hate EVERYONE in this FAMILY!”

I fervently wished at that moment that I could have shrunk myself to the size of a dust ball (not that she had any, her house seemed spotless) and rolled away on the still-glossy, just-polyurethaned wood floors to hide under the tastefully reupholstered sofa. Should I have just turned around and let myself out, or would that have been too rude? On the other hand, I didn't exactly want to interfere in this little conflagration to bid my good- byes. I didn't want to further embarrass my friend by reminding her that she had a witness to this outburst, but I also didn't have the slightest bit of curiosity about how it was going to turn out. I'd been there, I really had, and the endings to these episodes were never pretty.

At some point in the argument, she sighed and turned to me, bit her lip, and shook her head.

“I sympathize with you,” I said. “I really do. We have the exact same thing happening in our house all the time. Speaking of which, I'm gonna run. Good luck! See ya.”

I turned tail and dashed out the door, and realized, somewhat guiltily, that actually we hadn't had this same exact problem in our house lately because when Taz said no, he didn't want to do something, I never argued. I guess this makes me a wimp. Or maybe just a Terrible Mother.

As further evidence that my own child was becoming a stranger to me, one day another mother told me that the photo on Taz's Facebook page was a good one.

I was embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about. Terrible Mother that I am, I had not kept tabs on my son's Facebook page; I wasn't even sure what a Facebook page was. Turned out my friend's son had a Facebook page, too, and my son was a Face-book friend of her son's, so that's how she knew about the photo on Taz's page.

Not that I understood any of this. Clearly, I needed to get on board with this Facebook thing. So I went to the Facebook website and supplied my e- mail address to register.

Moments later, I got a message informing me that I had just invited forty- three people to be my Facebook friends! Some of them were people I hadn't heard from in years, including assorted cousins, high school classmates I hadn't kept in touch with, and others from various phases of my life, like a student from a college class I taught four years earlier and a political consultant I had once quoted for a news story I wrote during the 2000 election campaign.

I wasn't sure what I'd clicked or done to get this list
of people, but the whole thing was mortifying. People I hadn't spoken to in eight years were getting invitations to be my Facebook friend? How embarrassing!

Suddenly e- mails started popping up in my in- box. A couple of relatives were the first to respond. Yes, they did want to be my Facebook friends. Hurray! I was touched by this, and pleased. Then I reminded myself not to get too carried away— these people were my cousins, after all. If they won't be my Facebook friends, who will?

But as the minutes wore on, I wondered why so few of the rest of the forty- three invitees were responding. Had they gotten the invitation and thought, “UGH! I don't want HER to be my Facebook friend!” Or were they simply wondering, “Who the hell is this?” since they hadn't heard from me in years and quite possibly had forgotten who I was. I was starting to feel paranoid, and not a little bit depressed.

Then I got another e- mail from someone wanting to be my Facebook friend, only it was someone whose name was utterly unknown to me. I was certain this person was not on my original list of potential Face-book friends. I went to his Facebook page to check him out, and he definitely did not look familiar. His profile described him as a graduate student from Wyoming. I wracked my brain. Did I know this person? How could this person know me? It was all maddening, like something out of
Minority Report
or
The Matrix.
Maybe I knew him in my OTHER life, with my OTHER brain?

It was like my e- mail address was living some secret life without me, just like when I tie my dog up outside a store to run a quick errand, and I come out and people I don't know are talking to the dog by name. “Hi, Buddy! How are you?” some strange guy is crooning at her. I mean, excuse me, but how the hell does my dog have human friends whom I don't know? When I'm brave enough to ask, there's always some logical explanation— “Oh, I work at the dog boarding place, and I remember the time Buddy stayed with us for a few days,” or something like that— but it's still rather disorienting to think that your pet knows more people in the neighborhood than you do.

This Facebook thing was a little bit like that. I wanted to e- mail this guy and say, “But who are you? Why do you want to be my Facebook friend when I've never heard of you?” But I was too embarrassed. I mean, what if I did know him, somehow, through work, or some class I'd taken long ago or something, and I just didn't remember. Or maybe he was one of those Internet stalkers the FBI is always busting, and he somehow thinks I'm a teenager from Alabama who will meet him at a bus station, instead of a forty- something mother of two who has a lot of bad hair days.

I reminded myself that I'd started out on Facebook just wanting to see my own son's photo, but now, somehow, I was spending all this time obsessing over who was and wasn't friending me.

So I forced myself to get to the task at hand and look
for Taz's page. I found it easily enough. On it was a photo of him with a girl I didn't recognize. She had her arms wrapped around him and an expression of utter glee on her face. But he was staring straight at the camera, looking positively bored. There was nothing salacious about it, and yet his look of “been there, done that” ennui was somehow a little disturbing.

A day or so later, Taz checked his Facebook account and saw that there was an invitation from me wanting to be his Facebook friend. Even more horrifying, he realized that many other people he knew had gotten an invitation from his mother to be their Facebook friends.

Meanwhile, I still hadn't quite figured out how to have my own Facebook page, or what I would do with a Facebook page about myself if I could figure out how to make one, but one bright spot was that I already had a Facebook invitation to do lunch with one of my cousins.

“Why did you go on Facebook?” Taz demanded.

“I wanted to see your page,” I said. “Mike's mom said your picture was really good.”

“You shouldn't have gone on there. Don't you know how embarrassing this is? Facebook is for teenagers!”

“But there's lots of moms on Facebook. I invited a whole bunch of people to be my Facebook friends, and all the ones who are my age said yes.”

“Exactly! All the ones who are your age, and nobody else. You don't need Facebook. You can just make a phone call or send an e- mail or something. You need to delete your Facebook account.”

“How can I delete my Facebook account when I'm not even sure how I created it?”

“Mom, please, this is humiliating!”

Finally, I agreed that now that I had achieved my objective of seeing his Facebook page, I didn't really need a Facebook page of my own. I gave him my password and told him he could delete it if he wanted to.

“Me? Why should I do it?” he said. “I'm busy!”

Well, yes, I explained to Taz, that is part of the problem— you are always busy. Even too busy to hang out with your mother, which is why I felt the need to try to get to know you through your Facebook account.

Taz never did delete my Facebook account. And neither did I. And, eventually, a funny thing happened. I became addicted to Facebook, and it had nothing to do with Taz. I think it started when a former coworker whom I hadn't heard from in years found me on Face-book and said he liked the poem I'd put on my Facebook Wall. Until that moment, I hadn't even realized other people could see my Facebook Wall. I thought it was more like a diary.

Then the lightbulb went off. It
is
a diary. But it's a
public
diary. And that's what's fun about it. (Fun, that is, as long as your father isn't running for president and your Facebook page doesn't say you support some
other
guy.) Facebook is like TV— only every single show, every minute of every single day, is about someone who's your friend.

An important breakthrough in my Facebook evolution
was when my niece— the twenty- five- year- old Glam Queen of Long Island— requested me as a Face-book friend. After my experience with my son's rejection, I hadn't even bothered to ask my niece to be my Facebook friend, so I was pleased and flattered when the request came from her. She said she couldn't believe how many Facebook friends I had, and that she liked my photo. She even said she wanted to come hang out at an event I had mentioned on my Wall— an art show hosted by a friend.

This was especially amusing because my sister had just told me she didn't know if my niece was coming to the art show. She'd e- mailed and phoned her but hadn't gotten any response.

“She's definitely coming to the art show,” I told my sister. “She just wrote me a note about it on my Face-book Wall.”

“She wrote on your Facebook Wall?” my sister said. Then, after a pause: “You have a Facebook page?”

Suddenly, I felt so popular. It was like being back in high school— only this time I get to be one of the Cool Girls! At work, someone said that playing with Facebook was like being twenty- seven years old again. “ Twenty-seven?” I said incredulously. “You mean
seventeen!”

I now routinely waste every free minute of entire weekends on Facebook. I joined a group called “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet,” and another called “People who always have to spell their names for other people.” I took the movie compatibility test and was
pleased to see that according to the results, my boss and I are highly compatible.

I was afraid to add the “What kind of drunk are you?” application, but I would really like to, because a woman in Denmark whom I met once for ten minutes, and who is now my Facebook friend, has it on
her
FB page. I did take the “Which Beatle are you?” quiz, and was surprised to find that I am George. (I was so sure I was John!)

Then I got my sister to sign up for Facebook, and she took a quiz to find out what type of animal she was in a past life. She was a platypus, and she talked me into taking the same quiz, and it turns out I was a platypus, too. I found this a little embarrassing, like I was being a copycat of my big sister, but, in her wise way, she assured me it was fine. “It is as it should be,” she declared on her Facebook Wall. “You are my baby sister platypus.”

But I didn't realize the extent of my FB addiction until 12:43 a.m. one Saturday, when I sent a message through Facebook to a friend in Seattle, where it was only 9:43 p.m. I told her how much I liked the pictures of her puppy that she had put up on her Facebook page, and she immediately wrote back, “I can't believe you're on Facebook at 12:43 a.m.! ADDICT! ADDICT!”

Facebook even started to creep into my work life. My employer has offices all over the world, and I've dealt with many colleagues by phone and e- mail without ever meeting them. Friending them on Facebook was a way of matching faces to names and getting to know them a little more personally. But this also meant that work
conversations sometimes took place on Facebook. One day when a coworker sent me a work- related message on Facebook, I asked him to continue the conversation by phone.

“You have to help me stop!” I wrote. “I'm addicted to Facebook!”

“Help you stop?” he wrote back. “I can't help you stop— I'm an enabler!”

But why
can't
we stop? Well, it's just that it's so much fun. I can't wait to see what's on the little “News Feed” that tells me Ted is catching up on his reading! Diane is going to a party! Hilary just bought a car and got a job waitressing in New Zealand! I love posting my own news on my Wall— things like “I made a festive holiday craft today— I glued glitter on pinecones!”