Raising a Teenage Son: A Day in the Life Through Five Meals

EVENING

After dinner we are cleaning up together, scraping dishes and dishing out plans for the next day. My husband is on the phone with a client and the boys and I are putting things in order. 

The table is cleared, the food is put away, the dishwasher loaded and ready, and as I’m wiping down the counter one son leans on me. He almost outweighs me now and easily pushes his hip into my side, one arm slung around my shoulder. 

I wait, thinking he is about to ask for something or possibly thank me for a good dinner. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t look at me, just stands there hip to hip. For a moment I am tempted to ask him what he needs, but I put down the rag in my hand and hold back the words. 

I used to have to force a hug on him each night before bed.

Here he is—arm around me, casual. We look silently in the same direction, like two explorers at the edge of North America or two workmen surveying the day’s tasks. Have we done this together? Cleaned a kitchen, eaten a meal, had a discussion, made it through a day?

NOON

At lunch he is rifling through the fridge like a man ending a long fast. 

It’s been maybe an hour since his second breakfast but you’d think someone had hidden ancient treasure in this stainless steel box, the way he frantically shifts things around and ducks low to see what’s on the bottom shelf, both arms zombie-like in the refrigerator. 

“Starving!” he says, and I am quick to correct his senseless hyperbole. I am irritated with him. He just ate, and only moments ago I was telling him to clean up his food mess strewn from counter to table to living room. 

“Like a pack of wild dogs,” I complain. He’ll eat again in a couple hours and it’s senseless to say anything about ruining his appetite for dinner. 

His appetite has been larger than life since we brought him home at 17 months old. We thought he’d outgrow his insatiability, figuring it was the natural outcome of orphanage life and never-enough. 

People told us he’d make himself sick on so much food but he never did. They told us he’d outgrow his huge appetite but here he is, an hour after his last substantial meal, ravenous for more eggs or more meat or last night’s leftovers, and he is about to cook himself yet another feast. 

He pulls out the eggs and somewhere in the dark recesses of the fridge he finds taco meat and cheese. He has a process, and as he toasts an english muffin and fries his eggs over easy, he tells me all about the book he’s been reading for school. He’s in the groove, cooking an odd concoction and yacking at peak performance.

He is oblivious that I am annoyed with him or that I was just passing through the kitchen on my way to work on the laundry, so I stop and listen quietly. 

He’s also oblivious that I’ve read the book he’s talking about. I want to correct him on the finer points of plot or the background of the story, but he is flipping eggs and reheating taco meat and I am the only one here to listen. 

“Tell me what you mean” I say, when he claims he doesn’t like his book. What I want to say is “You’re not making sense.” 

I want to convince him it’s a good book, but I also want to remind him that his laundry needs picked up and he left his socks in the living room last night and his hair needs brushed and a million other petty things, but I am listening. He slows me down. 

“Tell me more.”