The Art of Being Smart

Oh Boy! Mothers Tell the Truth About Raising Teen Sons
by Maryann Bucknum Brinley

Worried your teenage son is the only boy on the block with a room so messy it's spilling into the hallway? Happened to find your son sneaking out the window in the middle of the night? Ever tried to sit down and "talk" to your teenager, just like the experts say you should, only to get an eye roll and a snide comment from him on his way out the door? If any of this sounds familiar, this book is for you.

In Oh Boy! more than thirty real moms share true stories about how they've handled their sons' adventures and misadventures. The minidramas recounted run the gamut of teen boy behavior, from body odor, prank calls, and bad grades to drinking and sex. The stories, each prefaced with a brief, insightful introduction from mother of two Maryann Bucknum Brinley, prove that-as you may have suspected, but don't mind hearing again-no mom handles things wonderfully every time. Yet even a seemingly disastrous experience can grow into a fond memory that just might generate laughter in years to come.

Like words from a good friend and stories with happy endings, Oh Boy! will help you sleep better at night and remind you that your son will grow up, one of these days.

"Parenting a boy is a lot like raising an alien. I'm not from Venus, but when he was a teenager, my son might as well have been a Martian. I love having a book like this to help me go where no other writer/mother has dared to go before." -Linda Lee Small, coauthor, You Know He's a Keeper . . . You Know He's a Loser . . .

The Art of Being Smart

A team of researchers at the University of Richmond in Virginia led by psychology professor Craig Kinsley has discovered that motherhood can make us smarter and may even help prevent dementia. Honestly, I love these kinds of studies. They were working with rats, not real women, but the results were still amazing and reassuring to those of us who have thought that our IQs would drop on account of the mothering maze.

At the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in Orlando, Florida, in the fall of 2002, Kinsley announced, "When people think about pregnancy, they think about what happens to infants and the mother from the neck down. They do not realize that hormones are washing the brain. If you look at female animals who have never gone through pregnancy, they act differently towards young. But if she goes through pregnancy, she will sacrifice her life for her infant--that is a tremendous change in her behavior that is manifested in genetic alterations in the brain. Females who had two reproductive experiences were able to learn and remember the maze better than females with one or zero." This research team believes that the effect may be even more pronounced in humans, because we invest significantly more time in raising our young than rat mothers.

Now watch how this mother flexes her intelligence quotient.

Stay Awake for Night Games

So, she wonders why he is being so nice to her this evening. He's been grounded for more than a week and has been, until this moment, surly even beyond what she can believe, and she certainly knows this kid's every emotional lurch. Sigh. He can really hurt her and usually succeeds. You know his type. Maybe you have one at home. Handsome, tall for sixteen, and uninterested in academic success, he's the quarterback on the high school football team, though only a junior. That doesn't mean she still can't exert control, which, of course, she's been doing since the guidance officer pointed out his unexcused absences and his report card with nothing but C's and that B in Italian, which everyone knows is a gimme from the assistant football coach. It hasn't been easy since his dad died when he was in middle school. But she's surviving nicely, and his two older brothers--one still in college and the other already out in the working world--are proof of her single-mother moxie.

Now, tonight, a Saturday, this youngest son has decided to go to bed at 10 p.m.

"I'm really beat, Mom," he says sweetly.

She's not really buying this recent helping of sugared talk but it does feel nice. "Okay, I'm going to finish watching my movie but I'll be up soon."

"Good night," he hollers, taking two steps at a time.

Now she hears him thump down the upstairs hallway and into the bathroom. There's the sound of water running and he crosses over to his bedroom. Maybe he really is sleepy. You wish...but not a chance. He did have football practice in the morning and then spent the entire afternoon working for the lawn service moving shrubs for the Clarks, who are putting in a new front walk. Anyone else would be exhausted but--and here's that tiny nagging truth of unconscious knowledge coming to the surface--she knows that this son could never be tired on a Saturday night at ten. A world of possibilities would keep him awake no matter what. The social life he was missing right now must be playing a riotous tune inside his head. She just knows it. There had been numerous calls to his cell phone. Not once did he return those messages within earshot of her.

She doesn't pause the movie but decides to let it play on. In fact, she turns the volume up loud. He thinks she is losing her hearing anyway, so let him become convinced. Sliding into her pink slippers and buttoning her sweater, she gets out of the Naugahyde recliner and quietly tiptoes across the family room to the attached screened porch. She looks around. The light from the kitchen window sheds only a little clarity on the lawn. Is there anything amiss? She can't tell and to tell the truth, she doesn't really know what she is looking for.

Outside, the air is miraculously crisp and very breathable. It had been warm and humid earlier in the week, especially for such a late fall time of year. So sticky. But now it's gorgeous outside. A night to remember. She crosses the backyard to the garage but doesn't want to flip on the light. What if he is watching her from his bedroom window? This has to be a surprise, she knows...and then wonders, what is it that should come as a surprise? This reminds her of that song in West Side Story, the one in which Tony and Maria both sense that "something's coming, I don't know what it is, but it is...gonna be great." Forget it. Focus, she tells herself. What is he up to?

His bike? Hey, the bicycle is missing. Grabbing a flashlight from the shelf on the garage wall, she heads back around to the side of the house. His room is at the rear corner with windows facing back as well as to the side. Bushes and overgrown shrubs make passage painful but she pushes through. In the pale yellow beam of the light in her hand, she spots it: the waiting bike.

But she can wait, too.

The sound of the movie still playing inside the TV room is clear. Those windows are open and the voices travel easily in the still night air. Is he going to wait until the movie has ended? She hopes not because that will be another hour at least. Lately he's been locking his bedroom door anyway, so he can't fear being exposed to a potential good-night kiss from her. No, the bigger fear would be missing out on any action to be grabbed from this Saturday night. She guesses that he'll make his break while the television noise can still act as a buffer. And she's right.

Now sitting in a lawn chair to the side of those bushes, with an unobstructed view of both of his bedroom windows, she hears the sound of his bedroom screen window being clicked out. From inside, a rope comes tumbling out. He is using a piece of old clothesline, and she can't believe he would be this stupid. He might get hurt. Don't shout, she tells herself. Hold it. Don't move yet.

He looks out, checking to see where his rope has dropped, and throws one leg over, then the other. Waiting for just the right time to expose his folly, she sits tight, completely still. He is so strong and so handsome and so young. Wow, what his father wouldn't have given to see him now. Stop that, she says. Don't go there. He's easing himself down the clothesline. What's it attached to upstairs? she wonders.

He lands on the back porch roof with a thud. Thank goodness, he didn't have to go the full two stories to the ground. She thinks, Wouldn't that line have caused rope burns? Maybe all the landscape and yard work he's been doing has toughened up his palms, not to mention all that palming of the football night and day.

As he scurries over to the end of the roof and prepares to jump down, she shines her light directly on him. What a look of absolute shock. I win, she thinks. I win.

"MOM? What the hell are you doing there?" he screams.

"A better question, I think, is what the hell are you doing there?" she replies but not in a scream. A sweet pleasurable sensation comes over her. There haven't been very many occasions lately when she has won this game they play.

"Well, you know..." He is fumbling, dropping his ballsiness.

"I guess I do know," she says. "Want to put your bike back in the garage now or in the morning?"

It's still gorgeous outside. And yes, this is a night to remember, she tells herself as she tries not to smile. Now is not the time to laugh. Yet, her ability to outsmart him is fun for her to consider. As she heads back into the house, he jumps off the porch roof. He's going to move the bike out of the bushes tonight. She starts wondering what she'll do when he heads off to college in two more years. Her job is certainly not challenging. If she really is so smart, maybe she'll go back to school and finish the course work for the degree she was supposed to get before he was born. That's a good idea.

The Art of Not Panicking

Signs of puberty start when he's only nine or ten. Your son is still a child, and my guess is that no adult tells him much at first. His testicles and scrotum (areas of his anatomy that you may not have seen in some time), once close to his body, drop at about age thirteen. Nipples swell on some boys. This is called gynecomastia and it's temporary. If you were he, would you share these facts of life with you? Michael Riera, dean of students at Marin Academy in San Rafael, California, and author of Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers, says that your son may not know as much as you think he does, even in this no-holding-back world of media sex and Internet adventuring. "In an ideal world, the road to sex" (and the drive starts with hormonally whipped-up, developing boy and girl bodies) "is paved with lots of information and conversation about its mechanical and emotional aspects."

The truth is, we moms feel a bit out of our element in this arena. And with ignorance can come a bit of panic. Schools aren't very helpful either, according to Time magazine. "The standard curriculum now consists of one or two days in fifth grade health class dealing with anatomy, reproduction and AIDS prevention, and perhaps a twelfth grade elective course on current issues in sexuality." Even so, when we stumble into wisdom, sometimes we discover just how much we do know. Here is a mom who turned her shock around in time to say exactly the right thing to her son.

Understand His Emerging Sex Drive

He's seventeen and still a virgin. That's a comfort to her but not to him. You will recognize her, I'm sure. Though we mothers aren't all alike, certainly not, our minds just don't head naturally, instinctively into the same places as our sons'. Meanwhile, she knows the part about his virginity because he wrote an essay anonymously complaining that every other guy in his high school class had crossed this mighty river of passage. Of course, what he doesn't know, but she does, is that boys will lie about such things.

But he is still so young, a really young seventeen, not even ready to jump from her comfortable nest in their midwestern town. Nothing to worry about. This will take time. The separation issues and the sex are elements of mothering she takes in stride, most of the time. He can't see anything clearly right now. She didn't mean to read the essay. It was right there on the computer when she went on-line. Called himself El Virgino. Ouch.

"Maybe I haven't found the right girl," he has typed. Of course he hasn't, she thinks. His hair is dyed Kool-Aid pale green. He uses tubes and tubes of L'Oreal Ironing Gel every morning to make it stand out and up. Oh my, he may be seventeen, which in some cultures makes a man mature, but not here, not now. He's a child. Still her child. "If I stay with a girl long enough, I might be able to reap the sexual reward," he admits. "Reward?!!!" She cringes for him and for herself when he rattles on, jealously describing in his teenage prose how most of his friends are studs.

Recently he has been upstairs on the computer all the time. Working on that paper for American history, he says. Researching colleges, he explains. In the ritual eleventh-grade spring one-on-one, his guidance counselor gave them a list of possibilities, including a few famous "reach" schools. He is taking those practice SATs so the next set of scores will go up, she hopes. She's sent off the check on time for another round of standardized test-taking and his admission ticket has arrived in the mail. He's definitely been distracted lately. His grades aren't as good as they were last year, either. He's also in the chat rooms, she knows, having shut her out of some places in his mind. He doesn't talk to her as much and she theorizes that it's good that he's communicating with friends, after all. Yet, he's up there tapping away so late into the night, and he's so removed from the rest of the family. What do they talk about? That is, if you can classify on-line chat and e-mail as human contact and communication. She's the kind of mother who never bought into the idea of a TV in every room--no set for every child's television taste--preferring to have her brood around her even when it meant bickering about choice of sitcoms and professional wrestling shows. After all, chaos, even that family fighting kind, connects them intimately. The disconnections are what worry her more.

It's three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon and she's just come in the back door from school. Her seventeen-year-old puzzle is at the gym, pumping iron with pals. His little brother is at soccer practice. Her husband won't be home until at least six or maybe a little later tonight because he had a meeting in Indianapolis.

"Hey Mom, do you remember that e-mail address for your old friend at the agency in New York?" her eldest daughter asks. "I'm thinking of sending her my resume."

"Oh sure," she says. "If I don't have it on my Rolodex, I know it's somewhere in the old address book on the computer."

An hour later, when the honeyed turkey breast is in the oven, the small red potatoes are scrubbed and ready to go, the salad is set, and the dishwasher is emptied, she climbs the stairs to what had been more of a full-time office back when she was freelancing five days a week. Now it's considered family turf and not just her own space. She flips on the computer, waits for the beeps and whirs of the hard drive connections to stop, and begins to search for that old computer address file for her daughter. It's not in the main directory. Remnants of her seventeen-year-old are all around. Why, she wonders, can't he put anything away, ever? Piles of paper clutter the desk. An empty, grossly congealed glass of what must have been one of his nutritional, calorie-boosting shakes sits alongside the keyboard. Energy bar wrappers are on the floor to the left of the wastebasket. Did he narrowly miss or purposely trash the office floor? Hmmm. Absently ticking off a mental reminder to bring his trash habits up later at dinner, she clicks her way into the windowed maze of a world he seems to prefer to her these days.

Excerpted from Oh Boy! by Maryann Bucknum Brinley Copyright © 2004 by Maryann Bucknum Brinley. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Maryann Bucknum Brinley, the author of six books, has written for Family Circle, Woman's Day, Good Housekeeping, and UMDNJ University magazines. She has a son, Zach, a daughter, Maggie, and lives in Montclair, New Jersey.