Thirteen Candles

My daughter turned thirteen earlier this month. On her birthday, when I was dropping her off at school, she begged me to go home. She didn’t want to go to school and thought she had the right to sit it out since it was her birthday. We were ankle-deep in the daily routine, and going home would be back-tracking since I head into Sacramento after dropping them at school.

Sitting in the congested carline, she fought me for what felt like an hour but might have been ten minutes. Her last act before facing defeat and getting out of the car was to scream at me, “I hate you.”

I funneled into the car line exit and had a massive cortisol dump. Having a fight with my daughter on the morning of her 13th birthday was the farthest thing from my mind when I woke up that day. She never yelled I hate you at me before.

I heard horror stories of “when they turn,” meaning your kids hit some age where they go from nice to a vestibule of dark energy.

When I walked my dog I ran into a neighbor, she’s a retired engineer and funny in a serious way. She asked how old my kids were, and I told her thirteen and eleven. A chill ran down her spine and she said, “Teenagers, ugh.”

I told her what happened on my daughter’s birthday, and she said, “It gets a lot better when they turn eighteen.”

I don’t know if its because their personality improves, or it’s because you go from seeing them daily to a couple of times a year.

The same week, in my writing class, the teacher commented on someone’s teenage character, and he said, “Something happens to a teenager’s brain. It is a chemical reaction.” He added, “I know this because I recently went through it with my daughter.”

He was like a man back from war, who would only share his stories with other soldiers over dollar beers at the Veterans Hall.

I thought my daughter would glide through this time since she’s an introvert and loves a good chill with her mom. When she was a toddler, she refused to let me buckle her into her car seat, and one time in a grocery parking lot, she screamed and straightened herself like a board, I broke a sweat but eventually got there strapped down. A woman approached me and said, “My daughter did the same thing; she was the easiest teenager.”

I held on to that lovely woman’s comment, maybe she was an angel, and thought, my daughter’s control issues would keep her on a straight path into adulthood.

It is not like my daughter isn’t temperamental. She fights with her brother like crazy. My son gets so much joy from making her mad; her anger fuels his fire. One morning, taking them to school, she made a comment intending to piss him off, and then he told her he was turning her in to Stop It.

She screamed at him, begging him not to do that. I asked what Stop It means; he said it’s the anonymous bully tip line at school. 

I asked him if I could use it too.

We still had fun on her birthday and talked about how that’s pretty harsh to say to anyone, let alone her biggest fan. The next day, though, she woke up sick. Was she really sick? I don’t know, I had to go to work. She stayed home and probably watched six hours of TV while drinking Coke Zeros. 

She ended up having her introverted birthday party-for-one after all. I still think she might be an easy teenager, that angel-lady from the parking lot planted the seed over ten years ago. I'm not letting it go because of one "I hate you." But, morning drop-off might not be that pleasant.

Brilliant Idea

 

Saturday morning, I was making Kiki breakfast. I stood at the stove, moving the scrambled eggs in the pan, and looked at a plate of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I made the night before. I took a sip of coffee and thought of how well the two would go together; the cookie and the coffee: the series bite, sip, bite, sip.

These were cookies I made after watching a reel my sister sent me, of a foul-mouthed lady aggressively giving the recipe for her world-famous flourless cookies. They are equal parts sugar and peanut butter, with an egg, a splash of vanilla and a bag of chocolate chips. It was the sugar content that had me questioning my desire.

I knew if I ate the cookie, I would feel like shit. I don’t have the stomach I once did, and eating a cookie with the sugar content of a can of Coca-Cola would leave me with a stomach ache.

I ate the cookie, and then I ate another one.

After I brought my daughter her normal breakfast of eggs and sourdough toast, I lay on the couch, waiting for the corrupting backlash. It was significant, compounded by the six cookies I had eaten the night before.

This day was meant to be a writing day, and I intentionally withdrew myself from the game by giving myself a wretched stomach ache.

Around noon, I figured, I would lay back and close my eyes to try and think about the story I’m working on. I had binaural beats playing on Spotify and because I’m too cheap to pay for the membership, I deal with advertisements.

Listening to the same ads over and over is annoying. Sometimes I listen to an ad for toilet paper and the next ad will be for a different brand of toilet paper. I have the ads memorized, but I use them as goalposts at the gym. I’ll say, “Go at the fastest pace for the length of three commercials.”

But as I laid down, the ads served a different purpose. I love how Thomas Edison would sit in his rocking chair with a silver spoon in his hand. His goal was to get into the state of mind right before drifting off to sleep. The mind goes somewhere we don’t see when awake. He wanted to go there because it was when he had eureka moments, and ideas came to him that he couldn’t access after prompting the mind, “Give me something great to work with.” 

So as he rests, he starts to drift off to sleep, the muscles in his hand relax, the silver spoon drops, and he’s brought back to being fully aware. Well, Spotify ads are the silver spoon. I laid back and enjoyed the wonderful time traveling to my dream brain, but right as I was about to power down the brain and sleep, the Spotify ad and its out-of-place, increased volume, jingle intro would pull me back to fully awake.

I didn’t have a brilliant idea. The blog I wrote afterward went into the computer garbage can because it wasn’t funny. 

Actually, I had one brilliant idea. I went into the kitchen, saw the last two cookies on the plate, and ate them. I’d already wasted my day, and I wouldn't waste another.