12 1/2

Okay, I give. Being the mother of a kid who’s almost not a kid any more is starting to . . . well, let’s just say it’s starting. First came the Great Oral Sex Talk (TM), and then came a sleep over with a friend the night before The Boy and said friend went to see a movie with another kid. And no parent. And GIRLS. (This was a totally harmless and upstanding visit to a multiplex to see the Wolverine movie. The mother who drove them all in her van stayed and watched Angels & Demons. Nothing to worry about, aside from, you know: girls.)

Most of The Boy’s friends have their own phones now, so you can probably imagine what the sleep over was like. Remember how, when we were kids, you went to a sleep over with your girl friends and one or two of the girls (never me, because I was too shy and puritanical [my, how that changed]) spent as much time as possible calling different boys and asking them who they liked? Think of how that scenario changes when each kid has his or her own phone. The Boy and his friend thought it was funny at first, but ended up shutting of their phones after a while, so they could end the deluge of “Who do you likes,” and get down to the serious business of playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii.

So, haha. Cute and all. But then it seems that The Boy and his friend got a little too big (stupid, mean, bitchy) for their britches. They wrote two stories about two boys in their class, and neither story was flattering. How do I know they wrote these stories? The idiots saved them to my laptop’s hard drive. Imagine my surprise when I opened up Word and saw a doc called “N Sucks.” I only hesitated a moment before reading it and the other file. And then I checked my browser history to see whether the two files had been e-mailed. Sigh. They had.

In truth, both stories were unkind, but pretty tame aside from one where a character called another a “stupid homo.” This more than anything is what compelled me to have a serious discussion with The Boy, because while I know my kid isn’t perfect, I like to think he’s got a bit of honor in him (I know it’s an antiquated word, but I refuse to believe it’s an antiquated notion). And kids who care about honor don’t make fun of other kids, and they CERTAINLY don’t let other kids use homo as an insult. Especially if their dads are gay. Mmm-kay? I knew The Boy himself didn’t write that little gem. In fact, I’m pretty familiar with The Boy’s writing style and vocabulary and know that he didn’t contribute much at all (I know, for example, that he had a character turn into a Muppet [he’s finishing up an art project that mirrors Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, using Jim Henson as his guest of honor] and then get defenestrated [we’ve been cracking defenestration jokes for weeks—it’s a funny word]).

What bothers me, though, is that The Boy went along. And I’ve seen him cave to this other kid’s whims since they were pretty small. Time for a talk.

I asked The Boy what he could tell me about some stories he and A (the other kid—in fact the very kid whose dad is an ass and who was trying to force the big stupid house on his wife) had written. Immediately, The Boy’s face fell. He said, “We wrote some stories that were stupid and mean, and we shouldn’t have done it.” I asked what he was thinking, and he said he didn’t really know, but that it was late and they were tired and being stupid. And then he said, “I feel especially bad about the story about R, because I don’t even know him!”

I was glad about two things: He seemed to honestly feel bad (he was near tears), and he didn’t try to sell out A, who I know was the driving force here. But I still had to get to the little matter of his allowing A to use the word homo as an insult—-in The Boy’s presence, and in our home. I told him he has to speak up about stuff like that. We talked about how to speak up, and how hard it is. And we talked about the fact that I had cool, funny friends who could be mean, and who were very hard to stand up to.

And then I told him that I’ll give him one more chance, but if I see him not being able to stand up to A, they won’t be allowed to hang out together outside of school.

It was a long, good talk. And I hope it made some kind of difference. I made The Boy e-mail the two girls he and A had sent the stories to. He told them both he’d had second thoughts, that he knew the stories were mean and stupid, and that he hoped they’d both delete them and forget about them.

And I called A’s mom and filled her in. She was really upset, but of course A’s dad said she was overreacting, that boy’s will be boys, and that e-mailing those stories was no big deal at all. Because A’s dad is an asshole. And despite his mother’s best efforts, A is heading right down the same path.

I just hope I don’t have to say the same for The Boy.