Letters to the Editor
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It's not about Marin, people...
Ah, Marin. I grew up there during the "peacock-feather-and hot-tub-era", moved away some 28 years ago and lo and behold I find that the county's denizens are still being branded as "navel-gazers." Some things never change.
I, too, am the divorced mother of a nearly 17 year old son who has undergone a transformation that renders him nearly unrecognizable. Where is the boy that I used to dance with in the grocery store? The one who simply had to buy the cheaply made trinket from the shoeless Mexican boy because he just knew his family needed the money? Who once told me, after helping to cook Thanksgiving dinner, that he was going to tell his wife to just put her feet up at the end of the day - he'd cook because he knew how hard she had worked that day.
Apparently THAT boy has gone into hiding; I know just how you feel, Anne. Mother's Day came and went. I would have been happy with "Thanks, Mom" scrawled on a dinner napkin. The bad grades, the spaghetti sauce all over the kitchen, the studied indifference (actually, barely concealed contempt) to pleas from his mother...adolescence is hell, isn't it? But, shining out through the cracks of his sullen cocoon, I occasionally see flashes of the man he will be and I'm reassured. Temporarily.
But for now? Well, all I can say is they don't call a cocoon a pupa for nothing...
Drop me an email, Anne. We can swap adolescent boy and Marin stories while the boys wash the cars.