'We have a decent understanding'
With end of school in sight, parents and teens learn to let go
MELROSE -- Weekday mornings, Eric Meredith's mother fills a roll with provolone cheese, bologna, mortadella, salami, lettuce, tomatoes, and olive oil, then wraps it in aluminum foil. She slathers cream cheese on a bagel, and also packs him crackers and cheese. At 10 a.m., when his oatmeal breakfast has worn off, Meredith snacks on the crackers. Later, in the Melrose High School cafeteria, he eats the sub and bagel for lunch.
"Every day," he says. "A constant flow of nutrients."
Meredith is four months shy of graduating from high school and seven months shy of going away to college. He's a fitness buff who doesn't always back down from a fight, a teenager who says he has a "pretty good" relationship with his parents and watches videos at home with them a few nights a week. He tells his friends that his mom makes his lunch, and he tells his parents only snippets about his personal life.
"They're on a need-to-know basis," Meredith says. "I could tell them anything and not worry. I choose not to do it.
"Let's say, for instance, I broke up with a girlfriend. I wouldn't be, `We broke up.' But if there was something I
needed to talk to them about, I would. Like, `I got into a fight.' When I'm banged up there's no escaping the truth. I tell them what happened." For all the rebellion of adolescence, the chafing for privacy and life outside the home, surveys find most teens are like Meredith: They say they get along with their parents. The Illinois-based consulting firm Teenage Research Unlimited finds that almost three-quarters describe their mothers as "loving," a majority say the same about their fathers, and 60 percent call family the most important thing in their lives. The Washington-based research group Child Trends finds three-fifths of
16-year-olds report good relationships with the parents they live with. "By and large," says Child Trends' Kristin Moore, "teenagers are much more positive than the average American parent would ever imagine." Yet as most teens and parents can attest, their interactions are not always smooth. High school seniors here talk about evolving relationships with their parents, about families complicated by divorce, about weathering life's blows and anticipating the future.
As much as Sarah Cullen says she gets along with her parents, she can't wait for college. "I am so moving out," she says. "No parents for a little while. `Did you finish this? Do it now.' " As much as Brenden Stark gets along with his parents, two and three years ago they fought so heatedly -- "Stupid stuff," he says, "like curfews or homework" -- that he'd storm off to a friend's for a few hours or overnight but was often mad enough he felt like staying for days.
"We started talking more. I learned about my parents, and they learned about me. Sometimes you need a little space and restart the conversation a few hours later," he says. "I used to dread long car rides. You'd start a casual conversation, and that would spark something. Sometimes the argument would last 10 minutes, and then an hour of angry silence. Now I like going with my dad because my dad listens to the same kind of music I do."
David Crespo's bandmates hang out with his mom in the kitchen, grilling hamburgers for themselves. Crespo can talk to her about most things. "I talk about drugs, alcohol, the band," he says. "Stuff with my girlfriend. Sexual stuff. It's harder to talk about things you really feel, like love. I hide a lot of things from everybody, especially things I truly feel." What about his stepfather? "We just don't talk to each other," Crespo says.
"Everybody does some kind of trip to his kid," says his mother, Danette Gilliatt, who is 41 and owns a yoga studio. "Nobody has a perfect life."
Freedom, responsibility
"Someone once said, `If all parents were perfect, no one would want to leave home,' " says Crespo's friend Jacob Lefton. "The best parents are the ones who get you ready to go out on your own."
While his classmates graduated from "Rugrats" to MTV, Lefton grew up in a television-free home. "My dad," he says, "would always say that the best place for a TV was out the window." So when Lefton, who wears a Howard Dean button on his sweatshirt and missed a week of school to canvass for him in Iowa, checks the results of the New Hampshire primary, he turns to the Internet.
"When I was younger I wanted a TV, mostly for video games," he says. "These days I think it's one of the best things. The shows that are actually good I get exposed to by my friends. Like `The West Wing.' I haven't actually seen an episode, but I've been told I need to watch it."
Lefton's a long-haired kid with long-haired parents, a class activist and espouser of progressive politics whose refrigerator has a MoveOn.org ad urging US "regime change" below a notice about SAT scores. When he says at dinner that he wants to attend a Young Democrats meeting in Boston, his dad asks if he's finished his application to Hampshire College.
"We have a decent understanding," Jacob says. "It's hard-won understanding. I got into conflicts with my dad a lot freshman year and sophomore year -- over grades and what I could do after school. Both me and my dad would try to get alpha male on each other. We would always be on edge." The situation improved when he agreed to get a B-plus or better in each class.
There are books all over the Victorian house, among them a healthy representation of science fiction, the family passion. On the dining room table is a set of bongo drums.
"Sitting around and vegging just doesn't happen here. You're either curled up with a book or doing something creative or sending an e-mail, communicating," says Scott Lefton, who is 45 and runs a mechanical design consulting business from the front parlor. "We tend to set very high expectations, and we find the kids generally thrive on it. We tend to give them a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility."
"Sometimes they put a little bit too much pressure on me, but I also think it's important to have good options open to you," Jacob says. "They're pretty relaxed about sex. They're pretty sure I won't get into drugs, and they don't care that much about drinking.
"For the type of family I grew up in," he adds, "I'm pretty conservative."
Rules to live by
Mutia Smoot's mother, Michelle Reese, is not "pretty relaxed" about sex. She was 19 when Smoot was born, in college and unmarried. Only now, with three children at home and a job as a secretary, is she finishing school, studying to be a sign-language interpreter. She wants a different life for her daughter, which is why she's strict. Not long ago, a classmate Smoot
liked met Reese in church and asked if he could take Smoot to the movies. He was the first boyfriend Reese has met. "I had some behind her back," Smoot says. "I started revealing things in 11th grade.
"I used to come in late and not tell her where I was going. She'd get mad. I thought she was trying to ruin my life. Then I said I'll try telling her. The worst she can do is yell at me. Then I did. And she was good. She understood I was growing up. Now me and my mom talk about boys. I tell her about my school troubles. I tell her everything. My mom is my best friend."
"I've raised her and her siblings alone," says Reese, 37. "Just a few minutes ago I was telling her it's rough."
Reese sets an early curfew and forbids TV on school nights. She just started allowing Smoot to use the phone during the week. "She's 17 now. I've got to let the slack out of the rope," Reese says. "If a parent lets a child run and do what he or she wants, there's no structure. I pray a lot, and I ask the Lord for his guidance on raising my children."
"I think I'm going to go crazy the first couple of weeks of college," Smoot says. "Then I'll settle down. I'll be so happy I'm on my own. No rules. But I'll miss my mom a little."
Letting go
Sometimes life hands families extra challenges, as it did when Ronnie Thompson was born with cerebral palsy and again when his father died of lung cancer in 2000. Thompson uses a mechanized wheelchair, and an aide helps him get around school. In the modest frame house he shares with his mother, his older sister, her boyfriend, one golden retriever, and two cats, the living room serves as his bedroom, complete with computer and TV and PlayStation.
Thompson is an honors student elected to class government, vindication for a mother who resisted the school system's plan, in 1991, to assign him to a separate program for children with special needs. "I came home crying," says Cely Thompson, a 46-year-old nurse. "After crying I fought. I didn't want him to be the role model. I wanted him to have role models."
"I get along with my mom," Ronnie Thompson says. "Some things I can't tell her, just because she's my mom. Personal stuff, like relationships. She wouldn't understand that because she has a perspective from a woman. I was pretty close to my dad. I did most of my talking to him."
Thompson's mother, ever the protective caretaker, says she's a "little bit scared" to see him off to college. His dad used to mimic cartoon characters and deliver one-liners. "He always let me do anything I wanted to do," Thompson says. "He took risks with me." He died a few months after he was diagnosed with cancer.
"Everybody was breaking down. If I was negative, too, it would just have made things worse," Thompson says. "The first few years my mom was very upset all the time. She took it out on us sometimes, which was understandable. She just used to get mad at us for small things. She's kind of reverting back to the way it was before my dad died. She smiles once in a while."
When Thompson wanted to ride a roller coaster, his mother said no but eventually relented. More recently he convinced her he would be able to live in a dorm. "She questioned how I would handle living on my own. Now she realizes the only person who can tell me is myself," he says. "She's letting go."
Dealing with divorce
Tara Dolan comes home after working in a mini-mart and flicks on MTV's "The Real World." She was bored at work, she tells her parents, because few customers ventured out on the cold, snowy night. She must have straightened the racks 8 million times, she complains.
Dolan will leave behind more than high school when she graduates. Her parents have told her they are getting divorced, and come spring they plan to sell the house they've lived in since Dolan was in sixth grade.
"It's weird living in a house where there's so much volatile energy," Dolan says. "Most of the time I'm able to escape. I can go to work. I can go out. But you can't escape all the time.
"I'm glad they waited, because I don't know how I would have handled it a year ago or two years ago," she says. "But you wonder if they could have been happier. There's always going to be a little bit of regret on my part."
"We're parents," says Robin Dolan, who is 44 and just earned a degree in nutrition. "We had to give her some stability."
Tara Dolan is copresident of the school's drama club, an animal rights club member, YMCA teen leader, cellist in the school orchestra, and bassist in a band called Killing Zygotes that to her dad sounds more like noise than music. Her hair is dyed shoe-polish black, with a shock of blond in back that upset her mother the day she saw Tara with bleach in her hair. She has about 10 holes in her ears, a few professionally pierced and the rest, to her mother's chagrin, done at friends' houses, but she wears only five earrings now.
"We don't have the worst mother-daughter relationship, but at times it's not the best," her mother says. "What I would hope is if she's confiding in a friend that if it were that bad a friend would let me know somehow."
"Whenever I was in a fight with my friend, whenever I was doubting myself, my mom was always there," Tara Dolan says. "Me and my dad aren't that close, but he knows what's going on in my life. It's not like we're strangers."
Graduating from high school will bring the wrenching decision of whether to reconstitute her bedroom in her mom's new place or her dad's. Dolan's room chronicles her years in this house, from the Care Bear stool to the calendar with photos of her friends that Katie Blais made for all of them for Christmas. Radiohead posters are plastered on the walls she had painted a tropical turquoise after she went to Hawaii with her grandmother in fifth grade. All this will have to move.
"It won't be the same on any other color or any other house, for that matter," she says. "I'm not very comfortable with having to choose. Where you put your room, there's a difference between it being your room and a room you stay in."
Robin Dolan gets teary-eyed talking about her daughter's future. "If there's a star, I sometimes worry she doesn't reach for it," she says. "I would hate for her to be lost in a job that she can't express herself in. She does it physically now with her piercings and her hair color. There are positive ways she can do it as an adult, too."
Someday, Tara Dolan says, she might get a tattoo of the angel of hope, one of her mother's favorite symbols. "My parents understand you can't not be yourself," she says. "They understand that better than most parents." 