Pretender to the Throne

by Marion Winik

The last time I felt like a hero of any kind was the day last summer when my fifteen-year-old son found the decomposing body of our lost cat in a creek near our house. We’ll have to just leave him there, said Vince. He was therefore pretty impressed when I managed to get what used to be Pudge off the rock, out of the water and into double Hefty bags.

Certain tasks of parenting have a mythic quality, and over time you may take your demigod status for granted. You give life, you administer justice, you heal, you bestow, you redeem. You bury the dead cat. But in fact, your authority is far from ultimate: not only there are sorrows that cannot be managed and children who won’t be either, but as I have recently learned, you rule only at the pleasure of strangers at the County Courthouse.

Not long after Pudge’s funeral, I sat beside Vince in a courtroom. Two years ago, when he was in eighth grade, he and three other boys guzzled some booze and committed an act of vandalism. I knew nothing about it until the cops showed up at our house and Vince confessed, but then I did what I thought was my job. I punished him, and I lectured him, and I took him to counseling. He wanted to help pay for the damages or even help fix them himself, but suddenly the police stopped returning our calls.

What I didn’t understand is that we were past the point when a phone call would help, past the apologize-and-help-clean-up phase. I finally got it two years later when the system worked its way around to our case and the real authorities arrived on the scene. The affable public defender, the young probation officer in jeans, the obviously decent judge in his black robes. He seemed to hear his words afresh each of the four times he repeated the series of questions designed to make the boys think twice before admitting their guilt.

I’m sorry, said the first boy; I’m sorry said the second and third; I’m sorry, said my boy in his baggy suit and fresh haircut, my boy a foot taller than I am, and I waited in all my smallness for the judge to pronounce his sentence. For the probation officer to make her assessment, for the drug and alcohol evaluator to come back with a report. We’re not going to recommend a placement, they reassured me – meaning they won’t take my son away to live somewhere else - but I was not reassured.

What a shock when the great and powerful Mommy tumbles from her throne, her phone calls not taken, her school notes carried off in the breeze, her boo-boo bunny melting on the floor. You know the boo-boo bunny, right, a plastic-sheathed cube of ice dressed in fuzzy rabbit ears, used to soothe the cries of mildly injured toddlers. It works like a charm – until the day it doesn’t. Like time-outs and pet funerals and curfew, like so much of what we do as parents, it is a kind of make-believe. Our empires are provisional, our authority temporary, stamped with an expiration date in invisible ink. You do the best you can until you can’t anymore. Then you take a deep breath and join the mortals.