The Stardust Lounge by Deborah Digges Page A

with Ed we discovered how easy it was to fall into the old patterns of rage and isolation.
    “You need to practice detachment,” Ed would say, taking time out from a session he was conducting to look in on me. Having literally run up to his office, I sat weeping in the knife-throwing room.
    “And go ahead and cry
here.”
He patted my shoulder. “But when you go home, don't. Don't cry in front of Steve if you can help it.”
    “He's locked me out of the house.” I hated hearing myself whine.
    “We'll work on this,” Ed reassured me. “We'll make it fair. For now, relax. Throw some knives, or play a little Nintendo. And when you're ready to go home, don't expectthis kid's sympathy. Use your head. Climb in a window. Have humor. Practice detachment. And go in prepared to be effective.”
    Through Ed's guidance, counseling, and coaching, Stephen and I have come to understand our relationship almost entirely through fairness, through what's fair to each of us in any given situation. Fairness—or the lack of it—was at the root of most of our problems, and by extension, Stephen's problems with authority.
    “You probably raised Steve with two goals in mind,” Ed said to me one day. “You wanted to protect him, and educate him, right? I don't doubt that you've been a good mother.”
    “You're right,” I'd said, tears coming to my eyes as I listened to him. “And thank you. You're the first person in a long time to say that.”
    “Wait.” Eduardo smiled at me. “It gets better. You gave this kid a lot of freedom while he was growing up. I saw right away that Steve is the kid of a baby boomer, maybe the kid of a true child of the sixties. Come on.” He laughed. “I bet that once you thought of yourself as a real flower child.”
    “Something like that,” I answered laughing, letting the tears come freely.
    “You really wanted things to be different for him—different than they were for you. I'll tell you, Steve has a very sophisticated vocabulary for his sexuality, for instance. He seems real at home in it, freethinking, comfortable. That was your doing, right?”
    “I worked at it for both my boys,” I said, blowing my nose.
    “You really let them discover things without making alot of moral judgments, let them wear the clothes they wanted, play with toy guns. You let them make a mess, even take risks you thought might be a bit dangerous. Stephen tells me you let him build fires when he was little …”
    “That's because he was obsessed with fire,” I jumped in defensively. “I thought if I let him build—
campfires,
we called them—and oversaw it, let him explore his fascination in a safe context…”
    “Did it work?”
    “I think so …”
    “See, you were right. You protected while you educated.”
    “That was
before”
I'd countered. “Think of our lives as
before
and
after.
Before was good. After is hell.”
    “It's hell because it's turned unfair,” Ed answered. “Kids like Steve have come to understand themselves as capable, independent thinkers by the time they reach their teens. Despite their problems with impulse control, even problems with conventional learning, they believe in their abilities to solve their own problems because— Steve's an example—they've been allowed to. Or because—like his street friends—they've had to.
    “After a childhood of being allowed to make his own decisions—after your encouraging him to explore his passions and play them out, even when they were a bit dangerous, even when they involved risk—
now
you're telling him no. That's all over. Now he's got to do what you say, what his teachers say, what the cops say, no questions asked.”
    “But the stakes are so much higher! He got himself into gangs and guns. And he's still just a kid. He's failing school…”
    “Okay, okay. Listen. What do you want right now for
you
and Stephen?”
    “I want us to be able to talk without screaming at each other, without his running away all the time.