1990s, New England

By Carol Greenfield

We were right there. And we did not know. The problem was, this problem never occurred to us as one of the things to worry about. Things seemed to be going along rather nicely. We felt lucky. Blessed.

OK, there was a divorce when Ben turned 7. Even before I was his stepmother, we were all in the child-rearing together. His mother and father lived only a half hour away from each other. While the oldest two, the teenagers, stubborn and angry, tried their own ways to grow up, we all took good care of Ben. Uncles and aunts galore were around. His grandparents were at every home game for eight years straight, until narcolepsy took grampa’s ability to drive away and Ben’s grades got so bad he got cut from basketball and soccer.

But this is not just about a boy who did badly in school. This is about a son who took such a wrong turn we may have lost him forever. The two older kids, now nearing 30, have worked hard and created superior lives for themselves. Ben is another story.

When he was 7 he was wide open and loving. We set up his own room for weekends and any time he wanted to stay longer. We got a great little Spaniel so he would have a dog at both houses. He loved my cooking and talking sports with his dad. He asked questions about the news and the vocabulary words we tossed around. We rented movies and he would cuddle, falling asleep half on my lap, then flopping securely into the strong arms of his father to be carried upstairs for the soundest of sleep in New York Giant ski jammies. As far as we knew things were pretty OK, given the circumstances, for five, six, and seven more years.

What did we miss during that time that could have alerted us to the seeds that were sprouting inside him?

I remember we thought he would be a math genius because he could keep sports statistics constantly in his head. He would create pages and pages of team records as weekends were spent watching college and pro games with his team loving father. They would talk strategy and trades while I would clank around in the kitchen making sure I was pleasing my two guys with great meals and general comfort.

All right. So his grades weren’t great. He had not found an academic interest. His dad and I are both constant readers but apparently modeling behavior is overrated. Ben did not like the quiet or solo nature of reading. He would read aloud or not at all. The newspaper was only good for the sports page and it was always the box scores that fascinated him.

On our way to a movie or Chinese food or to Thanksgiving in New Hampshire with the relatives, he would always say, “How long do you think it will be before we get there?” That terribly ordinary question. But he would follow it by, “I bet it will be 20 minutes.” Or, “I think 47 minutes to Keene.” Or, “I guess we get to Maine by 2:15. You wanna bet?”

“We do not bet in this house,” we would always say.

Ben seemed to have a lot of friends in his home neighborhood and was content to be with just us when he stayed over. Sure, sometimes he would be hypnotized by TV or fog out on the soccer field or back talk his mom, but other than knowing he was not going to be an academic fire storm, we thought he was pretty normal. We were very wrong.

By the time he was 15 he seemed unhappy. He would say that he had really liked being 10. That life was too complicated. His father and I were too serious. Or we laughed at the dumbest things. Being an adult meant you did not really have much fun. Too many decisions. Too much hard work.

Because he was continually at odds with his mother, he moved in with us for his junior year. He would not change schools or leave his friends, so his father would drive him to school, and then on to his own job five minutes further. Now, more often than not, instead of being gone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., they would return at 8, after practice, or after 10 if there was a game.

But we did not know who we were living with. Ben got his license and convinced his father that having his own car would be much more convenient for everyone: “Everyone gets a car when they get their license, dad!”

He decided we were too strict with curfews and he was sick of driving so much every day. He’d just move back in with his mother. He would study harder. He would have more time to study. He said all the right things.

“I promise not to let you down, dad. Trust me.”

He was delivering pizzas and talking big about his dreams. Fancier cars, better clothes with the right labels. Just like most kids.

Most kids, however, were not thousands of dollars in debt to their friends and to bookies. That was senior year, around Christmas.

“But everyone bets on games, dad. No big deal. I’ll stop. Promise.”

But could we pay this off, just this one time, and he would do anything to make it up to us. The counselor he had been seeing throughout the previous year had no idea Ben was gambling or tense about money or in danger. Ben said he would go to GA. Even though he did not have a problem with gambling, of course, he had just dug himself into an awkward hole, but yeah, he would go. My husband and his ex-wife took turns going to Gam-anon.

His father and I, who are painfully honest, believed every lie he told us for long periods of time, until he could not lie anymore. But he lied about everything … whether he had a job interview, where he was going, how he got the money for whatever. He barely graduated from high school. Too little effort, too late to make up for much. But that is the way it is with a lot of kids who find themselves in the service or in a community college, a year older, a year smarter.

Of course, we hoped for a new start. Surely he had learned his lesson. Ben had given up on the good schools years before, chosen primarily for their success during televised basketball games: Georgetown, Syracuse, Duke. But he wanted to go to college; he did not want to be a bum, he said.

We found a school two hours away that had a summer How to Study Program as a head start and a specialized two year degree set up specifically for underachievers. We thought that meeting new people, leaving the valley where he had spent his whole life, would show him his town was not the center of the universe. His fellow underachievers came from all over but primarily from New York and New Jersey.

“I will not let you down, dad. I promise. I know this is a great chance and I will get it together. I swear to God.”

By Christmas he had made new friends, had some success at soccer, and owed thousands more to bookies.

This time it was Russian Mafia from Brighton Beach. No joke. We know now that he worked for them but stole bet money to place his own picks, losing it all. He led a gambling ring in college. His soccer coach knew about his gambling, not us. The coach did not want to cause trouble, or interfere, in this college committed to helping kids without direction. FIRPA rules for college students demand the student sign a waiver to allow the parents paying the bills to be notified of problems.

But his desperate father, who swore the bailout in high school made him so sick to his stomach he would never do it again, could not let his son be beat up or worse. They had threatened to kill him, to take his mother out … for a date. His father paid whatever it was. A lot.

All this was our family secret. My husband’s three brothers and three sisters didn’t know. Nana and Grampa didn’t know. Now we had to tell them. Our extended family was shocked and bewildered. We were broken. Ben was contrite. He came back to live with us but he was over 18 at this point.

The idea was that he would get a job, turn the money over to his father, work out a budget and make symbolic amends. After passing the first of many drug tests, he found work on the night shift of a food distribution place. His hours were odd and long. It was hard, physical work. Good. He would sleep during the day and be gone when I got home from work.

Sometimes, though, I found odd, scary messages for Ben on our answering machine. He always said it was one of his friends goofing around. Then he quit his job. Hated it.

Are you thinking that we should have thrown him out? Disowned him by now? That there was nothing more we could have done?

We kept trying and he kept promising. He kept lying and we kept believing him.

He never came home drunk. In two years I believe I smelled marijuana faintly in his car a couple times, never on him. We had some curfew complaints. His father was not sleeping. He could not sleep if Ben was out. Then, Ben wanted a job closer to his home town. He found a studio apartment at a reasonable rent in a secure building near a community college as well as a new job, so we decided to try independence.

Subsidized independence, of course.

He took some courses and worked a new job while we hoped for the best. I noticed small empty boxes of cheap cigars lined up in his kitchenette. Called blunts, kids stuffed cigars with marijuana. He rolled his eyes at me. Said I had been reading too many articles again.

He got evicted. Probably he was dealing drugs, and he certainly had visitors that were disturbing the other tenants. We did not know he had been arrested for brawling until after he had blown off his community service and needed money to pay off the huge fine.

The mother of his girlfriend alerted us to the fact that he had been stopped for suspicion of dealing drugs, coming back from a trip to New York with his underage sweetie, where he had been stiffed by the dealer, relieved of his money, which meant the police could not find anything in the car search. And why did her parents keep letting their daughter go out with him, we wondered. Ben insisted these were all misunderstandings, blown out of proportion. The police had it in for him. They knew his car. They were jerks.

He was not gambling, he insisted. He was not using or dealing drugs.

Of course he was. Doing both. He was a gambler, and smoking dope made him forget to think about consequences. In fact, he had been smoking marijuana almost every day since high school, he told us later. Remember, he had taken and passed three drug tests for jobs by now. I have a nose like a bloodhound. I did not know.

He has no moral compass. We do not think he feels guilt exactly, just bewilderment about how things do not turn out right for him, or why it is that other people seem to luck into things.

His father feels guilt, of course … over the divorce and its affect on his two sons and daughter. He feels guilty about talking sports with his son, over somehow not knowing the best thing to do to make things right.

My husband is a problem solver, but he could not solve this one. I had been a high school teacher my whole life. I knew and loved teenagers and I could read them pretty well. Not much bullshit got by me. In my own house lived a mystery. A seven-year-old. A felon.

Although not in school, he managed to fit in Spring Break in Cancun with some friends. What? He had the money? Someone had canceled at the last minute? He had a tax refund to cover it? I snapped, but his mojo was still working on a few other people.

A second wife tries not to hammer her opinion too hard into a wonderful loving heart of a husband. This time Ben had conned his sophisticated-knows-better older brother into lending him the money. Tax refund had been held up. Uh, huh. Ben has a large sense of entitlement. He has no conscience.

Upon his return our world shattered again. He had hidden the following pre-Cancun occurrences until it hit the papers. There it was, in print, three separate crimes he committed spanning January to March. He had threatened someone, somewhere, somehow, who swore out a complaint. He had been found with drugs in his car at a party the police raided. Not his car. He had sold that one. This car he had borrowed from his sick grandfather to use. And he had stolen an ATM card from a woman, out of the slot, as she made a withdrawal. Then he headed to Foxwoods Casino.

My husband paid for the lawyer. It took the system almost a year to deal with each separate case. We do not know how good to feel that he got only probation for all three charges. If he were not white, if he did not have an excellent lawyer, and an executive father with long roots in the community, and the ATM victim had not felt sorry for him for some reason, he would certainly be in jail. Where do you think he should be? Is he an addict? Is he a punk?

He is 21. We have been through five years of hell.

We learned in the hardest way that how we think is not how our son thinks. That how we imagine he must feel is not necessarily how he feels at all. He certainly cares what people think about him. Perhaps he would like to be good. But it is a lot of work to pay people back, and some things you can never make up for.

Ben has learned the right things to say at every step. He is handsome and likable. His father always hopes this time Ben really understands what he needs to do to live a good life, a decent life. My husband vows he will no longer have a commercial relationship with Ben, although he will certainly be there for him in other ways. My husband hopes. My husband prays. The ex-wife and I are much more on guard.

Where are the parents? That’s what people ask about other people’s kids. We are right here. We have always been here. We do not buy lottery tickets, we do not frequent casinos. We do not think dreams come true by that kind of chance. Having children, on the other hand, is quite a gamble.

We just got a telephone call from one of the uncles who was visiting nana with Alzheimer’s and grampa with five different things wearing him down. They are housebound. Ben has been running errands for them for a few months. Now he has stolen a credit card from his own grandfather. The bank called alerting them to an attempted use by someone who did not have the password.

Where are the parents? We are here. Feeling as though the knife is twisted just a little bit more when we are accused of not being smarter, tougher, more insightful, or more involved.

Carol Greenfield treasures her chance to be a step-mother, never having had children of her own. She is still happily married. Ben has, after a stint in jail, started a legitimate, successful business, married, and become a father. The family ties are much less frayed these days. All names in the story have been changed, and the author is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, April 6th, 2007 | Email This Post

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