My Tween Doesn't Do Hugs But He Does Do Trains (essay)

My son knows the drill. As soon as the train passes, we duck below the slow-rising guard arms, scan our passes, and run through the revolving gate. We’re fast; usually fast enough to catch the train before it pulls away.

They say kids don’t come with training manuals, but Adam almost does. He often knows just what he needs. For instance, he was the one who suggested we coordinate our morning commute so we could share the train for four stops, until he gets off for school and I continue downtown to work.

The three-block walk from our house, and the rides themselves, are full of mischief. There is no attendant at our end of the station, so if one of us is out of money on our pass, Adam is slim enough to grab the severe gate by its stainless steel arms and insert himself into the “locked” segment so that one swipe of the pass will get both of us in. If there’s someone else there with a dead pass, we become minor Robin Hoods, opening the handicapped exit door from the inside so they can enter for free.

Adam is my oldest of three. At eleven, he is just a hair shorter than me. About a year ago, I went to tuck him into bed, and he informed me that he didn’t do hugs anymore. I put on a brave face and settled for a fist bump.

My experienced mom friends tell me this is just the first of many times my son will break my heart. I’m lucky to have a daughter too, they say. Sons date and marry and forget about their mothers. Daughters stick, through thick and thin.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. I think he’s just letting me know what he needs. Either way, my role is to raise him without the expectation of anything in return. But I do hope.

I hope the train rides and other small moments we manage to grasp are enough to keep us connected. I will take even the thinnest thread, anything we can build on later when the tumult of adolescence settles down and we both come to our senses.

Nowadays, I take the temperature of his room each night. Sometimes I wish him sweet dreams from the doorway. On warmer nights, I walk across his dirty laundry and art supplies to put my hand firmly on his shoulder or, in the case of rare tropical breezes, dare to kiss his head. I always tell him I love him, and once in a blue moon he says, “I love you too, Ammi.”

He calls me Ammi because his dad is from Hyderabad, India. When Adam was born, we agreed to adopt parental titles from each other’s cultures to model mutual admiration for the Anglo-Saxon and Subcontinental ingredients that would become parts of our children’s identities.

Adam hasn’t had as much of his dad as he would have liked. Since Adam was six, his dad has spent many months of the year working out of state. When we divorced two years ago, Adam blamed me. There were times when he wouldn’t speak to me, and times he yelled, demanding to know the details of a legal proceeding that had turned his life upside-down, frustrated that all I would share was what we’d agreed to tell the kids. “We both love you very much. We, too, are sad about the divorce and so, so sorry. It was our failing, not yours.”

It pained me to cling for dear life to those talking points when I had been transparent with Adam about the hard stuff his whole life. Even if my reticence in this matter was for his own good, it felt like I’d erected a wall between us.

Adam is a loving human. Despite his anger and hurt, he taught me how to build a strong Pokemon deck and hand-spin Beyblades. He accepted help from me with pan-frying tilapia and finding common denominators. But when the divorce came up, when he missed his dad, a cloud hung about him. He pulled away, more than once wishing aloud that he’d never been born.

I’d like to say that I mothered him through his struggles. Of course, I worried about him and did all I could think to do for him. But mostly, I listened when he told me what he needed.

I found a family therapist to help us all through the divorce, but I was most concerned about Adam’s cloud—or was it our cloud that clung to him?

Adam didn’t want a therapist at all. “If I have to have one, though, I want it to be a man.”

I found him a man—a brown Muslim immigrant, in hopes that it would help give him something his white mom and often traveling dad couldn’t. He played that man like a fiddle. The so-called rapport-building lasted more than a year, during which time Adam played video games, watched YouTube, and exchanged memes with that nice young therapist. When pressed to share his methodology, the therapist said, “A little of this and a little of that.” When we stopped going due to a scheduling roadblock Adam said, “I was smarter than him.” He was not being arrogant. It was a simple fact. And maybe he hadn’t needed therapy, because the cloud has mostly dissipated.

It was also two years ago that Adam decided to quit homeschooling and attend public school. Though I saw traditional school as regimented and breeding conformity, he said that meeting other kids three times a week at homeschooling gatherings wasn’t enough. “I need lots of friends who I see every day.”

Not having been to school, his ideas about it were formed by TV. He wanted to know, for example, if he’d get detention for taking a knee during the pledge. “I don’t think they do detention in Chicago Public Schools,” I said. I wondered if he was also idealizing his potential social life, imagining that the day would be full of attractive, colorfully dressed kids trading witticisms and coming up with complex schemes that went awry with much hilarity.

In fact, he did make many friends. They are witty, and they somehow manage to have a fairly lively social life around their classroom obligations. If Adam thought he’d be living in a junior-high sitcom, he was largely correct.

We rode the train and bus routes to and from school together for the first year, so he could learn. He was so proud when I gave him his own set of keys and a transit pass.

Often, our walks and rides pass without conversation. Sometimes the silence is comfortable and sometimes it seems to be a buffer when I’m too embarrassing to associate with. But conversations do emerge, like shy animals approaching a very still human. We cover the mundane—homework or the week’s menu. But often, he says things that take my breath away. I write his words down like they are dreams that could easily fade from memory.

“No one has my coloring, with black hair and white skin,” he said once. I invited him to look around the train car. In our mostly Latino neighborhood, there are many people who look like him. But that’s not what he meant. He was thinking of his Hyderabadi family and how he stands out at the grand parties he attends, his fancy sherwani suit not enough to compensate for his light complexion and elementary Urdu. “I want my skin to be darker. I need to go to India and be in the sun, then I’ll fit in better.”

At times, his talk turns to romance and emotions.

“It hurts to be emotionally honest,” he told me on a sunny fall day, when the breeze was just warm enough to coax our jackets off. “If a girl likes a guy and she asks him out and then he says she’s whack, then she got hurt for being emotionally honest.” I said it was better for her because even if she was hurt, she could now put her energies elsewhere. “You really don’t understand anything, do you?” His rhetorical question was full of pity for me.

On another occasion, he broke the silence with, “Ammi, do you know why more men rob stores than women? Because men are taught to ignore their feelings, so they can’t feel when they’re doing something wrong.”

When I mused out loud that the phrase “lone wolf” made no sense because wolves live in packs, he responded without missing a beat. “That’s why it makes total sense. If you’re part of a species that usually lives in packs but you’re still off by yourself, you are really, truly a loner.”

Adam and his friends went through a whole Hamilton period. When I asked him if he wanted to read the book that the musical was based on, he said, “Only if there’s rap in it.” He went on. “You know the problem with Hamilton? The very first song is full of spoilers.” I countered that the plot points are commonly known historical facts. “Nobody pays attention in History class. Most of us could have been surprised.”

The older he gets, the more time he spends in his room, working on projects and video chatting with his friends. I keep thinking that one of these days, the train rides will no longer be worth the effort for him. He has to leave a little early for the timing to work out. Even now, they’ve dwindled down to once or twice a week.

But this morning, he caught up with me walking down the block. We said nothing, walking side by side, going a little faster and a little faster, until we wordlessly agreed to a race. Both of our backpacks jostled. I tried my hardest, putting my feet down carefully in deference to my recently awakened, middle-aged body. He moved easily beside me and, then, just a bit ahead.

Note: I wrote this piece just before we shut down for COVID in the spring of 2021. Adam recently turned 13, is a head taller than me and now gives the occasional hug. We miss riding the train, though.