Mallory's Camera

Snow on Mt. Tauro…

So around 11am, I get this call from Robin – he kept falling asleep in his first period class till his English teacher – exasperated – sent him to the office. And now, he wants to come home.

"I can't stay awake," he says, and I am panicked thinking, My God he has narcolepsy and I never noticed it before. Or maybe it's encephalitis. Or cancer! Am I the worst mother in the world? How could I have not noticed he has a fatal disease?

I do not share these suspicions with Robin.

Instead I ask coldly, "What time did you go to bed last night?"

"Midnight," he says. "The neighbors were making a lot of noise."

The neighbors do make a lot of noise. We live in Monterey, which is supposed to be this toney, ne plus ultra place, but in fact, we might as well be living in a trailer park. The guy who lives behind us is this shaven-headed tattoo freak who drives ten different cars and collects skanky live-in girlfriends. Whenever he's not having loud sex with them, he's screaming death threats and kicking them out of the house. The domestic abuse cop team is on a first name basis with him.

Robin's bedroom unfortunately is in the back of the house where he can hear it all.

But then there's also the issue that Robin likes to stay up late at night playing video games, IM'ing his pals and upgrading his MySpace profile. Currently his MySpace profile describes him as a 22-year-old male making $250,000 a year enrolled in Colton middle school. He has two older brothers. He'd like to meet Bob Saget.

"You're supposed to be in bed by ten on a school night," I remind Robin sternly on the phone.

"Eleven," he says.

Right. This must be some new arrangement he & Dad came up with. That they forgot to tell me about.

And I sigh thinking how very much I suck at being Robin's mother, how peripheral I am to his life. How peripheral I've always been to his life really – I was always the wage earner and the work I had to do to earn those wages always left me exhausted. I'm not one of those superheroes who can program out their down time. I can't function if I don't have down time. So work, downtime, sleep – that just about eats up the time I have available for anything.

He deserves so much better.

Robin is in desperate need of structure. But he's never had structure, and thirteen is not a good age at which to make those first introductions.

I worry about him.

Still, if he went to bed at midnight and got up at seven, he got seven hours sleep. That's not enough sleep for a rapidly growing adolescent – he's now almost as tall as his father – but it should be enough to keep him from falling asleep in class.

I know he wasn't awake after midnight because I was awake after midnight. Woke with a bolt – some oppressive dream or another, details mirage-like: I was in a room with my mother. I had done something very, very wrong – I could tell by the cold, implacable fury in her eyes – but honest to God, I couldn't remember what it was. I had taken an inventory of my entire life, and I couldn't remember…

Her birthday's tomorrow, was my first coherent thought upon awakening.

Reason enough for a panic attack.

And what a panic attack it was! The usual bromides of ibuprofen, red wine and endless Bravo TV reality television weren't working at all.

You're a failure, pure and simple, said the voices in my mind – and I really couldn't argue with them: Lauri Waring, the Real Orange County Housewife, now she's a template for success! In the season finale, she is marrying her rich land-developer boyfriend. So what if he doesn't have a chin! He has a $100,000 credit line on his Citibank Visa. Are chins really that important?

Lauri is a few years younger than me and neither her face nor her tits ever move – well, okay, her lips move when she talks, but the overall effect is rather like Anthony Hopkins' wooden friend in the under-rated horror classic, Magic. Her teeth gleam like sun-bleached tombstones. Her trees are decorated with cymbidiums and crystals; her bartender is serving bottled water color-coordinated to match the wedding guests' outfits.

You had your chance, the voices continued. They were obviously thinking of the Houston tugboat heir, or the plastic surgeon, or the Giants assistant offensive coach. Ann Duerr used to list ex-boyfriends by nationality -- the Swede, the Egyptian, Turk 2. I prefer the demographic snapshot approach, heavy on wage earning capacity.

And then I started brooding on Heath Ledger. I'm kind of pissed at myself that Heath Ledger is occupying more of my consciousness than the imminent collapse of the American economy. But, see, if Heath Fucking Ledger was as miserable as the various Internet gossip sites are making him out to be, then there's really no hope for the rest of us. Heath Ledger had everything. Everything the material world can offer, that is.

This revelation makes me blink. Does that mean that happiness is not correllated with material consumption? Surely not!

There's really nothing I can do about the panic attack. It's going to get worst today, be really bad tomorrow – seventy-four, she would have been seventy-four – and then gradually recede… I'll try not do anything too horribly stupid. It's just brain chemistry, it's just brain chemistry I'll chant it like a mantra.