I am attracted to teenage boys....

I can't help it. Whenever I see a small knot of adolescent males gathered on the street, my eyes are drawn magnetically to their budding acne, gangly legs, sprouting and totally incongruous face hair, and voices that are stuck in a barren land, somewhere between alto and base. A year ago I would have walked right by them, without a glance. They would have been as transparent as the dogs being walked around me, or the strollers, or young couples, arm in arm, experiencing the first raptures of young love -- I always find this sight especially invisible, ever since Cupid's blunted arrow led to the very reason for all of this. I realize that the things that cause a second, or third glance, and still do, are those that relate to my own, self-serving interests. I'm guessing it's all very Darwinian, intended to keep us focused firmly on the most important things in our life.

Now that a thirteen and fifteen-year old actually reside in my apartment -- which is hard to believe -- and are eating me out of house and home and challenging my debate skills on the hour, my teen radar is on high alert. It's all I notice when I go out. Teens, skulking around, smoking, looking shift, walking in groups of fifty down Broadway, secure en masse but petrified alone.

Same deal when the kids were tiny -- unlike my single years when the mere sight of an infant had me running headlong in the opposite direction -- once I became a mother, I was instantly attracted to anyone in the same boat, which I would describe as fairly desperate at the time, given the overall amount of colic my kids brought with them into the world. Back then, anyone struggling with a stroller, or carrying a baby became my peer group, someone to sympathize with and relate to, and on through the ages as the babies grew into kids and developed their unique personalities.

With each milestone, the past became another country, so to speak, so that I have become somewhat intolerant of kids younger than third grade, and appear to struggle with latent hostility towards new mothers -- particularly the happy ones. Six of them trooped into a restaurant yesterday, in single file, each carrying a baby in a Snugli, looking very proud. As soon as the squawking began a few minutes later, I became a crochety old diddy, raising eyebrows and frowning at the invasion. Perhaps it was the memory that I could never get near a restaurant when my kids were babies, given their inability to sit passively while I ate. I was always the exception, circling the block with the stroller while everyone else dined, waving to me occasionally as I passed. That was a century ago and whoever would have thought that teens would seem attractive in any form?

That's really the most ironic aspect of this all given that there is nothing particularly redeeming about them -- having been one, and now being a parent to two of them. Teens are awkward, half-beings. Neither man, woman nor child. The teen is Nature's little inside joke -- bumbling outcasts, hanging in a limbo land of humanity.

Like I said, I just can't keep my eyes off them. And that's just the boys. Heaven help me when we get to the girl version. By then, I'll be veering unconsciously towards young twenty-somethings, which might ease the pain -- somewhat.