I don't remember the details, it happened when I had been maybe 20 years in practice, so I had gotten fairly good at the job. I always like the well visits, especially the teen visits. There was no formula for that, you just had to be prepared for whatever might happen. Sometimes I fumbled – like one time when a boy told me he was gay, hadn't told his parents, just chose me to come out to. I did my best to reassure, reassure that telling his parents would be a good step and I could help if necessary, but I wasn't sure-footed. Or another time when a teenage boy came with his mother, and he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and she didn't want an abortion. His mother wanted him to marry the girl, but the boy wasn't on board for that. The Mom asked me if I could tell him what to do. That's a pretty tough assignment. I kind of stumbled through it. Pediatrics is sometimes harder than people think.
So, this one time, I came into the exam room with a maybe 14 or 15 year old boy and his mother. The pediatric exam rooms can be small – this one was maybe what, 7 by 11? Narrow. High examination table on one side (pediatrics) with a counter and sink along the same wall, a couple of plastic chairs opposite them on the other narrow wall, a window at the end. The boy might have been sitting on the exam table, or standing by it, and the Mom was at the end of the room by the window. Usually I would see the teenager alone, but this time the two of them were together. Both were dark-haired and maybe Mediterranean or Armenian, I don't know, not that it matters, Oakland is one of the most diverse cities in the country. But there was some kind of tension in the air. They were probably in there together because there was something they wanted to talk about. We would have acceded to that, we weren't rigid, there were reasons for everything, and it was our job to be flexible. I liked these meetings.
So, I remember kind of sizing up the situation as I walked in. I said, so how are things? The boy was just starting to get a mustache, I think, and he had his head down the way boys that age do when they are doing something difficult and they are still immature, and he kind of murmured, “Ah, not so good.”
“Not so good?” I said. “What's wrong?”
And he looked toward his mother and murmured, “She's mad at me all the time.”
I looked over toward her myself, then I looked back at him. “What is she mad at you about?”
“Everything,” he said. “Homework.”
I looked back at her and she was a little tense, but she was unapologetic, and she said something like, “He won't do it. He won't settle down.”
We must have said a couple more things, but there it was, they had brought their problem to their pediatrician, who was me. So, as I said, I had racked up a fair amount of experience in practice by this time, and I thought with all this practice my batting average was rising, so I took on the challenge. So I turned to the boy and I said, “So she's mad at you a lot. And that's upsetting, right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Do you think she doesn't like you?” I said.
“I think she hates me,” he said.
So I looked over at her, and she didn't know what to say. She just looked forlorn.
“Because she's mad at you,” I said.
He nodded.
“You know,” I said, “I can see that it feels like that, but I don't think she hates you. I think she loves you. But I think she's yelling at you because she's afraid.”
He looked up in surprise. His eyes asked me to explain. I turned to his Mom and said to her, “Do you love him?”
“Of course I love him,” she said. The boy looked at her and heard her. I turned back to him.
“She loves you, but the reason she is getting mad at you is that she is afraid for you.”
His eyes said to me, “Why is she afraid for me?”
“She's afraid,” I said, “she's afraid that if you don't do your work for school, if you don't take it seriously, that you won't be able to go on to college, and your life will be hard for you, and she's afraid you will grow up to hate your life. She's afraid for you.”
I looked over to her, and she was relieved that it was explained the way she had wished it would be. That's why she was in the exam room with him.
I looked back to him. His head was up now, he was looking over to his mother, he wasn't afraid an afflicted anymore. I don't know if he looked inspired, but at least he felt loved.
When they left the exam room, they were walking together. They were together. I have no idea how things worked out, but at least something was cleared up. If things hadn't turned out better after that, they would have been back, that I'm pretty sure of. I thought I had gotten another solid hit, maybe not a homer, but a double anyway.
Budd Shenkin
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