Slave to a 13-Year-Old

My son just went to his last Bar Mitzvah of the year, at a hotel in Old Town Scottsdale where all the Hollywood stars hang out when they come here. Yes, a pack of 13-year-olds from a Jewish day school in North Phoenix, all hanging out at a hotel Beyonce stays at when she's here. The invitation was a bunch of playing cards with various parts of the invitation printed on each card. The theme? Las Vegas Night.

He's gone to a Bat Mitzvah with a mechanical bull, too many with "game trucks" to count, many with sports themes and one with a Winter Wonderland theme for a Bat Mitzvah in December. Hey, I know it must be hard to decorate around all those hotel Christmas trees, but a Bat Mitzvah with a Christmas theme?

I started this blog because I was planning my son's Bar Mitzvah and was kind of losing my mind as we came up on the event. It became a chronicle of a type. But one of the things I assumed going into the whole year - which for Jewish kids is kind of like debutante season - was that things would be pretty low-key because the school they go to is so low-key. I expected that there would be no themes, that people understood that the theme is the Bar Mitzvah.

But I guess I'm not running the world yet because I was wrong. There have been plenty of themes and no one yet has come up to me raving about my genius move of using the Bar Mitzvah itself as the theme. Oh well.

So after all these suits and dress shirts and shiny black shoes he's worn, my son, Bar Mitzvahzilla, has come away with a lot of new knowledge:

1) He now knows he can sit through services at any synagogue in town, uncomplainingly, for hours. He always knows to carry a kippah. (prayer cap)

2) He knows not to fight the hungry older people and try to get in line for food after services. He'll only get pushed out of the way.

3) He knows how to write "Mazel Tov - you did great!" on the cards I hand him and then wait for me to stick my check in.

4) He knows how to nag me to death to walk him into the services and the receptions, insisting he won't know anyone there and how will he find anyone there - working himself up into a lather about it - then, once I'm in there wearing, like, yoga pants, he spots his friends and ditches me instantly.

5) He knows to call me in a panic to come pick me up now, why aren't you here yet??? the second his first friend leaves an event, knowing it takes me half an hour to get anywhere.

6) He knows how to stalk me as I drive to get him, calling me every five minutes, breathing into the phone like a killer and then, once I'm there, popping into the car like a normal boy, cheerful and exuberant, saying, "So what'd you do while I was gone?" He knows this Jekyll and Hyde thing keeps me off balance.

The social schedule will resume in the fall. I (we) get the summer off, which is good because Bar Mitzvahzilla will soon be fourteen and he has grown. I need to go shopping. New dress pants, new clunky men's dress shoes, new dress shirts. Game truck clothes.