13 Is the New 18: And Other Things My Children Taught Me--While I Was Having a Nervous Breakdown Being Their Mother

“I wonder sometimes if there’s something to the old superstition about the number thirteen. Maybe that superstition was originally created by the mothers in some tribe who noticed that in their children’s thirteenth year, they suddenly became possessed by evil spirits. Because it did seem that whenever Taz was around, things spilled and shattered, calm turned into chaos, and tempers were lost.”

So laments the mother of one thirteen-year-old boy, Taz, a teen who, overnight it seemed, went fro...