Rated M For Mature
When my eleven-year-old son was an infant, I joined a group of mothers who’d all had babies within a few weeks of each other. One of the moms often began sentences with, “If I were you, I would do my research.” She once said this to me when I mentioned that my son liked avocados. If you questioned her, pushed for an explanation, she’d say, “Just look into it. That’s all I’m saying.” I don’t think she had any specific information warning against avocados or pacifiers or toys made in China; she just wanted to feel like an expert, someone who could save her child from any hidden danger that might be lurking in the world.
Part of me admired her confidence. By the time my son was a toddler, the only advice I felt comfortable giving if pressed was, “Never leave a two-year-old alone in a room with someone else’s newborn and a magic marker.”
Now my son hates avocados and loves video games. He got a little obsessive when he discovered Fortnite, a cooperative shooter-survival game. He could play online with real kids he knew from school and I suddenly had to rethink my policy of allowing swearing. I had always pictured each curse being used separately, by itself, quietly and in the privacy of our own home.
“Hey Sweetie,” I said. “I’m thinking maybe swears shouldn’t be combined with specific body parts. It’s maybe a little inappropriate to scream into your headset at other fourth graders, ‘I will fuck you in your eyeball if you shoot me.’ ”
Besides the swearing and the shooting, there were things about Fortnite I liked. Kids would readily admit that they were not great at this game. Even the kids who bragged about everything else seemed happy to say, “Dude, I suck.” In a Fortnite match, sometimes enemies would stop shooting each other and instead, agree to a dance-off. And there are no rigid gender roles. My son has long hair and even the boy who told him he looks like a girl seemed perfectly fine with playing Fortnite as a character named Dreamflower, with pink sparkly clothing, long yellow braids, and gigantic boobs. Dreamflower looks pretty even when screaming, “I will fuck you in your eyeball.”
But Fortnite has now been replaced with Grand Theft Auto, or “GTA” for short. Initially, I told my son he could not have this game until he turned eighteen. When his very sweet, grown-up stepbrother wanted to get it for him for Christmas, I caved. How bad could it be, I thought.
Grand Theft Auto comes with a “Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack.” In GTA, when you buy an apartment with your bank heist or meth lab funds, alcohol and a bong magically appear on your kitchen counter. The name of the beer that takes up all the space in your GTA refrigerator is Pisswasser. The cursor for selecting things in the game is a middle finger. On the first day he played, I heard my son yell into his headset, “My P-Diddy-ness is out of control right now!”
He asked me if I wanted to see his apartment in Grand Theft Auto. It was a modern, sleek, high-rise that I’d like to live in myself.
“Doesn’t Hadrian’s avatar look like Kim Jong-Un?” he said.
I leaned in closer to the screen. His friend’s avatar did indeed have the exact same haircut as the leader of North Korea.
Then my son showed me the animated figure he had chosen to represent himself. A black man in a neon pink track suit with a giant gold dollar sign roped over his chest, a neck tattoo, chin-length dreadlocks, and a smile covered in what my son called his solid gold grill.
Then he pointed out the animated figure of his other friend, Dylan. The avatar had a blond buzz cut and looked exactly like Dylan. The Dylan figure walked into a wall.
“Dylan’s really drunk,” my son said. “He just got back from defending his weed farm.”
Characters can choose to get drunk in GTA. My son tells me he hates it because it makes the screen wiggly and if you try to drive one of your fancy cars, you can’t get where you need to go.
“Are there twelve-step meetings in GTA?” I asked.
My son knows I struggled with addiction ten years before he was born. I chose to speak openly about this with him once I started to publish essays about my history. He asks me sensitive questions about those years, questions not about what I did but about how I felt.
My husband and I call my kid Aunt Ruth because he’s so cautious and careful. His instagram is full of short videos where he can be heard telling friends not to do stupid, risky things like jump from great heights or bike without helmets. He checks the expiration date on everything I feed him as if I have a rap sheet for poisoning people. When he was five, he watched some preteen boys trying to coast down an icy hill standing up on their sleds, and he put his little hands on his hips and screamed at them, “Are you crazy? Where is your mother?!” Last summer, he rolled down a grassy hill on a hot day and when his body came to rest at the bottom, he stared up at the cloudless blue sky and said, “Great. I just rolled in this grass without even thinking about ticks. I’m totally getting Lyme disease now.”
When I ask him if he thinks Grand Theft Auto could influence kids in negative ways, he says, “Maybe some kids. But Mom, I know it’s just a game.”
When I had my son, the world seemed to rearrange itself into an obstacle course of harm. As he grew older, the worry came down to choices about how much to shelter and protect, how much to reveal.
If anotherparent were to ask me if they should let their child play Grand Theft Auto, I would take a moment to answer. You have to know your own child, I might say. On other days, I might tell them, “It’s pretty bad actually.” And on days when I felt completely ill-equipped to give advice, I’d say, “If I were you, I would do my research.”
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In April 2019, Cindy House read “Rated M For Mature” to open for David Sedaris at performances in Stamford, Boston and Providence.