Three weeks before my son, Will, turned 13, he received his first bar mitzvah invitation. It was elegantly engraved on paper the color and texture of creme fraiche and came in an envelope professionally addressed in $5-a-pop calligraphy. He opened it with an expression of awe.

Most of Will's socializing prior to this point had consisted of birthday parties that featured those giant, inflatable bouncy things you can rent for the backyard by the hour, or a trip to Magic Mountain plus a sleepover. The bar mitzvah invitation indicated a whole new universe of social intercourse. "I'm supposed to mark whether I want steak or salmon for dinner," he noted as he held the reply card delicately by its corners.

"I think I'd like a bar mitzvah," he announced the next day, when I picked him up from school. As far as I knew, he'd barely heard the term, and even now had only the wooziest idea of what such an event entailed.

"Honey," I said, "if you wanted a bar mitzvah, you should have planned a lot further ahead." He shot me a suspicious look. "You should have worked it out to get yourself born into a Jewish family."

"You have to be Jewish?" he asked, narrowing his eyes as if he thought I might be manufacturing this restriction just to torment him.

"Well, yeah," I told him. "It's kind of a religious thing."

"That sucks," he said.

Just about a year before, Will had gone through a rough period when preadolescent hormones invaded his body like spring floodwaters. He'd also graduated from our nice, low-key community Topanga Elementary and was attending a middle school for gifted kids where the homework load produced nightly cases of irrational dread. And on top of everything else, there was the father issue.

At that time, a friend suggested that I hold some kind of welcome-to-manhood celebration for him. "Boys need a rite of passage," said the friend, who is not at all your sensitive New Age guy but an ex-Marine with a slightly surly demeanor. "It'd be good for your son, especially since he doesn't have a dad to, you know, show him the ropes."

Actually, Will does have a dad: George, my ex-husband, who suffered a cerebral aneurysm several years back. A tiny vascular balloon ex-ploded in the left temporal lobe of his brain, damaging the mechanism that encodes and decodes speech. Now his words are a jumble of English and a language of his own devising. George does his best to reach Will from inside his psychic terrarium; sometimes they play cards together, or chess. But never again will George be able to show his son any kind of ropes.