A story of a mother’s love and one patient kid
Stonington Memories, Paul Anka once sang, are times you borrow to spend when you get to tomorrow. Max Wojtas will have 180 memories awaiting him one day from his senior year of high school, 180 opportunities to show the world he's stone-faced, curmudgeonly, hilarious and only the best kid ever.
We could call him Patient Max Wojtas. Tolerant Max Wojtas. Or perhaps Poor Max Wojtas: the kid whose mom takes a selfie with him every day at 6 a.m. — #thedailymax as it's known on Facebook — to commemorate every day of his senior year at Stonington High.
Wojtas' mom, Elissa Bass, a former writer and editor at The Day, rarely leaves home without her sense of humor. Now it appears she's on her game within the house's walls, too. She explains:
“Since cell phones became a thing, I always took a picture of the kids on the first day of school and then a selfie,” Bass was saying earlier this week, sitting next to her son, a forward on Stonington's undefeated soccer team.
“So this year when we did the first day picture I did the selfie. The second day I took another one randomly as Max was heading out the door. I captioned it.” It went like this: Mom: “Max, wouldn't it be fun if we took a picture every single day of your senior year and at the end I could make a photo book out of it?” Max: “No.” Mom: “C'mon, it'll be fun.” Max: “No.” Bass continues, “I posted that on Facebook and all my friends were like, ‘Oh my God that would be so funny.' I'm thinking, ‘180 days of school, how hard could it be?' Someone said I should make a daily calen-
dar, and that's where I came up with ‘#thedailymax.'”
It's a month in now. All photos appear the same: Mom with the goofy grin and Max with the blank stare of a telemarketer or the kid parking cars at the valet.
“I'm not on board yet,” Max said. “I'm tolerating it.” Some days more than others. “Random people I've never met before have come up to me and said, ‘I love seeing you on Facebook every morning,'” Max said.
“And I'm thinking ‘I have no idea who the hell you are.' It happened in Big Y a few days ago.”
Somewhere beneath the humor, though, lies the unintended consequence of the high school experience, loosely translated into this: It's torment for the poor parents, who slowly accept the reality that their babies aren't babies anymore.
“I had an epiphany when (older daughter) Summer was starting her senior year,” Bass said. “All these things happen as a parent that make you realize they are breaking away from you. The first year of their life they depend on you, specifically you, the mother, for life.
“Then as they get older, there are these moments you realize they are breaking away, like when they get on the bus to go to Kindergarten. You realize there's this whole stretch of time you have no control. I'm a control freak. The letting go part is hard for me.
“I've said to people for the last few years this phase of parenting is the hardest part,” Bass said. “I will take 100 colicky babies over this, where it's time for them to be grown up and leave. And so as part of a way to cope, I try to be funny about it and make it fun, sort of.”
Quite the following
#thedailymax has quite the following. A friend of Bass' in Chicago said she says good morning to Elissa and Max on Facebook every day before addressing her own family right there in the house.
Max has always been a good sport, among the reasons he's a leader on his team and in school. Mom and son also do Facebook Live skits, dating back a few years ago when they would reveal their March Madness brackets together. It should be noted that Elissa Bass is a former Day champion.
“We call it ‘Bracket Update,'” Bass said.
“We have thousands of views,” Max said, giggling.
They did another this year of Max's first ice bath, after three soccer games in four days.
“Max has the soundtrack to Frozen on his phone. He sang ‘Let It Go' word for word,” Bass said, “while the rest of his body was numb.”
Wojtas said nobody talks about #thedailymax in school because “kids aren't on Facebook.” When it was suggested that perhaps the secret will be out after a newspaper column, he said, “I don't think any kids my age read the newspaper.”
Ah, but at least there's this: Max Wojtas has a relationship with his mom that is to be envied. And he'll have 180 photos to share with his grandchildren one day. Pretty terrific idea mom had, no?
“Next year she'll have nobody to take a selfie with,” he said. “Which is why I'm tolerating it. Most of my friends would have put a stop to this by now.”
Even Max Wojtas has his boundaries, though.
“I don't know why Max is as good a sport as he is,” Bass said.
“Although he won't go to the zoo with me. Or apple picking. So I take what I can get. A selfie at 6 in the morning.” This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro