My son is just weeks away from turning thirteen and starting his journey into manhood, and I have to be honest, I’m very excited to have long conversations with him about a good quality water heater.
Oh, I’m sure there will be other conversations besides that one. There’s weed trimmers, lawnmowers, and thermostats. This is not to say that I didn’t have these exact same conversations with my daughter. She just passed out around the part where I start to talk about BTU’s. I expect that the same thing will happen with my son.
It has been my absolute pleasure to watch him grow from that little screaming thing so many years ago. One day they just pop out and are all “Hey dad, I need some boob milk.” It’s an odd first impression to be sure, but I get it. We’ve had many talks since and most of them haven’t even been of the screaming nature of that first. Also, there has been a lot less poop for me to clean up, which is always nice.
I’ve seen my son grow to be kind and thoughtful. Intelligent in a way that there are times when it’s hit me that my boy is way smarter than I ever was at his age. Don’t get me wrong, when he gets with his friends there are still a ton of dick jokes. It’s just that his crude jokes are way cleverer than mine when I overhear them when he talks with his friends. Which is to say something as most days I think I’m a very clever bastard.
He has the best parts of both his mother and me, and I smile when I see them come out. He’s able to figure things out when he takes the time to study them, and that’s all me. He sees a deeper meaning about things in general as well, which is his mother. But there are also some of the less than stellar personality quirks he has gotten from both of us as well. For example, somedays his solution to a problem is to smash it. That’s on me. He’s also a worrywart that has anxiety about his future. Thanks, mom.
“Dad,” he said to me as we sat down in the living room.
“Yeah?’ I said.
“So, I’m about to be a teenager.”
“Yup. My boy is going to hit the teen years!”
“I’m worried,” he said.
I think this is normal, especially for my son.
“What about?”
“Well, everything I read makes it seem like I’ll be angry all the time, and I don’t want to put that on you and mom. I don’t want to make life hard, you know? I don’t want to make you mad.”
First off, it’s not unusual for my son to worry about others before he thinks of himself. That’s his mom. But it’s also from his mom that he worries about things that haven’t even happened yet.
“Like what? You don’t think we can talk things out and make it work?”
“I just don’t want you to go crazy. You just seem so, I don’t know, calm when things get nuts. I don’t want to make that worse.”
Dammit, I love my boy.
I know that he holds me up on a pedestal. I’m the role model that he wants to live up to, but the vision of the man in his head is much different than the one sitting in front of him. How our children see us is often much different than the people we really are, and it’s important that they see the difference.
“Son, let me tell you a story,” I said.
Like my son, I was mostly a good kid growing up. I followed the rules, but when I broke them, I was smart enough to not get caught. Now, this doesn’t mean I was throwing bricks through windows, but I have done enough stuff in my teen years that I’m not proud of. I got into a lot of fights, cussed like a sailor, and thought it was funny to pee on the door handles of my friends’ trucks. I don’t know why, but it made me laugh. And I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was. Somedays, I did get caught.
“Once,” I said to my son, “I made my dad so angry that he stood up from his wheelchair. Think about that for a minute,” I said. “I pissed my pop off so bad that he walked.” I let my son take this in as he leaned back in his chair.
My dad had MS and had been in a wheelchair since I was eight. As the disease progressed, his legs became less and less useful. By the time I was sixteen, I hadn’t seen him stand in years. But that day, and for the life of me I can’t remember what I did, it was bad enough for him to cure himself for five minutes. He stood up and grabbed me by my shirt collar. I don’t even remember what he said. All I know is that the man stood up and I thought to myself Oh, crap.
“Wow,” my son said.
“Yup,” I agreed. “I don’t even know what I did, but it had to be something really bad.”
“Wow,” he said again.
“Look, life happens. Yes, you are going to do things that I’m not thrilled with. And at times, I’m going to piss you off, too. It’s how things work but we shouldn’t sit and worry about them. It’s natural. You remember your grandfather. Nicest guy you ever met, right?”
“He stood up because he was angry?”
“And it was because of me. I’m not perfect, but I’m smart enough to know that none of us are. Yes, there will be a lot of changes and you’ll feel things more intensely, but we’ll work through them together. And more than anything, there is nothing you’ll ever do that will make me mad enough to stand up from a wheelchair.”
He laughed at that, and I could see some of the worry leave his eyes.
My dad isn’t with us anymore and I often miss him. I sometimes wonder how he would think I’m doing as a father. I know he would be proud of me, and it’s that thought I hold onto when things get tough.
Sure, the next four or five years may be tough, but they are also going to be exciting. I’ll guide him the best I can and know that even if we mess up, we’ll mess up together. If there is one thing I learned from my father it is that when things are hard, you stand up and face them.
—