I’m 50 years old and my twelve-year-old son keeps challenging me to hand-to-hand combat. We wrestle in the living room, moving the coffee table and throwing a few pillows around so that no one loses an eye or needs stitches.
It wasn’t that long ago that this would have been a balancing act between showing him the few moves that I know and letting him get the occasional win so that he doesn’t lose heart. But now, one junior league football Super Bowl and a summer of puberty later, things have gotten difficult.
Pro Tip: if your kid wants to play fight, always set a timer. Even when they’re very young, they have a lot more energy than you. The timer lets them know that playtime is over without too much whining. We’ve used one since back when he was a kindergartner and I was grabbing him by the neck and super-slamming him onto the bed, watching him bounce three feet into the air, giggling all of the way.
Those days are long one and these days, all that he lacks in skill or finesse, he makes up for in bulk. And he’s learned that draping 185 pounds on your aging opponent is tiring, even if you don’t really know what to do once you’ve got him down. And if you pin that opponent face-first in the shag rug, with his arm under him, he’s going to have a bad day. Now if you can also use a forearm to the back of his head as though you were attempting to to push his head through the floor and into the basement, you’ve really got a good thing going.
This is true even if your opponent still outweighs you by 80 pounds and yells at you about bedtime. You might even be able to make him tap twice in one short session.
A few nights ago, in the darkness of our bedroom, my wife turned to me. “He didn’t really beat you, did he?” She’d fled to the rear of the house when the fighting started, later celebrating my son’s triumph with him.
I thought about it. “Well. Not really. I’m only fighting at about 80%. And we’ve got to be careful. There are a lot of ways to get hurt wrestling in a living room. A lot of things to break, too.”
“Good.”
“Problem is, I’m not going to be able to keep a winning record fighting at 80% for much longer. And at 90% I’m basically spearing him into the fireplace.”
“Yeah. Maybe don’t do that.”
I thought about it.
“I can’t make any promises.”
Sometimes it doesn’t quite seem fair that just as I am accepting middle-age and the normal declines that come along with being on the back side of 50, I have to watch my boy grow stronger and more confident.
But I know that is not a curse. Really. I can see it for the joy that it is.
But just barely.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
