My son and I are getting on one another's nerves. It's happening more and more lately, enough to the point where my wife has declared that the boy and I require some male-bonding alone-type time over the holiday weekend, while she and the girls stay in and presumably gossip about how annoying the two of us have been lately. This is a common parent's lament: my child is so different from me, we don't think alike, we don't understand one another. I've never held any pretension that I was going to be a "cool" dad. Since becoming a father over a decade ago, I've learned to embrace my inner uncool, connect with the Geek Within. So what's a parent to do when their kid turns out to have all the signs and symptoms of coolness?
The differences are striking: he's athletic and tan and lean, proudly showing off his skatepark-earned scrapes as he sits in his room picking out Nirvana and Hendrix on his electric guitar. I was the opposite: pasty and chubby and uncoordinated, far more prone to contemplating the hit points of gelatinous cubes to doing anything resembling physical activity, unless it was re-reading the Hobbit for the umpteenth time. Had we been children at the same time, we would not have been likely to be friends, though I can't help thinking that I would have envied him just a bit. The apple didn't just fall far from the tree, but it looks disturbingly like some kind of exotic citrus.
What I need to remember -- and this gets harder to do as he gets closer to his teens -- is that he and I are artifacts of the last century. He is the only male child in the house, and the only of my children who was born in the twentieth century. When he's a grandparent, I'm sure he'll be looked upon with wonder by his own progeny, Old Grandpa born back when the years started with a nineteen. We need to stick together, us last-century guys. Of course, he's got this-century tastes, so we're planning to take in the latest Pixar romp, grab some smoothies and bunker in at the local video game swap shop, just two different kids from a different time, trying to reconnect and find a little common ground.
6 comments:
I took my kid to Wall-E too, but she's 2. However, the attitude has already kicked in.
I took my children (with their aunt, uncle and three cousins) to Wall-E as well. The older kids enjoyed it, but my three year old got bored about thirty-five minutes into the movie and, to avoid distraction for the other children and audience in general, we spent the last hour and fifteen minutes outside on the sidewalk. I had already seen what was going to be my favorite part by then - Wall-E's treasure trove of salvaged items.
My son and I are off to Boy Scout camp this week.
Well, the movie and weekend went fine and we did some reconnecting, which seems to have been shot all to crap with a fight this morning over his summer reading assignment. Sigh
My oldest brother's third youngest was haranguing my brother for a while on his failure to be a cool dad. None of the rest of us would have predicted that he should be the one to start that.
I really wonder what my daughter is going to think of me when she gets into double digits.
I think that, as a parent, I have really conflicting, almost opposite wishes for my kids. I want them to be different enough from me so that they don't have the same struggles I had growing up (who wants their kid to be a cripplingly introverted late-bloomer, lining up for his daily ass-kicking behind the gym?). But you also want your kids to be enough like you so that you can, you know, RELATE. It's a weird dichotomy, one I haven't yet reconciled.
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