My teenaged son and I were having a heated conversation not too long ago about school, grades, and the amount of time he spends NOT being concerned with either. As a teenager, he felt it necessary to come up with some wonderful, snide retort that let me know that teenagers don’t need to discuss mundane things like education with their father’s; especially when there are still a couple of YouTube videos out there he has not yet seen. My son, summoning all of his teenage wisdom, said this: “Don’t worry dad, three more years and I’ll be out of your hair.” In the span of a microsecond, my brain said things to me like “You got that right, buddy”, “Do we really have to wait that long?”, “Smack him! Smack him, hard!”, “Try to remember, you were 15 once also.”, “It could be worse, he could be you.”, “Where DO you hide the body parts so that they can’t be found?”, “Oh come on, smack him!”. My brain is very fast, and rather caustic! Unfortunately, my mouth has been rather slow on the uptake since my “friends” at work have been reminding me that most people have a “gatekeeper” (you are more than welcome to picture me holding my hands in front of me and making the quotation marks with my fingers, if you would like) that keeps the things in their brains from making it to their lips! Whatever! So now I have a dilemma because I want my son to respect me but I also dearly want to stove in his cranium with a pan (which obviously would make it hard for him to respect me, duh). I paused a couple of seconds, exhaled deeply for dramatic effect and looked my son directly in the eyes and heard this come out of my mouth…”Son, you will never, ever be out of my hair. You may be out of my house, even in another state but I will always love you and always worry about you. And, believe it or not I don’t want you out of my hair. I might want you to be a better person but I don’t want to lose you.” Up until that point, I had never seen a teenager open their mouth to formulate a response and then close it dumbfounded (at least not without doing it on purpose to make a point). He was completely taken aback by this. He didn’t run to his desk and start doing his homework; but he didn’t lose his cool and start arguing either.
Naturally, after he walked away, I sat back and basked in the glow of what I had just accomplished. No fight, no (more) sarcastic looks or phrases, just stunned silence followed by a stroll out of the room to digest what he had just heard and try to discover if his dad really meant it or if there was a new method to sarcasm that his father was trying to impart on him. Either way, I had just gotten away with a major coup and I was very proud of myself. The back-patting machine was going full bore. Then my brain started having this little discussion inside my head that went something like this.
“That was very good, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. How did you come up with that? You’re really not that good you know.”
“Maybe, after 15 years I’m finally starting to come into my own.”
“Yeah, and Hillary’s going to be a wonderful Secretary of State. Really, where’d you get that from?”
“Can’t I have just a single moment? Leave me alone.”
“Do you think your mother had anything to do with this?”
“She’s 1800 miles away. How could she?”
You see, my brain knew something that I didn’t remember knowing and it wanted to remind me of it. I hate playing games; I am a very direct person and I would prefer my brain to treat me the same way, but I had to give you some insight, didn’t I? Eventually, I was taken back to a conversation I had with my mother several years ago. I don’t remember exactly how we got on the subject but I distinctly remember saying to her, “Aren’t you glad all your kids are grown and you can stop worrying about them?” To which my mother replied that you never stop worrying about your children. In fact, she said, if they told you the truth beforehand, you’d never have children. The truth is, once your first child is born, you will never be able to stop worrying again as long as you live.
Can you imagine? And sure enough, it was way too late to try to stuff those little buggers back where they came from! So, my brain was very satisfied with itself for stealing my glory and making me realize that I had not actually become a great father overnight as well as giving me more things to think about as my teenager (who thinks I’m an idiot) becomes a man.
Well, as the wonderful poet and theologian Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Deep, huh?
Oh, and for those of you who read the title and continued on because of it, I have something to say to you. Shame on you, go to confession now!
