Growing Up

This week, my oldest son will celebrate his eleventh birthday. I’ve been thinking a lot about the boy, particularly this morning, when he (as he occasionally does) intruded upon our tiny little closet of a bathroom to use the toilet while I was in the shower. The young man has bathroom radar. He seems to wait until someone has preceded him to the facility to decide that suddenly his bowels and bladder require voiding. This is a bit of an offshoot from his other domestic habit of needing to accompany any member of the family on any venture to any other part of our home from where he might at that moment be reclining.

If my wife takes the baby up to our room for a nap, he will become insistent, even in the face of his mother’s angry protests, that he must immediately retrieve some random object from the landfill that he and my younger son consider their room. If I grab the newspaper and announce to the household (as I have an alarming tendency to do) that I am going to the bathroom, he suddenly remembers a reason that he, too, must climb the stairs, mumbling some excuse and glaringly daring me to object.

Ever since we purchased our home three years ago, the boy seems terrified to be left alone in its quarters, accustomed as he was to apartment living with his mother for the first six years of his life. To be fair, this is just one in a series of adjustments he has had to make in the four years since my wife and I decided to start our matrimonial adventures and subsequent human zoo. After the initial meeting of Robert and wonderfully entertaining six-year-old son of Robert’s girlfriend, our relationship and all other elements of our lives changed at such a rapid pace as to transform, quite overnight, Robert to Dad, and wide-eyed young boy to son and older brother three times over.

As angry as I occasionally get at the lad, the pressures of family life and fatherhood ever mounting and causing my mood to take sudden plummets into degrees of intolerance and irritability not felt since my early and frustrated twenties, I try to remember that if my entrance into this life of new familial experience is unexpected and uncharted, so must be his. Wonderful as all of our progress has been, strong as our family has become, I must assume that in that strange and bewildering brain of his, there must be some longing for the days when he had his mother all to himself. Never knowing his father and bonding even more closely to his mom than a child with siblings and another parent with which to interact, he certainly couldn’t have foreseen the complete reconfiguration of his place in the family line-up at first meeting with the man who would be Dad.

Back then, even he and I interacted much differently. He was a welcome seminar into fatherhood for me, and I served, I’m sure, as a manifestation of his own paternal imaginings when witnessing friends and relatives with their own dads. We fulfilled specific expectations for one another—happily and enthusiastically embracing the newness of what each of us thought would never occur in our lives.

And now, here we are, not half a decade later, in a much larger setting, surrounded by more family and chaos than either of us could have dreamed. To say that our father and son relationship has been strained at times is a gross understatement. Each of us feels a sort of male competitive drive, the kind of rivalry that occurs when introducing any new male into a primal setting that includes a female. We two orangutans occasionally tussle, if not physically then most definitely verbally, attempting to win the position of alpha male in an arena that includes Playstation tournaments as well as dinner table squabbles and strategic bathroom tactical maneuverings.

But I love that boy dearly.
I attempted to explain this to him just this morning, after seceding my moment of privacy in the shower to his natural urge to poop at that specific moment. I was actually calm and soft spoken. Every now and then, I pick and choose my moments about which to increase the level of my ever rising blood pressure. He was lounging on the couch, a bit under the weather, and I, while preparing to go to work, attempted a little conversation about the cartoons that he and his siblings were watching. Our communication is of late, not stellar, more a series of grunts and growls, but we spoke this morning. I ribbed him a bit. “See,” I taunted, “it’s okay to talk to your stupid old man once in a while, right?”

“When you’re not yelling at me,” he sighed, rolling his eyes in his customary response to my attempts at peaceful negotiations.

“But, you know,” I intoned, doing my very best rendition of “Father Knows Best” half-hour paternal problem-solving tone and demeanor, “I correct you because I love you. If I let you do whatever you want, without trying to guide you in some way, I wouldn’t be a very good Dad, would I?” I inwardly cringed. He would never buy such drivel; I certainly wouldn’t. But he smiled. Yes, I’m positive I saw a definite foreign upturn of the corners of his mouth.

“I know. I love you, Dad.”

Sigh… Happy Birthday, dear boy. This job does have its benefits.