PARENTING

Son pierced, dad OK, mom a little concerned

The first request was for a small pair of sterling silver studs. After my wife and I discussed it, she took him to Providence Place mall – he picked out a pair that had a brushed metal look. They pierced the lobe and put them in.

Done.

Honestly, they were so small they were barely noticeable.

Three weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon came the second request. It went something like this:

“Dad, can I get a new pair of earrings?”

“What’s wrong with the ones that you have?

“Nothing. I just want another pair.”

OK, I guess. Nothing too drastic, OK?

“Thanks, Dad. Can I borrow a few bucks?”

And then off he went – this time on his own – to a small smoke shop on Broadway.

About an hour later, he walked through the door, sporting a pair of silver hoops and a pleased look on his face. Still understated but definitely more noticeable than the silver studs.

At the time of this writing, there have been no requests for additional piercings, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that he wants more. I know this because he spoke so spiritedly about the ear-wear and one design specifically. I listened as Jake described an elaborate gauge earring that burrowed through the soft tissue of the lobe, hugged the back of the ear, shiny, scaly, and serpentine-like before punching its way through the cartilage of the upper ear. “It was pretty cool” – “Ah-ha,” I said, one eye on him, the other over his shoulder where I saw his mom, lips pursed, head shaking sharp and short left to right.

The earring thing is a relatively new development with our 17-year-old. Until recently, the only time the subject of earrings came up was in hushed tones around the kitchen table about what to get mom for Mother’s Day or her birthday or for Christmas. I remember the proud smiles he and his younger brother would share when mom opened her lovely froggy or dragonfly or starfish earrings.

Those were simpler times when earrings were just jewelry. Now I’m forced to think about earrings through the dark and edgy prism of teenage self-discovery.

I’m not too worried about this latest development, to be perfectly truthful. I see it as a relatively common and benign step towards self-expression – It’s all good, in my view.

My wife, on the other hand, is a little more hesitant. She worries about the potential snowball effect – might ear piercing be a gateway to nipple rings and a torso of tattoos? Might we wake up one morning to a Dennis Rodman situation across our kitchen table? Although I doubt this will happen, we have an obligation to our son to put some healthy boundaries in place – mainly because teenagers can’t see life beyond the front door.

I don’t want my son setting off metal detectors at the airport or having to explain to an angry and hard-of-hearing beachcomber why his MineLab Excalibur II keeps beeping whenever he approaches Jake’s blanket.

So, a few guidelines:

A face should always have fewer safety pins than a cloth diaper. Better yet, no safety pins are allowed.
For every piercing under consideration, your child must ask himself whether or not the same piercing would look OK on mom or dad. If the answer is no, he should not proceed – Jake, you won’t be a teenager forever.
Always consider how your face will look when you remove the piercings – if you envision a crater-filled landscape created courtesy of a madman with a hole puncher and staple gun – then think about scaling back a bit.

I suppose that’s it for now, Jake.

Please keep these guidelines in mind next time you venture out. By the way, I like the hoops – they suit you.

Free Play Gone

Some 48 years ago, my parents (perhaps over a glass of wine and a scotch), decided to move the family to Aquidneck Island — where I was raised, not far from the ocean, in a neighborhood of shabbily constructed raised ranches — where on warm summer days, squinty-eyed kids staggered zombie-like from their garages or front doors, pop-tarted, sugar-smacked, and ready to roll.

We played ball (whiffle, base, foot, basket and stick) in our backyards or in the street — we rode bikes everywhere, we red-rovered red-rovered, and played kicked the can against a near perfect backdrop of New England sunsets and warm summer breezes, to a generous and harmonious soundtrack of crickets, peepers, and nightingales.

We hunted salamanders in the woods and flash-lighted our way to collecting night crawlers for fishing expeditions at the town reservoir, to which we walked unattended by adults, poles over our shoulders, sun warm on our backs, our conversations held together with lite laughter and kinship.

The entire summer we hardly interacted with Mom or Dad except at dinner time, which was had around the dining room table without exception.

And so, it was on Aquidneck Island I stayed, met my wife, raised 2 good boys and 4 dogs — the latest, a pocket-sized pit bull, full of spittle and spunk, who envelops me in rhythmic doggy snores as I write this piece.

What strikes me most on this stroll down memory lane is the magnitude of change in parenting over a single generation. Our generation, handicapped by socioeconomic conditions requiring two working parents, and a feeling of fear and mistrust (largely unwarranted), the flames of which were fanned by continuous exposure to 24-hour cable news, which made us believe we could never leave our kids alone, that they had to be within earshot or eye sight 24 hours a day, less someone steal them away forever — and so it was by these phenomena, that free play, that priceless gift and ever-important ingredient in child development, was killed.

Gone are the days when kids gathered at a park or in someone’s back yard to organize on their own and “get a game going” — sadly, this has been replaced by regularly scheduled league games on sun-splashed well-manicured fields with perfectly chalked sidelines and clipboard-carrying, whistle-blowing, score book-keeping adults shouting out instructions while pacing in front of tight-jawed fathers in sunglasses and Bermuda shorts (newspapers tucked firmly under their arms), whilst antsy, floppy-hatted moms in folding chairs with cup holders, try to capture every moment of play on their iPads or cell phones.

I think we’ve forgotten the value of free play on uneven surfaces where the end zones were marked by a rock and a tree, and the sidelines were guesstimated according to natural or not so natural boundaries and, most importantly, where kids worked out the teams and the rules and addressed issues that arose without “expert” interference by adults.

As my children walk into adulthood, I wonder about the absence of free play and the implications of an overly scheduled, overly structured, and, quite frankly, overly parented childhood.

The Self We Lose

That’s my mom.

Young, vibrant, confident, and just starting out in adulthood. I believe this picture was taken before I was born.

In the photo, I both see and don’t see my mother. It’s my mom, yet it’s not my mom. The simultaneous feeling of the familiar and the unacquainted wrestle and dance inside my head. I recognize her instantly, yet that recognition doesn’t map to my experience.

The feeling’s a bit like the one you had as a kid the first time you saw one of your teachers outside the classroom, walking an aisle of the grocery store, you were like “wait, I know you . . . . but what are you doing here?? and why are you buying Kraft Macaroni and Cheese? You recognize that teacher, but they’re out context.

In this picture, my mom is out of context for me. I think it's because at the time of the photo, she had not yet assumed the role of mother. The person in the picture is a purer, undefined by role version of my mom, and that’s what emanates from the photograph — it's a version of my mother that I never knew.

Our relationship with our parents is so rigidly defined by role, we tend to see them as mom or dad only, as caretaker or protector only. Parents rarely reveal their true selves to their kids — I’m not sure why. There’s no written rule stating, “Don’t let your children know who you were before you became mom or dad”, but that’s what we do — we keep that part of our self, to ourselves, almost instinctually it seems.

The photo made me realize how little I truly knew of my mom; that most of what I knew of her was based on the bits and pieces she revealed to me as caretaker, protector, mother. The rest of her — her core self — her fears, what she wanted for herself, and the things she thought about in the dark of night, remained hidden from me.

The photograph reminds me how parenthood ushers in a new phase and sense of self, distinct from who and what you were before taking on that role.

I think this transformation was more impactful for women of my mother’s generation, many of whom chose to put off careers or ventures that might have fulfilled them in different ways than motherhood.

It’s a risky proposition, becoming a parent. How will the sense of self we lose, measure up to the new self we become? The potential for reward, matched equally by the possibility of regret.

Some find their better selves as a parent, others struggle, or feel a sense of loss and sadness at the self they left behind. In my mother’s waning years, I can’t help but think she felt some regret and sorrow.

My mom was a good mother. She relished the role – threw every ounce of herself into it. She instilled in her 3 children a sense of responsibility and a love of learning. And I think she was proud of her effort and the results.

We all get a certain amount of time on this earth. My mother, like many other moms, put her pre-parent ambitions and untapped capabilities on hold, dedicating her time and energy to motherhood. I suspect she felt the impact of that tradeoff.

When you put everything, you’ve got into nurturing your kids, you sometimes lack the energy, or simply run out of time, to nurture your self. It wasn’t until later in life that I understood the enormity of that sacrifice, and the love that fueled it.

R.I.P Tom Petty

Some artists stick with you, through good times and bad, like a trusted friend you’ve never met.

I remember the first time I heard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was 1979 and I was a junior in high school — the song was Refuge. As soon as I heard that song, it resonated with me. I loved the musical snarl and punch, I loved Petty’s drawl and attitude, I loved everything about it.

It’s a curious thing how we connect to artists – musicians specifically. For me and Tom Petty, it was a convergence of things — a perfect storm of his aggressive-edged rock and roll and my teen angst, bottled-up energy, insecurity, and the malaise of adolescence.

When I first heard Refuge in 1979, it felt like chemical reaction in my mind. For three minutes and twenty-two seconds, I felt clarity, like the song physically pushed shit aside in my head – so it was just me and the music – I remember there was something pure about the experience. I suppose that’s why I kept going back to Tom Petty for 38 years – and he never disappointed. For me, that’s what was so special about Tom Petty – he grew as an artist — aged gracefully, which allowed me to grow with him. As much as I loved Refugee as a teenager, listening to that song as an adult was mostly a way of reconnecting to my youth. As Tom matured, he became a master songwriter, tapping into the complexities of human relationships – doing so with sparse simple language – clarity.

When I heard Tom Petty had died, I cried — sitting alone in front of my laptop. With a conference call a little over an hour away, I got up, found my iPod, connected it to a Bluetooth speaker, turned up the volume, hit shuffle, and cried a little more.

Later that afternoon, I went into my son’s room, he was hunched over his laptop, I touched him on the shoulder, and he broke — we both did — had a real good cry – together.

Tom Petty was an integral part of my life – from adolescence to fatherhood, he was my go-to artist — always a drop of the needle away, a CD shuffle away, or an iPod click away — he never failed to lift me and help me through.

R.I.P. Tom Petty.

Small town dust-up forces dad to think about dirty dancing and sexual mores

Last week the Middletown high school principal cancelled the student’s homecoming dance less than halfway through the festivities.

Apparently, juniors and seniors were protesting a ban on a type of sexually suggestive dancing (known as grinding) imposed by the administration earlier in the school year.

The protest included a sit-in, as well as a profanity-laced chant directed at the principal, who took to the microphone to admonish the students and to warn them that the dance would be cancelled if they continued to protest.

Mind you, at 50, the only thing I grind are my teeth. But, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years most, you’ve probably seen examples of this type of dancing. If not, just flip your channel to MTV or an episode of Jersey Shore (or any reality TV show for that matter) and you’re bound to bump into some grinding.

Truth-be-told, I'm not bothered by it when I see it. I certainly don’t avert my eyes or act as if I am disgusted by it – I am old, but I’m not dead. That said, it’s funny how views on sexual expression shift to the right in matters that involve your own kids.

The story of the cancelled homecoming dance unfolded in real-time through social media, which is a good thing, because the part of the brain that enables humans to articulate verbally is slow to develop in teenage boys, of which I have two.

When I asked my older son what happened, he simply said “We rebelled”.

Here’s something I’ve learned as a father of two teenage boys – If you want any details about what is going on in the life of your teenage son, be prepared to ask more questions than a New York Times investigative journalist and be accepting of the fact that almost all his responses will be one or two-word answers. It’s an exhausting exercise in futility, like trying to draw blood from a stone.

Over time, I received a full accounting of what happened. That which I did not learn from interrogating my sons, I gleaned from the local TV news, our town’s daily newspaper, and most interestingly, Middletown Patch – a local community web site and public forum (I am including a link to the Patch article at the end of this post – it provides an interesting and entertaining take on small-town mores and values.)

But the point of this post is to peel back the layers of my reaction to my son’s response to the question “Do you grind?”

Now, if I were to describe my older son (and my younger son for that matter), I would use terms like kindhearted, intelligent, well behaved and socially modest. My wife and I have raised our sons to be respectful of their elders and mindful of the rule of law, and to not act like a jackass in public. Our boys have always held up their side of the bargain – they’ve never gotten into trouble – basically, our two boys are very good kids.

To be honest, I just could not envision my son grinding away on a dance floor – it just seemed. . . I don’t know. . . out of character. Still, I was a bit nervous to even ask the question – perhaps I was afraid of the answer.

A few days after the dance, I was sitting in my living room – my son was across the room on the couch. It was just us; my wife was in the kitchen. That’s when I decided to let the question fly:

Me: Hey, can I ask you a question?

Son: Sure

Me: Do you grind?

The words seemed to hang in the air between us.

Son: “Sometimes”.

This is where things got interesting from my perspective – because I could almost hear my brain working – it was as if my brain and myself had separated momentarily – my brain, grappling with the word “sometimes” struggling to come up with an appropriate response.

And then I heard my self say (rather sternly) “Ask yourself if you would dance that way in front of me or your mom or your girlfriend’s parents – and if the answer is no – then DON’T!”

And that was pretty much the end of the discussion – but not the end of me thinking about it.

I wanted to understand why I said what I said – because honesty, when I replayed my own words – in my own head, they sounded like total horseshit

Here is what I think happened:

I had no mental frame of reference on which to formulate a response – meaning, my brain searched its database and came up empty :

Son+Grinding=NoData

I remember feeling agitated at his response – I think that feeling was my brain throwing up its hands in exasperation – and that’s when I spat out my horseshit response.

So, what have I learned?

I learned that my kids and your kids live in a society drenched in sexual imagery and their dancing is a reflection of that society and we would have to lock them in a closet, throw out our televisions, take away their smart phones, unplug their computers, cancel our magazine subscriptions, turn off the radio and erase what has already been burned into their memories in order to put a halt to the grinding or the urge to grind, and that our best bet is to tell our sons to respect their girlfriends and to tell our daughters to respect themselves and to not get overly concerned with how they dance and to not judge a kids character by what they might do on a dance floor, because, after all they’re kids, but at the same time tell them that people are watching and people will make judgments and that if they get carried away on a dance floor expect to be called out by a teacher or a chaperone and if that happens be thankful that someone is reigning you in a bit and letting you know it’s time to cool it.

Here is the link to Middletown Patch article:

http://middletown.patch.com/articles/mhs-homecoming-dance-cut-short-for-grinding

Parental Conundrum

I remember my kids watching a Trump speech early-on in his run up to the presidency, and the expression on their faces as they listened to him.

In Trump, they saw all of the behaviors and attributes they were taught to fight against. He was awash in them — he was a brazen an unabashed example of what they were taught not to be — he was the embodiment of the worst human attributes and characteristics (mean, petty, vindictive, and intellectually lazy) and surprisingly, there was no attempt by Trump to obscure any of this, no subterfuge – he reveled in these negative attributes like a hog in the slop.

I remember my kids watching Trump on television, then looking over their shoulder at me with a confused expression, bracketed by nervous laughter. An expression that occurs when realizing somethings not quite right at an elemental level — an expression that bubbles up from your core when what you’re seeing doesn’t jibe with what you were taught. It was an expression that said “Is this guy for real? This can’t be real, right dad?”

“Right dad?”

And I think that’s why I detest Trump so much. Because his ascension to highest office in the land was a refutation of the values that I so strongly believed in and that I so vigorously instilled in my kids. Values like kindness, empathy, understanding, hard work, and strength of character.

After the 2016 presidential election, I had to come to terms with the fact that the person elected to the highest office in the land — the person representing America to the rest of the world, was unkind, apathetic, and totally dishonest.

For nearly four years, I had to deal with a buzzing dissonance deep inside the frontal and limbic lobes of my brain. Not only could I not make sense of a Trump presidency, but its very existence agitated the shit out of me (as evidenced by my social media posts over the last 4 years).

If I take a step back, my anger at Trump is misdirected. Sure, Trump is an intellectually lazy and vindictive narcissist. But he’s never tried to hide that from anyone, he’s totally transparent, never tries to be something he’s not, which normally is an admirable trait, if you’re not a raging asshole.

If I were on a psychiatrist’s couch, it would be a relatively short session to get to the true source of my anger.

“Mr. Reilly, you’re not angry at Trump at all, you’re angry that so many of your fellow citizens voted for him – TWICE!”

And that would be an accurate diagnosis.

Which brings me to some questions:

Doesn’t every good parent teach their kids the basic values that I taught mine (work hard — be respectful — be honest — be a good sport – admit your mistakes — don’t bully — don’t brag)? And if they do, how do they square that with voting for a person who exemplifies the opposite of those values?

I have a theory.

My theory does not take into account the people who support Trump because they’re drawn to the President’s bigoted views and white supremist tendencies (fuck all of those people), in my view, these are not the majority of Trump supporters.

I’m pretty sure that the Trump supporters who I’m friends with, know the President is a deeply flawed and selfish man.

If they were to walk into a bar and see some schmuck spouting disparaging remarks about women or a handicapped person – or, if they saw an individual bragging about his intelligence and then, in the very next minute, demonstrating his ignorance, they’d think that person was a moron.

And yet, they turn a blind eye to the same behavior when it’s the president.

Why?

Because for some Americans, Trump’s flaws are insignificant and easily dismissed when balanced against the views they hold on to abortion and religion.

For other Americans (though I suspect there’s a lot of cross-over with the first group) they believe in a wildly weird conspiracy theory that pits President Trump against a cabal of global elites who are trafficking in human flesh. Like the first group, these folks are willing to dismiss the President’s intellectual ineptitude and moral decrepitude, because the alternative is a country being run by cannibalistic vampire sex traffickers.

These two groups (the religiously fueled and the conspiracy-driven) are tightly spooning bedfellows when it comes to their support for the President. For both groups, the president’s causal relationship with truth and facts matters less than what they see as the alternative.

I’m still working on how we overcome this phenomenon.

Riffs, memory, and a sense of self

I remember this day.

According to the timestamp on the video, it was more than six years ago. Two months shy of your 15th birthday.

It was late in the afternoon – I recall getting off the couch to the buzz of your amplifier… By the time I reached your room, you had already programmed the loop — I had walked in with my camera, sat on your bedroom floor, and started recording.

You play for almost 12 minutes, at times oblivious to my presence — passionately engaged in the endeavor, beautifully lost in your music — but every now and then (as shown in this clip), you play a riff or come across a note that surprises and delights you.

I love that.

I remember posting the video later that day to YouTube — the entire 12 minutes — and how mad you were at me for doing so. I took the video down immediately. As I recollect, I was angry at myself — and I remember feeling agitated at how everything had turned out.

Looking back, I realize that day was a bit of a crossroads for us, a realization that you were coming into your own, and sharing that video without your permission was a clear case of parental overreach — an infringement on your sense of self.

I’m not sure I ever apologized in a meaningful way.

Sorry about that, Jake. 🙂

For years I had no idea where the 12-minute video was. First, I was disappointed at myself for misplacing it – an irritating reminder of how scatterbrained I can be. Then, I began to think it was gone forever, that perhaps I deleted it inadvertently.

Only a few weeks back, I came across the full video on an external storage device.

Thanks for letting me share a snippet some six years later, on your birthday.

Dad.

Time, it goes

How many times have we heard the question or uttered the phrase Where has the time gone?

In almost all cases, it's a hackneyed expression, of little meaning to anyone living amid the whirring now – where time is like air and noise filling the gaps between atoms. But, to those living in the here-and-now, time is an ever-present, unconsciously tapped resource.

That said, the expression "Where has the time gone?" becomes "unhackneyed" to a parent whose child is preparing to leave home for the first time. As your child takes flight from the protective, loving, and caring environment that they worked so hard to provide, the question "where has the time gone?" seems as concrete a question as "Where are my keys?" or "Has anyone seen my wallet?"

As that day of departure approaches, I find myself whispering that phrase in pre-dawn seclusion, puffy-eyed in front of the bathroom mirror - I feel the words knocking around the inside of my skull late at night as I lay wide-eyed in darkness.

WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE?

As parents, we know where it went.

It went to the thousands of moments that (over time) formed the connective plasm between you and your child.

As parents we immersed ourselves in the fecundity of time - we became part of it - and it became part of us – we used it as needed, for whatever circumstance we faced - on a daily, hourly, or minute-by-minute basis - from the big life-lessons to the little league games – we took the time to sooth our kids through the transitory aches and pains of skinned knees and bruised egos.

Like Sherpa, we packed time away, along with knowledge, life experience, and love to help our kids crisscross the complex landscape of a wounded soul -- to scale the jagged edges of a broken heart or to seek respite from the deep sorrow of loss. A sorrow that we will wallow in when our kids leave.

Who will be our Sherpa?

As the day of flight draws near, time becomes a sacred commodity – I wish I could cast a spell on it – to thicken it - to slow it down - I want desperately to corral it, stockpile it, and optimize its use.

But no matter my desire to control time, it marches on steadfastly and unapologetically. To our son, who is getting ready to leave, time stretches out before him like a shimmering ocean of opportunity – a totally different perspective on time.

I'm learning the most satisfying use of time these days is simply enjoying it – to savor it – even the most transient of moments.

An evening ago, I watched my son back out of the driveway. A waning late afternoon sun reflected off the dogwood and pine, giving birth to a speckled blanket of light on the lawn. From his car, the melodic sound of Henley's "Boys of Summer" became one with the cool summer breeze. He looked good – comfortable in his skin - he was on his way to pick up his girlfriend. This was a moment in time that 2 years ago, I would not have given a second thought to – but now I let it wash over me, and I settle peacefully in its glow.