This Dad Stuff is Hard
I got my feelings hurt. I’m a month away from my 49th birthday and I got my feelings hurt in the same way I did as a kid when someone didn’t want to play with me. It was silly, it was childish, and it was real. I wish I could figure out why I can be so confident in one moment, only to “lead with my chin” emotionally in the next and get completely knocked out. I’m talking KNOCKED OUT! Like when Mike Tyson would wreck someone back in the day. One of those knockouts where the ref starts waving his hands before he gets to 10. Where he has to cradle the poor schlub’s head, then pull the fighter’s mouth piece out to keep him from choking. I got blasted and was completely unprepared for it.
A quick look in the rearview mirror has me aggravated at myself for even reacting like I did. It’s embarrassing. But it happened so now I have to deal with it. What’s amusing to me is that If I was listening to someone as they told me the story I am about to get into, I would be lightening quick with my response as to how big a mountain they were turning their molehill into.
It was four words that sent me into a tailspin. Nothing big, just four words…”Dad, you’re annoying me.” That was it. That was all. It came from the mouth of my 14-year-old son, and while it doesn’t seem like much at all it carried the weight of school bus when it hit me. I remember him saying it, and instantly feeling every hair follicle on my body light up with electricity. It happened so quick I couldn’t get out of the way. That shock raced to my brain and within nanoseconds I was wrapped with hurt, pain, fear and anxiety. It crushed me! A part of me wanted to lash out. Thank God I didn’t, but the energy it took me to not react drained me and I couldn’t think of anything else to do but to slowly get up, leave the room to go hide in my bedroom.
At this point in the story I am totally cool with anyone reading this thinking to themselves that I am a complete whackadoo. They would be well within their right to do so. I get it. I mean that is what 14-year-olds are supposed to do…right?!?! He is at the age where I am the least cool person on the planet. I know this. I have had conversations with other parents about it. I was literally on the golf course three days prior talking to a good friend about this exact thing, yet I still reacted the way I did. So, what the hell man?? What is wrong with me?
This is what I found. As I have spoken about in this blog I am in recovery. That means baggage…lots of it. Without going into detail, I can say that for a large portion of the early part of both of my son’s lives I was living in addiction. Terrible addiction that robbed me and my family of a lot of things, most importantly of those was time. I lost large portions of some of the greatest moments in their life licking my wounds on the couch from staying up too late the night before. I was tired, I was cranky, I was irritable, and I was not present.
It’s a terrible realization to “come to” and realize that I missed out on those times. It was one of the hardest things I had to come to terms with when I sobered up. But those times are gone now. I can wish all I want to get that time back but wishes like that can’t come true.
I get that though. I did a lot of work early in sobriety to deal with that loss, but I am not immune to the occasional flare up of regret. For me, that regret comes out in really weird ways.
My oldest son is a big kid. At 14 he stands 5’10 ½” tall and weighs approximately 170lbs. It’s like living with another adult in the house even though he’s not old enough to have a learner’s permit. Honestly its unsettling. He is not my baby-boy anymore and I’m having a hard time adjusting to it. Mostly because there is this constant juxtaposition of him as a small boy up against this man-sized child that he has become. It’s difficult for me to reconcile the change. It’s like he went to sleep as my little guy one night and woke up as a full-grown man. It’s tough to experience.
Couple that with the “lost time” from when they were young, and it makes this unpleasant gumbo of regret, real life, and confusion that is hard for me to swallow. I’m constantly replaying these fond memories of him from those days. That 2-6 year-old timeframe was great when he was learning to talk and play. We’d do the airplane game where I would lay on my back and I hold him in the air with my feet until he fell into me and we would laugh like crazy. Tickle fights were a thing, and his laugh while we wrestled was awesome!
The problem is, he is not 6-years-old anymore. Unfortunately, my default parental setting tells me he is. Figuring out how to change that setting is the challenging part. As much as I want him to be that 6-year-old kid again, it aint happening.
My other problem in dealing with these parenting situations is a lack of any real example on how to be a dad. My father was married 7 times. That’s not a typo. 7 times the man said, “I do”. That is C-R-A-Z-Y! My mom comes in at a close second with 4; between the two of them I have 10 examples on how marriages can fall apart. I say 10 examples because my mom has currently been married for 25 years, so as of today only 10 of the 11 marriages ended in divorce. (That is a weird sentence to type.)
Needless to say, I’m not example-rich on how to be a Dad, so I am having to figure this out on the fly. Unfortunately, it results in examples like the one I am writing about.
Which leads me back to the story. My oldest was hanging out in his brother’s room, on his brother’s bed, minding his own business, watching YouTube on his iPad. I crawled up next to him and was kidding around with him, doing my usual dad thing. The problem is my dad thing has not evolved. I still want to play the kid games of a 6-year-old. NEWS FLASH…tickle fights and the airplane game are not on the menu for a 14-year-old young man. His reaction was exactly what should be expected from a kid his age. “Dad! You’re annoying me!” His delivery was pure, punctuated with disdain, and a quick shoulder shrug that said, “Leave me alone!” and it crushed me.
Why though? Having taken a real hard look at it, this is what I found. I still want to treat him like the younger guy he used to be because part of me doesn’t want to let the little kid go. That’s not unique to me and I know that. I’m assuming there are a lot of dads out there that would say the same thing if I asked them about it. I just happened to be in recovery and with that comes the guilt and shame of not being there. But that guilt and shame can’t be the driver of our interactions. My “want” for him to be the little guy he used to be can’t translate into me trying to play airplane or have tickle-fights with him. I hadn’t realized it until now, but I had been doing that to him almost every time we had an interaction, and he was over it.
What’s worse is that I was getting butt-hurt over his rebuke of me treating him like a little kid. Put that into perspective…here I am treating a teenager like a 6-year-old, then getting my feelings hurt when he reacts the way he does. And I am the adult here?? What was I expecting? Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to get it. I needed to make a change.
It was time to recalibrate.
I get that my boys are growing up. I’m also owning the fact that I alone caused the lapse of time from when they were younger, and they own no part of my missteps. I concede that my past is out of my control and I further concede that my future with both of my boys depends on how I treat them as they grow to be men. I want to be part of that growth, but that means I need to be willing to grow as they do.
So, that’s the plan. I’m not fool enough to thing that hitting “save” on the final draft of this blog post is going to prevent me from slipping as I try to figure this dad thing out; and that is ok. At least I am in the game with them.
In the time I started writing this to today, I spoke with a good friend who is the father of grown children about this whole experience. He really framed it for me in way that I could not see. His focus wasn’t on the struggle I was having letting go. What he saw was a guy trying to figure out how to be better dad; and to him that was cool. To be able to recognize that there was a problem and then try to figure out how to fix it was really what it meant to be a father. His words meant a lot, because being a father is what I am trying to do here. And in this moment, I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job.