A slice of cherry

[I haven’t written about my son in a while. This weekend, I just wanted to… I hope you don’t mind. Wrote this yesterday…]

Last night, I served up a slice of pie at my favorite table – this one - and then promptly passed out on the sofa. All this pie talk just put me under with dreams of Thanksgiving dancing all through my head.

Now, I’m not saying I manifested this but…

This morning when I woke up, my son came walking in and the very first thing he said to me was… that he was bringing home stuffing later.

My son works at a restaurant now. He and a couple buddies have a pretty plum gig, and it is the newest of new world hustles. They work at an upscale old school Italian place. They don’t wait tables or bus dishes though. They’re the backroom bridge between ‘people who don’t dine in’ and ‘the people who make the food’.

My son and his friends coordinate the post-COVID trade. Each of the food delivery services has its own system. The restaurant has another. There is no way to integrate the lot. Somebody has to port the order from one system into another. My son and his friends run that backroom op and then front the pickup/delivery process.

It’s a good little gig… and it has its perks. It ain’t terrible to be able to occasionally text your son “Hey, can you bring me home that chicken parm penne thing?” and have it door-dashed by someone with his own key.

This morning’s glorious wakeup message was a different thing. I’m just a scavenger this time around. Apparently, my son and his friends had a ‘Friendsgiving’ last night and had the restaurant hook them up with the meal. I mean… damn… how fun is that? A bunch of high school kids doing a Friendsgiving? A nice restaurant doing the cooking? Me eating the leftovers? It’s just wins all over the place.

My son and his friends have had this tradition for a few years now. These are good kids, and together, they are a good group. They are close and cohesive and have a long history. They’ve been solid forever, and what holds them together is caring about each other. I’m sure my son would find that a little ‘cringe’ to hear me say, but it is nonetheless true.

There are about eight boys in the group overall. The central figures have been tight since kindergarten… third grade… fifth grade. One of the members lived on our street. My son has known him since before either of them could ride a bike. Now, they can both ride bikes - and one of them is 6’ 6” and plays on a prep school basketball team.

They go back a ways. They all do.

There have been a few names that have joined the cast but then faded from it… but even those fade-outs were just fade-outs. They weren’t fractures.

And in my relationship with my son, there has been a natural ‘fade-out’ as well. As our kids get older, we don’t take up as much of the screen as we did when we were the ones who set the password on the iPad. That is just how it works.

There has been some ‘receding’ but there hasn’t been a ‘fracture’.

It would be entirely age-appropriate and psychologically healthy if there had. Children ‘breaking’ from their parents is a necessity of childhood. It is what allows them to fully ‘individuate’ as free-standing, entirely self-contained whole human persons free and distinct from the one they were literally attached to once, and the other one who makes the corny jokes.

‘Fracture’ during teen years/late adolescence/early adulthood is just a thing that happens when very little birds have wings big enough to fly away and are putting the finishing touches on the whole ‘flying free’ thing.

My son and I just… haven’t had that.

Instead, we’ve had this… transition.

It started earlier than I thought, and it has moved more quickly than I imagined it would. Over the last three years, he has just come under his own power with little… well… anything from me.

It has felt fast… but really, it is more a burst to bloom after a long season in a greenhouse designed for exactly that.

I separated from my son’s mother when he was under three. I have been a single father for 83% of his life. The entirety of that time, I have had a laser focus on three things which exist for me as practically primal, inviolable drives. They’ve eased the older he has gotten, but when he was younger, they were absolutely-damn-necessary-nothing-comes-before-them level mandates of human soul. The three were: 1) rock solid stability in the foundation of his life; 2) absolute reliability that I would be there; and 3) fully nurturing his ‘individuation’.

In terms of the first, it wasn’t that nothing could ever change or anything of the sort. It was more that there was a stable, granite foundation of ‘how things worked’ without seism. The world could shake. It would never cleave open and engulf portions of his life.

Kids don’t need life to be perfect. They need it to be orderly. They need it to make sense. They need to understand that there are reasons for things - and that those reasons can be understood – even if they can’t understand them.

There was a time when my son was maybe six when there was some upheaval and turbulence in pockets of his life. To him, it was destabilizing. It was literally affecting him like hitting unexpected turbulence in flight. He was getting bounced around. One night, the two of us were lying on his bed talking after story time – as was our custom – and the subject of some particular recent turbulence came up.

I said “Yeah, I knew that was going to happen.”

My son was astonished – astonished – and said “Wait… you KNEW that was going to happen?!”

It had been so out-of-left-field to him, he was stunned it wasn’t for me. I gave him an age-appropriate and situationally appropriate explanation coupled with sharing something that corroborated that I had indeed known.

I had seen something coming. I had operated in the expectation that it would. I had prepared for it in case it did… and then it did. In that conversation, I footed back to things I had done over the weeks prior and was like “That’s why I did _____.”

And just like that, the turbulence settled for him.

He didn’t need perfect air. He needed to know that planes don’t just fall out of the sky; sometimes things just get bumpy in flight. He needed to understand that turbulence was just turbulence - and even if he couldn’t understand it or see it coming, I could and I did.

He needed what any kid needs: safety.

Sometimes safety is just knowing there is someone flying the plane - and that you can trust the pilot.

Fast-forward twelve years later and I’m standing on the runway; neck craned to the sky yelling at a plane already 1,000 feet off the ground like “I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO TAXI A LITTLE LONGER.”

He has his hands on the stick and a sense of where he’s going. I’m mostly just ground crew now. One day, you’re taking your hand off the back of a bicycle seat. The next, you’re waving to a plane.

I adore my son. I just love that kid with the sum total of my capacity for love. Getting to be his father has always been a gift first to me. Watching him grow into his wings has been so deeply, richly… fulfilling.

Now, watching him takeoff more quickly than I expected, more easily, with me feeling like I’m more watching than participating… man, it is all of the good things. It is every last good thing. It is a joy and a wonder. It is personal and vicarious, gratifying and satisfying.

In a way, I think we soar a little too when our kids do.

I will be perfectly honest; I hadn’t expected all of this to… feel this way.

I hadn’t expected the pie chart of my emotional experience to divide out with the wistful, melancholy, sad-for-myself slices being thin enough to see through. I had expected to have a dichotomous ‘joyful grief’. I thought I was going to both revel in his liftoff and feel a heart-tugging ‘No, please, just give me a little longer…’ as the last sand ran through the hourglass.

I fully believed that I was going to have initiate an actual project plan to ‘transition into a busier non-parent life’ in preparation for when that was my whole life. I legit thought I was going to have join clubs and make tedious small talk with fellow whatever-whatever enthusiasts who I met every other Tuesday now. I thought I was going to have to fill up my schedule to make it hurt less... and, truth be told, I thought it was going to hurt… a lot.

Somehow, that hasn’t been the case. We’ve just… sort of… slid into the way it works now. The ‘new normal’ is wildly different than it was even a year ago. So much so, I am sort of in disbelief that we somehow slid from one into the other without… anything really. He comes and goes, has school and works. We see each other when we see each other. There is WAY less ‘volume’. It just hasn’t felt like ‘loss’.

My son has a car now. The first day he drove somewhere, it hit me: I don’t have to drive him anymore.

And right behind that thought, another barreled in: I don’t get to drive him anymore.

I loved our ‘car time’. I was sad to see it go… but it didn’t drop me into a sobbing-at-a-stop-light full-throated rendition of ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’.

‘When you coming home, son
I don’t know when
But we’ll get together soon, dad’

I just kinda processed it as “I have loved this whole book. I loved that chapter. Things change… but I have always loved whatever came next.”

Things change.

I have always loved whatever came next.

And, at the moment, that is apparently a tray of free stuffing.

My son will come home, and we’ll eat. He’ll tell me about Friendsgiving. I’ll make the usual array of ‘always interested/never pushing’ inquiries. He’ll share what he wants to share. He’s a teenage boy. The range of what that is on any given day is… VAST.

Some days you ask, “who was at the party?” and they look at you like “What? You working for the government now? Simmer down, Special Agent Dad.”

Other days you’re like “Didya have fun?” half-rhetorically as they pass by your bedroom, and they come in and plop down on the bed with a funny story about a friend eating two squares of his mom’s ‘special chocolate’ and then briefly leaving planet earth.

Ya get what ya get.

My son has been doing the latter a fair amount lately, just coming in and plopping down on my bed to chat. It’s nice.

Things change; things stay the same.

It goes fast. It’s a helluva ride. There ain’t none better.

I am lucky. I am just lucky. I am thankful. I didn’t pick this kid, but there is no other kid I would pick. He didn’t pick his parents. I’m glad he still picks a spot next to me on the bed to just talk sometimes.

Thanksgiving is in a couple weeks. My personal ‘thanks giving’ is always the day after. That is the day my son came home from the hospital after almost not surviving his first 24 hours. He spent two weeks in neonatal intensive care. There is nothing I will ever be more thankful for than that kid, that homecoming, and getting to be his father.

On that note, my son just walked in… and he has stuffing.