My Son, My Sun

I have been in a meditative place lately. It’s a mood familiar to me. I’ve been prone to it my whole life. Lately, the impulse has come from a different place though. There has been a lightness to it. That hasn’t always been the case.

When I was college, there was always a certain unsettledness to my quiet times. A discomfort with the state of things, the state of me. I was ill at ease and therefore ill at rest. I did a lot of driving around. I spent a lot of time in my car. It was a motion for the motion of it. A self-soothing by making a blur of things.

At the time, I had just achieved the gaining of some distance from my father. I was away at school. I couldn’t be expected to make the regular trips to see him I always had. I hadn’t entirely escaped the pull he exerted but I had at least gotten farther away from its center of gravity. It was the first time in my life I had managed even that much remove and even that had taken some resolve.

In the solar system of my father’s family, parents were planets and children were moons.

While most parents raised their children to someday find their own place in the universe, my father’s family worked to keep theirs from ever leaving orbit.

Healthy parents raise their kids toward independence, toward flight. The unsaid is that if the parents are successful, their kids will someday achieve an escape velocity and slip free of their parents’ pull. My father’s family worked to see that their kids never did.

All family environments have a certain gravity. Parents have an inherent force by dint of authority and the imbalance of power. Most parents wield that power within limits and only for so long. They let up. They yield with an acceptance. For their kids to fly, they must be freed to do so. They must be ‘let to go’ by their parents ‘letting go’. And most parents do. Most parents let go of their gravity so as to let their children reach space. My father did not.

My father weaponized his pull in an effort to keep my sister and I from breaking free. But first, he created an environment where that pull was hard to overcome to begin with...

If most parents exert a gravitational pull on par with earth, my father’s was closer to Jupiter’s. It had triple the force. His mechanism for achieving that was through the constant application of guilt. Oppressive, asphyxiating guilt. He smothered my sister’s and my ability to do much of anything by first smothering our will to even ask. That was on purpose and by design. It just wasn’t his design. He had been on the other side of it growing up with his own mother. Parents deliberately stunting their kids’ independence ran in the family.

My father was just carrying on a family tradition:

Parents kept their children from escaping their orbit by making them feel bad about wanting to do even the most ordinary of things like participating in sports and activities, seeing friends, going on dates, or having a boyfriend or girlfriend.

My father learned the tools of the trade in his own childhood. His mother made everything have a cost. Even when he was in college and home on break, if he had wanted to leave the house to go to a dance in town, his mother would first try to scuttle him going by demanding he be home so early, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. If he balked, she would layer on a guilt trip so absurdly hyperbolic, it bordered on abuse.

“If you come home and find me dead on the floor, you’ll know why.”

In my father’s family, coercive guilt was the stock-in-trade. Parents used it to keep their kids from leaving home, leaving them. Some never did. Others reached school emotionally impaired and academically unprepared.

My father managed to carve out an escape route. He went to college and then moved to New York for law school. He put 300 miles between him and his mother. Along the way, he married and became a father to two kids.

And then he picked up the family tradition.

My parents divorced when I was seven. My father had custody of my sister and I every weekend.

From the time of their divorce until I was nearly 14, I saw no friends on weekends; had no sleepovers or playdates; went to no birthday parties; and played no sports. I did nothing at all that would have taken me out of the sequestration within the smothering gravity of my father’s apartment.

I might as well have been on Jupiter.

The gravitational pull of my father’s guilt was just as oppressive and the rest of my life on earth was effectively just as far away.

Physically, I was just a block away from my weekday life, from the park I played in, from my friends. I might as well have been on Jupiter.

I have been thinking about all of that lately. My relationship with my father. The dynamics in his home. The force they exerted over me. How long it took me to pull away from them and, eventually, free of them.

28 years.

It took me 28 years to break his orbit. He and I became estranged when I was 28 years old. He wielded guilt as a weapon right up until our very last phone call.

It has now been 25 years since that call. I have a son of my own. He’s 16 and the light of my life.

When he was born, I was determined to be the father my father wasn’t. Healthy. Whole. Reliable. As I have now told him many times, my goal was (and still is) to get him to adulthood with nothing to unpack. No baggage to get out from under. No patterns to break. No defense mechanisms to unlearn. Healthy, well, able. Free to find his own place in the universe with nothing in need of repair before he can.

Last weekend, he and I were sitting in a doctor’s office. It was the fourth appointment in a week lost to two healthcare issues. [When I last posted here, I fully believed I was poised to get back to posting more frequently here. So much for that. Last week was a shitshow from beginning to end. I’m sorry.]

The first issue had been minor. The second was my son developing pain in the same area of his leg where he had suffered a previous injury. It required some immediate attention. Fortunately, having been down this road with him many times now, I have the orchestration of care down to a well-practiced triple-jump of appointments:

Urgent care for prelim exam and x-ray à orthopedist for secondary exam and MRI order à MRI to confirm orthopedist opinion.

Through that specific sequencing, I can get him all the way through diagnosis to treatment plan in 2-3 days instead of two weeks. It requires dropping close to everything and running him around to an array of different offices across a far-flung medical network. By Saturday, we were on the last leg of the race: getting him an MRI mostly to just confirm the diagnosis and treatment plan.

As the two of us walked into the waiting room for his MRI, my phone connected automatically to the medical provider’s WiFi network. We have been to so many different offices over the course of his multitude of past injuries, neither of us could even remember which one had brought us there before.

Trying to remember got me thinking about when my son was last injured. It was almost exactly a year ago. At the time, he was on a soccer team and on the track team and had been training hard for each. He had been overdoing it. I hadn’t realized that until he pulled up during track practice with pain too severe to continue. He had been overworking his body so much, his tibia had weakened to the point of being near a complete fracture. There was no recourse but to have him shut down athletic activity altogether for 3-4 weeks and then slowly work his way back.

My son took the news terribly. He had been pushing himself too hard for reasons that were more emotional than rational. The year before, he hadn’t made the high school soccer team. He was hell bent on avoiding a second disappointment. Emotion had taken over and was driving the bus. Reason had been pushed to the back. And he adamantly refused to change drivers.

There was no choice in the matter but my son wasn’t hearing it. He was insistent on getting back to training. So, we bickered about it… Then we argued... Then we fought. Heatedly. Repeatedly. His refusal to relent to reason forced me to be more imposing and authoritarian than I have ever had to be with him. I was forced to wield my authority, my power, instead of my influence. It hadn’t felt good.

Throughout, I told him “I am responsible for keeping you healthy, but more than that, I’m responsible for preparing you to keep yourself healthy. In three years, I won’t be there to overrule you. I need you to get back to using good judgment because it is what will protect you when I can’t anymore.”

Usually, I get him to where I need him to be by explaining the ‘why’. Last year when he hurt his leg, I couldn’t. I ended up being forced to say “You can either be responsible in treating your injury or have me yank you out of sports altogether, but I will not let you hurt yourself. That is not happening. That ain’t one of the choices.”

He knows me well enough to know I meant it. He was furious. But eventually he yielded and just did what he had to do.

There had been a subtext beneath that final exchange. My forcing a choice with potentially severe repercussions. I almost never issue dictates to my son; instead, I bring him along to what I need from him so that he is more opting in than being coerced. It is hard sometimes. It takes patience and repetition and sometimes some pressure. It would be far faster to just issue orders. “You will do this or else!” but the net effect of sticking firmly to what I need from him and why is that there is no “Because I said so. That’s why.” in our relationship. There is an adult with responsibilities and reasons and a kid who eventually gets to “Okay, dad.”

Last week, as we sat in the doctor’s office waiting on the MRI of his leg, I thought about his injury last year and how I had been forced to basically go thermonuclear to get him to relent. In the aftermath, he matured a lot. He learned to see preventing injury and taking time to recover as part of training not ‘missing training’.

As we sat there in the waiting room for his MRI, I asked him what he thought he should do about treating his new injury. He said “Winter track ends in two weeks. Spring doesn’t start for a month. I think I should shut it down for the rest of winter; use the month to heal up; and then work my way back into it.”

Basically, the treatment path he had fought heatedly against a year ago, this time he chose it for himself.

I just replied “That sounds like a pretty rational plan.”

Inside though, I was thinking about gravity, rockets, and astronauts.

I think the job of parents is to raise astronauts. Young people prepared for flight. Strong, resilient young adults ready to find their own places in the universe.

When our kids are babies, we have so much gravity, they can’t even hold their heads up without us. So, we take to the mission. We try to build stable platforms. We train them for flight.

And all the while - as we are doing that - a clock is ticking down. A T-minus counting down toward launch.

When our kids are born, the number seems so big as to be infinite. 18:00:00:00. 18 years. That is forever. Until it isn’t. Time peels away the digits until there are only a few years left… and then just months, just days… and then no time left at all. Our kids go off to college. They move out and move away. They leave for space, and we are left to just watch from the ground.

I have always felt the ticking down of that clock acutely. I have heard it peeling away what is left of my son’s childhood loud as a metronome. I used to dread the sound. It was a reminder that it would someday reach zeroes. I have loved this mission – this phase of it - more than any other. I will so miss it when it is over. There will be another phase behind it… but I have loved this one so very much it has always hurt to remember that it will someday end.

Lately, I have come to hear a different sound though. A low rumble slowly arising in the distance… It is the sound of my son’s engines coming under their own power.

Last fall, he started a business with a friend powerwashing people’s sidewalks and decks. He and his friend came up with the idea on their own and went door to door to gauge interest. They researched equipment and with some friendly financing from family, bought some. Then they went and found customers and got to work. Within a month, they had made enough money to keep them in pizza and junk food through the winter.

I would have long spent the money by now. My son took his and invested in stocks. Through an app I set up for him, he bought stock in an array of companies. There are fairly tight limits on what he can and can’t do with his account. He can’t trade. But he can buy and sell enough to build a little portfolio. I let him make his own decisions. It is his money. I let him manage it without my oversight. He keeps me informed. He doesn’t seek my permission. I am consulted. He is in charge.

So far this year, his portfolio is up 15%. He’s looking to make some changes though. As he told me last week “I’m not diversified enough. I’m too heavy in tech.” Such are the challenges of managing a several-hundred-dollar empire.

When it comes to my son’s life, his safety, his wellbeing, his growth, ultimately, I am always the person responsible. But more and more, I am just consulted… because he is responsible. He talks with me about things which he already has well in hand. He doesn’t ask me what he should do; he tells me what he is thinking of doing.

At school, he picks his own classes and pushes himself. For the most part, he is piloting his own way through high school. We never discussed him taking over the responsibility for steering his classes and education. He just did. He occasionally hits me with a “Dad, what do you think about me taking ______.” Today it was “Chemistry over the summer.” [I told him he has only so many summers as a kid and Chemistry wasn’t going anywhere.] If he decides that he wants to take Chem, I’ll see that he can. I’m the support van. He’s the athlete.

The shift is just that – a shift - rather than a sharp change.

I have always guided him with the lightest hand possible. These days, it feels like he doesn’t often need my hand at all.

That low rumble I have been hearing lately?

It is the sound of my son’s engines firing to life. It is the sound of him readying for space.

In space flight, there are Mission Control and flight crew. The former is the team on the ground. The latter is the team onboard the spacecraft. For the earliest part of a launch, Mission Control has control over the spacecraft but then it hands off. The people on the ground cede control to the people in flight.

I am Mission Control. My son is the flight crew. There are still digits up on the countdown clock, but the ceding of control is already underway… because he is ready for it, capable, independent.

I marvel at my son. I marvel at his confidence and character. I was tough; he is resilient. I had an armor; he has a strength. I was vigilant against trespass; he sets healthy boundaries and surrounds himself with people who respect them. He is ambitious and driven and responsible. He has a wisdom beyond his years. He is not me. He isn’t derivative of me. He his own person - and I happen to just love the absolute shit out of who that person is.

So much of the kind of father I tried to be was just guesswork. It was like trying to design a launchpad without having had a healthy one in my relationship with my own father. It was like trying to build a rocket after struggling to escape gravity myself. There was just so much hope in it. There was so much guessing. I didn’t know what I was doing or whether it was right or wrong.

I just wanted to get my son to adulthood with nothing to unpack.

I wanted to someday be able to say “Parents hobbling their kids’ lift-off ran in the family… until it ran into me. Kids struggling to launch ran in the family too… until it ran into my son.”

I think parenting is the raising of astronauts.

My son is an astronaut. He is built for flight.

Hearing his engines come under their own power, watching him ready for launch, it is just so profoundly joyful, so meaningful, so fulfilling, I can’t put it into words.

There is still some time on the countdown clock. I don’t dread the sound of it ticking down anymore. It isn’t a countdown to a departure. It is a countdown to a flight.

My son is already lifting off. I am already in awe at the sight of it.

He will soon slip my gravity and find his own space in the universe, and I will yield with a grace to his flight.

The job of a parent is to raise an astronaut.

The job of an astronaut’s parent is to rejoice in their launch.

I will. I already am.