My son is sixteen years old and consequently, no longer wants to hang around with me. I’ve tried posturing like his friends and leaning up against lampposts in a provocative fashion, but he’s having none of it. Same for the footy or cinema, he’d prefer to go with his mates – can you believe the audacity of the little squirt, exerting his independence and personality instead of relying upon me as his fount of knowledge. I’m gonna have to get a pet dog, the ego can’t take it.
The most difficult aspect of watching your child become a young adult is that you don’t have a clue what makes them tick anymore. All knowledge is hidden away in an undecipherable text code, pseudonym myspace accounts, the music on the iPod I can’t even operate or the grunt of ‘nothing’ or ‘ok’ to every single question asked. All in all I no longer know who he is or what makes him tick. But then the best thing in the world happened. He got really behind on some school work.
I’m not going to vent my anger at the incompetence of a school that lets a child get one year behind on assignments and fails to mention it because without their incompetence and his deviancy, I’d not have had an insight into his personality and thoughts. Instead I begrudgingly turned our house into a homework prison, whereby he had to sit down all evening and write up the assignments he’d missed. Rather worryingly they were all English essays, suggesting, perhaps, that the walls of our home stacked ceiling high with books has had an adverse effect…(Next child will be forced to read the Daily Mail every day and fed Ikea hotdogs for dinner. He’ll be a fucking genius.)
He had two assignments: One about An Inspector Calls and socialism, the other from the perspective of the young Spartan boy in the initiation ceremony of 300. (And let’s not even delve into why he is writing about the scene of a film for English Lit…) After much moaning and groaning he finally got into a good routine and a month or so later completed the work. To support him, I agreed to type up his smudged notes and email them to his teacher. He smiled, we became best mates again. But what I thought was going to be an arduous task brought me more pleasure than a game of arrows on a Friday. Reading through his work enabled me to step inside his mind and see the world through his eyes. His choice of metaphor, his expressions, his opinions and general structure of argument gave me a brief insight into who he was, something I’ve not experienced for a while.
I’ve just emailed the work off and after pressing send I felt that gut-wrenching sadness I felt when he recently went to see a James Bond movie with his mate and broke our ritual (we’ve always watched them together since he was six years old). It’s hard watching your child transform into a young independent adult and gently letting go. Thank goodness then for words and sentences, for these peculiar chains of logic that allow a father once more to be. Of course if he gets behind on his homework again I’ll be smacking his arse and locking him up in the shed for a year. But for now I’m really grateful for the simple things in life, like awful schools.
