26 Feb Writing: Uncharted Waters

“Dad, there’s something I need to tell you.”

My son and I had just finished moving into Lupinewood, a long and harrowing process that involved wrestling a wildly unhappy cat into her carrier, scrubbing a decade’s worth of grime from kitchen walls, and consolidating all our worldly possessions into two rooms’ worth of stuff. All things considered this had gone pretty well, but it’s a big transition for an 11-year-old, so I’d been readying myself to hold his tough feelings about it. This seemed like it might be the moment.

“What do you want to tell me, bud?”

Linden took a breath.

“Jayne is cooler than you are.”

“I see.”

“Like, way, way cooler,” he emphasized.

When we moved in, Linden officially replaced 26-year old Jayne as the youngest member of the household, and immediately developed an admiration for her verging on infatuation. And for good reason: Jayne can recite the names of Pokemon like an entomologist rattling off the binomial nomenclature of moths. She can solve a Rubix cube in like ten seconds and always knows the trick to beating a difficult boss in any video game. As someone whose own video game knowledge stopped at Mario III, how could I possibly compete?

I take a breath myself. “Thank you for letting me know.”

“Dad, it’s not that you’re not cool too. It’s just…I’ve lived with you for so long.”

It’s true. Since Linden was 8 months old, he and I have lived together as a miniature family unit in a series of homes, ranging from the very post-divorce one-room studio where his crib was practically inside the oven to the hobbit house we’d just moved out of. At the time of that last move, he was four, and wept bitterly about leaving behind the growth chart pencil-etched onto the kitchen wall. As a gesture of reassurance, I tattooed those dates and ages onto the side of my own leg and told him that while I couldn’t promise him we’d never have to move again, he and I would always make our home together wherever we ended up. Linden’s now balanced on the precarious brink of adolescence; his growth chart climbs up past my ribs to my shoulder.

Living in a collective is about as different a situation as one could find from the insularity that marked his early childhood, so I was nervous about the adjustment. I felt very clear that this was something I needed for my own well-being; I was less sure how much such a shift would ask of him, and how he would handle it.

But as the spoiler of his comment to me in the car suggests, since being here, he has come into himself in a new way, stepping outside the comfort zone of our dyad with the encouragement of adults who aren’t his parent but who take interest in him as a person, and sometimes speak his language more fluently than I do. He is doing the thing I hope I have prepared him for, shifting away from me and into his own life, where he has opinions, relationships, and interests that are distinctly his. While Linden hangs around outside Jayne’s bedroom door like a puppy dog with a distinctly teenage slouch, I feel the bittersweetness familiar to any parent who watched their child take their first steps and now watches them step away, down the start of their very own path.

I hope Linden keeps letting me add lines to the growth chart on my side until, as he once gleefully predicted, it’s “up past my neck.” Because if he thinks my coolness is waning now, just wait until he brings his first date home to Lupinewood and I show them the lines of his growth chart tattooed on my face. Beat that, Jayne.

Story by Hunter, edited in collaboration with Terran