Thinking About Raising a Boy

Quarter for your thoughts?

You know those toy dispensers that you’d see at grocery stores, where you’d put in a quarter, twist the T-handle, and catch a plastic bubble container from the chute? My brain is the dispenser, and each morning a new load of prize bubbles gets dumped in the top. Then I spend the day twisting knobs and opening thought bubbles.

Far too simplified obviously, but those things are etched pretty deeply into my memories of boyhood. Choose Your Own Adventure books. Taco Bell. Crabs walking up the concrete shoreline at Ports O’ Call in San Pedro. The sounds of AOL Online. Super Nintendo. Finding my first nudie mag, literally in a gutter while walking to school. Stealing quarters from my stepdad’s change cache to play Street Fighter at Star Donuts instead of going to school. Losing my virginity just minutes before varsity soccer tryouts… I mean looking back from here, it all happened so fast. Time is ruthless in its compression of the past. But in the moment, every new childhood discovery felt like it unlocked a new piece of the universe. The wonder of every single little thing was mad potent.

For the second time in two years I exist as a deeply held breath on the precipice of fatherhood. In some ways, it doesn’t feel any different at all than the first time. The anticipation is intense, the excitement is palpable, the hopes and worries blow across the prairie of my mind like tufts of dandelion as I lie awake at 4:47 a.m. My wife grabs my hand in the dark and pulls it over to her impossible taut belly to feel what might be a foot, or an elbow, or a knee arc across the inner lining of the boy’s cozy womb. He’s right there at the portal, physically just a few thin layers of mom away from this realm while somehow someway still floating around in that parallel universe.

I love the unruly parade of dad thoughts so much: What am I going to say when he realizes his penis looks different than mine? I am circumcised, he will not be. It might be a very easy discussion, but what if he does the thing where he asks “Whyyyy?” over and over again to every answer? Will I be able to come up with a satisfactory series of replies? What if he never asks?? Will he be silly, or serious? How will I comfort him when he skins his knee for the first time? How am I going to manage him growing up in this supercharged AI race? How can I explain something I can hardly understand? Will it be him that explains it all to me? Will I be able to protect him from a mad world, teach him to navigate it, show him how to be a good man? Will he trust me? Will he love me? Will he be ok when I’m gone? And a magillion more.

I know I’ve got a fair amount of time before a lot of these things come up, but again… how fast will it actually feel like it goes? At this point, the majority of my friends are parents so I’ve heard myriad laments on the speed at which they grow up. Speaking of worries (and laments)…. as Steven Tyler so ubiquitously rasped back in my day: I simply don’t want to miss a thing.

I will miss things. Of course I will. Bills, etc.. Probably healthier for our relationship overall if I am gone sometimes, but I suppose that’s one potentially difficult part of losing our first boy: Letting this one make his own mistakes, find his own way feels harder for sure. After two years of grieving, healing, somatic therapy, video games, muscle building, sauce perfecting, and asking impossible questions to the void, I probably won’t be able to stop the occasional overbear. I suspect a bit of overstepping is the norm though, even without the scarring from watching my beautiful boy die in his mother’s arms. There’s certainly no “getting over” that, but I believe myself when I tell you that I’m significantly stronger of body and mind at this second anticipatory stage than I was the first time. Besides the uptick in random bouts of joint and back pain, I feel superior to the human I was in 2023 in almost every way. I’ve been to “hell” and made it back to good. “Back 2 Good” if you’re Rob Thomas. Nah Huhhww Huohh.

So yeah… I’m fuckin’ ready to be Dad to this boy, man. Sure I’ll be able to use my senior discount at his high school graduation dinner but better late than never some old dads have etched into their gravestones. I am curious how well I’ll be able to keep up, and for how long. I wonder aloud about this to my wife who, at a decade younger than me, thinks I should try to be more kind and encouraging to myself. I’m also writing this as I kill an hour before the drive down to Dr. Jedediah, my chiropractor. Dang nerve pinch returned. (Shakes fist at the cloud that pinched the nerve) Def wanna get that little zapper ironed out before I’m hefting our little potato sack.

So much time, so little to do. A phrase I adopted long ago and use often. Can't wait for him to tell me to stop saying it so much. Can’t wait for so so so so many moments. Time for a back crack.

B