Day: January 21, 2022

I couldn’t sleep last night, bitter and distracted by the situation with my kid. I don’t know how to handle it and the rancor of the thing kept me up all night. What kept kicking around in my head is the thing my partner said. She asked me what my kid’s big brother is doing about it (more or less) and as it turns out he doesn’t know, because his little brother doesn’t trust him enough to tell him. He has not been the best big brother. Ever. He cheats at games and finds ways to make it not fun for everyone else or straight quits when he is losing. This is troubling because it is reflective of his personality and really argues that he is a selfish person that cannot be relied on. Which means I raised a selfish kid who cannot be relied on to look past himself, his pleasure, and his personal gain. While he is one of the hardest working people I know, that work is directed solely at self-improvement. I’ve done nothing as a parent to teach him balance and it honestly feels like it is too late. Have I created a monster? I want to believe in my heart that he is a good person. He is a good person, but he is not a self-sacrificing person. He is also loathe to go out of his comfort zone.

I struggle with the reality of kids growing up and becoming people you don’t always get along with or want to be around. I have one kid who is often entirely contradictory to my personality and who I want to be as a person and that chafes. I have another kid–the subject of this rant–who has been handed everything in the world and coldly expects more. I recognize that eventually these kids leave the nest and go off to be their own people and that they have to be able to be who they naturally are, but I want to love them. I want to want to spend time with them and more and more I find that I don’t enjoy the moments as much as I used to. It feels like maybe all of that is a part of all of us growing up.

The toughest thing about being a parent is having to sit back and watch as your kids go through hell. Of course, hell is relative and what feels awful to them may seem meaningless to you. I’m in a situation where our horrors align. My kid is going through a terrible moment in time and I am fairly certain that all I can do is listen.

I have very vivid memories of the first few weeks at Iowa State. To begin, I was a walk-on football player. That meant I was invited to try out by the coaches but I wasn’t known to anyone who was playing and didn’t have a scholarship, so I wasn’t living with anyone from the team. Try to imagine walking into the gym for initial evaluations. Everyone is doing their 40yd sprints and shuttles, etc. and here I am, this gangly black kid in the heart of white-ass Iowa alone and even more alone because the handful of people who look like me and want what I want are treating me like I am not even there. It got worse when I showed some speed, because then I was competition. People had to stop and think, ‘is he trying to take my spot?’ I was, actually. I wasn’t trying to do it maliciously, because that isn’t who I am (outside of video games) but I did want a chance to play and I hoped to start one day. So, to quote Imagine Dragons, “Uh oh, the misery. Everybody wants to be my enemy.”

My kid is a better player than I was. He has more raw athletic talent and more drive and determination. He earned a varsity spot as a 14 yr old sophomore. That means everything I talked about in the paragraph above is magnified. Except in my story we had leadership that worked hard to mold us into a family (oh, and I caved under the pressure and quit, btw). In his story he doesn’t have that. All he has is a room filled with hateful boys who don’t appreciate anyone or anything but themselves and cannot accept that he is ahead of them. Oh, and in the absence of a head coach they’ve decided to get downright violent about it.

So, I have a hard time standing idle the more I learn about what is going on.