The prompt that greeted me on my computer at the start of the week was: “What was the most fun thing you’ve done with your child?
It’s no surprise that my son, Shawn, selected this question for me to answer on the day of his 50th birthday, or the one he picked last week: “What was the toughest thing about raising my child?”.
In fact, I feel blessed to write about him. As I noted in my previous entry, there was nothing “tough” about raising Shawn. What’s tougher is boiling down five decades of fatherhood to one incident. The whole process of squiring him to a time when he became independent was a pure joy, although, I didn’t always realize it at the time.
Sorry to get dark so early in this piece, but…
I was pretty much fogged over—wandering through a haze of booze and “bones”–for the first 16 years of Shawn’s life. Yes, I was a presence in his childhood, being the parent at home while my wife, Margie, brought home the paychecks for 10 of those years. I was present, that is, but not all there. By way of example, I will relate a story which makes me sad to this day. By the time Shawn was 4 years old, he had been told many times, “Five minutes”, whenever he asked to do something with me (that’s how much time I always “needed” to get into what I considered the proper mindset to be with him). No shock, then, that, early on, whenever I asked him to do something, he would reply by saying, “Five minnis”. Kids are sharp; nothing gets by them.
Okay, folks. I’m back from the dark side now and ready to get on with the good stuff.
Being the parent at home from the time Shawn was 7 till he went off to college (side note: I was one of the first dads to be called, “Mr. Mom”), I had the privilege of doing many cool things. For instance:
I helped out as a teacher’s aide in his grammar school classes and took him to all sorts of appointments, from doctors’ visits to acting calls when he got an agent around age 11, to judo tournaments across Southern California. I also recall specifically helping him with school projects, like shaping and painting a dinosaur out of mattress foam, and building a fort out of Popsicle® sticks.
Additionally, I adored being Shawn’s buddy in his sports activities, from playing full-court one-on-one basketball to serving as his punt retriever when he would practice kicking a football (I never could get him to run with me in those days, however, much as I tried; by the time he took up the sport seriously in adulthood, I couldn’t keep up with him). We also dug watching the Boston Celtics together from our Southern California family room, with Shawn wearing his team tee unless they started losing, in which case he would change shirts and switch seats to flip their luck. He (and I, sadly) believed we could control outcomes that way.
But the most fun thing Shawn and I have done together? After giving the matter considerable thought, my No. 1 choice has to be our 13-day trek across the country in my yellow VW Super Beetle. In a March blog on this site, I detailed that 1978 trip, which, I now am convinced, shaped the course of my relationship with Shawn (even if it didn’t have as a big an impact on him, since he was still 6).
Until that point, I had been mostly an absentee father–sleeping when he went off to school, and working by the time he came home. It was during those 13 days rolling through the Heartland that I came to see what a smart and wonderful human he was and how, even a month shy of his 7th birthday, what a treat he was to be around. On a purely practical level, I am sure I would have been lost in America without his navigation skills. He clearly had inherited other family members’ keen sense of direction, because I get farblunget (hopelessly turned around) just pulling out of a parking lot. Not only was he my best friend driving across the country, Shawn was Pathfinder, the one who directed us to safe haven 4,400 miles from where we started.
So, happy 50th birthday, Shawn, and thanks for putting so much fun in the Son. May we have many more great adventures together.
Above the Roar 