Five four six

It’s May the Fourth, which means I’ve heard the John Williams opening theme to Star Wars on three different radio stations and it’s not yet 11 am here in Portland.  For me, though, today is a wonderful day – it’s my son’s sixth birthday.

There are dozens of parenting clichés, but I’ve only found two of them to be accurate for me.  First, as I mentioned in a recent post, is the fact that you change as a person when you become a parent.  I don’t mean simply because you are part of the team that brought a new being into the world; plenty of people do that and end up appearing to view the child as simply a new accoutrement to their lives, which fundamentally don’t change.  But when you buy into the potential of being a part of a child’s life, you shift yourself in ways that aren’t easily explained.  It’s not that I am in awe of the responsibility, or the open-ended nature of the relationship.  I think it’s related to accepting the strange but necessary role in the child’s own process of creating themselves.  They need adults to serve in the role of “parent” – to be a kind of pole star for what it means to be a human being – because that benchmark will serve as an intimate kind of reflection for their own journey.  Lots of parents think they are “raising” their child but I think the verb is incorrect – the child builds themselves – but parenting is a critical element to that journey.

When you buy into it – and there are lots of ways to do it – you can’t help but notice both your necessity in their process and your simultaneous non-necessity.  By this I mean you as you – as your own self – isn’t necessary so much as having a few deeply involved selves is necessary, and the fact that it is you is more an accident of how human beings are procreated or how you arrived at the scene than it is due to your fundamental nature.  They need parenting but they’ll find it if you’re not up to the task, or choose to reject it, or die – you aren’t required so much as people in the role are.  Children love being parented and when you do dive into the pool, whether with your own or with someone else’s kid, they’ll embrace you without guile (at least at my son’s age), but the embrace is so ready and so easy that you have to realize that it’s not because of you per se, it’s because you chose the role.

Choosing that role was probably the best thing I ever did, even though it has come with quite a few unintended consequences – or rather, consequences that were inevitable but I’m still not all that thrilled about them.  It only happened after I separated from my wife, which meant I missed out on a couple years of him, back when he was in nappies, but that doesn’t seem to matter any more.  And by recognizing how important I am to him but also realizing that it’s not me, it’s just that there is a me around, has humbled me and made me understand the nature of what love really is, how open and unprogrammed it is, and that has led me to buy into the first cliché: parenting changes you permanently.

The other cliché I’ll agree with is that the nature of time changes radically when you’re in this kind of a role with a growing child.  Their perception of time is totally different – it moves much faster, their lens is collapsed because they haven’t experienced time yet, and the nature of their memory seems (from my angle) to still be structuring the notion of human time.  My son is aware of history – things happened before he was born – and he is dimly aware of a future, but nothing like I am.  His present, moreover, can bend, expand into endless waiting and collapse into manic spells of Legos or crafts or painting that always end far too quickly even if hours have passed and he’s beginning to get faint with hunger and thirst.  He’ll always go to the toilet at the moment of desperate emergency at those times, even though when he’s not as engaged he’ll sometimes go to the bathroom simply to fill time.

As an adult, my sense of time shifts quite a bit as well, but forty-three years have given a structure to it which is reliable (if fragile) and tested by experience.  Being attached to a small creature that lacks that structure erodes my confidence in my own structure, it makes me question whether I’ve structured incorrectly and therefore really have screwed up how I make decisions with respect to time left, time elapsed, time consumed. That’s incredibly disconcerting, and it’s made me far more aware of time as a lived process as opposed to an absolute process.  It makes general relativity much easier to grasp, frankly, at least intuitively – the equations are what they are, and I got those through the absorption of symbolic algebra – and it also makes the time-independence of quantum mechanics easier to understand, not so much intuitively but as a simple reflection of reality.

Time is constructed – I’ve built my own personal model – and my son is now in those early stages of building his model, but it’s obviously different than my construct and always will be, we will not experience time the same, ever, but that’s a new observation for me.  When you compare your experience with other adults it doesn’t seem so vastly different, and my memory of being a kid is such that even if I had been conscious of that process – and I think I was – I knew I had no language for comparing that difference with others.  Dealing with adults reminds you of the fact that whether socially or just through a mean-reverting process, we get to a fairly small distribution of notions of time structure, and that reassures you and provides you with confidence that your own structuring process “got it right”.  Dealing with a small child makes you realize the potential full distribution of time structures is infinite, and makes you question how you really got to the adult version you own thirty or forty or fifty years later.  Being my son’s father has eroded my own sense of the structure of time physically, emotionally, spiritually, even if intellectually I had been trained to understand a fluid structural context of time back in school.

So he’s turning six today.  For me, that means stretching back across time and space and reflecting on what has happened so far and trying desperately not to speculate on what may happen next.  For him, it means presents and a party and steak and more presents, and probably some speculation on what presents aren’t there and what might come at Christmas.  I’m flying back tonight so we’ve planned the party – crazy golf, little craft activities, and cake and ice cream for 16 children and 19 adults – for tomorrow, and on Sunday my ex-wife, her brother, my son and I will go out for a steak dinner at a sixties era neighborhood steakhouse that he likes, complete with faux leather bench seats, iceburg lettuce salad with blue cheese dressing and Cheez-Its in place of croutons, and parsley garnishes with a slice of orange folded into a little wing that he likes quite a bit but went out of fashion sometime midway through the Nixon administration.  He’ll get clam strips and eat half my steak, which is great.  This year he’ll sleep at my place so I’ll get some extra time with him to play Sorry with him and the stuffed bears, and we’ll build some new Lego sets and expand the train layout: he’s getting new track as well.

Strangely, though, given the coincidence of his date of birth, he’s not at all interested in Star Wars.  When my ex-wife and I asked him a few weeks ago about birthday gifts, he asked for a number of things, but specifically said he doesn’t want Star Wars Lego sets.  “I don’t really like Star Wars,” he said, with a kind of annoyed tone that suggested he’s a little sick of the other kids in his Seattle class who are obsessed with it.  I looked over at my ex-wife and mouthed “thank God”, and she smiled and told my son not to worry, he wouldn’t get any Star Wars things for his birthday.

We’re winning at least one battle so far.

Think of my son today and expand your heart a bit for him.  He’s beautiful, and he’ll know you’re doing it.