When Love Ends, Dadding Begins

My oldest son, Jack, is home from school as we all shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. I could not love another person more than I love Jack. I also could not be more frustrated with his lackadaisical attitude toward school and most other stuff. Suspecting he was not paying attention while away at school has now turned into witnessing daily how he’s not giving two rats asses to his online school work. His lack of a motor on this topic would be impressive and funny if it weren’t so maddening.

I don’t have any actual answers. Only questions and worries.

Now…full disclosure. He reminds me of me at the same age. So I have some idea of the struggle, as well as understanding that somewhere in a deep pile of teenaged life conflict made sticky with beer stains and Snapchat debris, he almost certainly has the spark to work past the breathtaking phase of life he is in now. He will eventually become a guy like me who can, for the most part, hold it down.

There will never be any end of my love for Jack, no matter how many the thousands of hours he spends playing Fortnite at 1am with his friends outnumbers the mostly distracted minutes he spends studying or meaningfully interacting with his quarantine-tethered family.

Jack did recently share some of his academic work with me. Love Ends is the title of the piece he created for an assignment in his freshman writing class. He had to write a short comic strip. Yes…a comic strip. Go, Tigers. Anyway he asked me to take a look at it.

It was crap…a product more representative of the work of an unambitious 3rd grader than the caliber of work a college freshman should be striving to produce.…even a college freshman currently stranded from his beloved southern college football-worshiping party machine. There is simply no way should be claiming the tripe he showed me as his own

But rather than tell him it was good or bad, I decided to try and inspire him to do better by showing him myself. Because what is more inspiring than your dad trying to one-up you on your homework during a pandemic? Especially when you’d rather be thinking about which bar in Tiger Land you want to go with your frat bros after your parents Venmo you money from 2000 miles away (it’s Mike’s).

You can see the result of my dad meddling as the featured image for this post.

I showed it to Jack. He said, “Well…that’s a lot better.”

Hell, yeah it’s better. It is easily the most beautiful and proudly emo PowerPoint slide I’ve ever created.

And then the knucklehead turned in his first-draft scribbly mess any way. He did so partially because he waited until the absolute last minute to submit it. The other part was he didn’t really want to spend the time or thought to make it good. So…the struggle continues..

I worry about what Jack’s apathy for school means for him. I worry about how this whole shut down will impact him and his brother. It’s a lot for all of us. I know it’s not what either of them planned for, because none of us planned for this. How could we? And what would we have done differently even if we could have known what was coming?

I don’t have any actual answers. Only questions and worries. But I also have hope that at some point before the quarantine is lifted, I’ll see the spark glow a little brighter in my son.

Tonight, he and I made dinner together. I told him to pick out a dish. He chose chicken adobo that he saw some kid his age make on a super profane TikTok video (which I can no longer find, so watch this instead). We watched the video, improvising here and there on a couple of substitute ingredients. I encouraged Jack to take the lead and I’d throw in support and tips, like cooking temps and times not provided by the cussing-assed kid on the video, and thickening the sauce with slurry and a lump of cold butter. It all reminded me of cooking with my dad.

The adobo came out great…savory sweet sauce and moist chicken cooked to the precisely right second. He also picked orzo over Rice a Roni…my boy!…and made it creamy and perfect with butter, parmesan, and basil. I could tell he was proud and happy of the food, and of us.

Jack is going to come out great, too. Until then, I’ll keep trying to nudge, kick, pull, push, talk, berate, and love him forward to his own better path. We both certainly have plenty of time to work on it over the next few weeks.

Art credits: story - Jack and Brian Johnson; Boy Meets Girl - Banksy; Love Dance - Ashira Metanala; The Happy Family - Ashok; Car Crash - Denise Katz; My Fear of Confrontation - Emily Welch; Stop Bullying - VikingMera; Tree Carving - etsy seller vol25; Gone back to Barca - Gerard Deulofeu