The World According to Chuck

I didn’t sleep well last night, one ear listening to my son cough in the other room. He just has a cold, I’m sure nothing serious, but my theories about independence and keeping my distance always make a fool of me. Might as well face facts: There’s no going back from parenthood. Always going to worry, always wanting to rescue, always needing to make it feel better.

He makes non-cough noises at night all the time. He’s a restless sleeper these days, arguing and pleading in his sleep, tossing and turning, and I note this. It was, actually, what inspired me yesterday to write a column about my complicated boy.

I’ve done it before; it just felt as though I’d grown out of that stage, and surely he had. I got a lot of mileage out of being a middle-aged dad, watching the kids put the final touches on their childhoods, but they’re adults now. And I’m less sentimental anyway, for good reason and all the better for it.

John is 20 years old today, though, and it just popped into my head that I wanted to mention that. Round number and all.

As I say, he’s complicated. It’s easy for me to slap together home video of my daughter and see nothing but joy; she’s had a linear life, the kind most of us live, with growth and progress. John has not, and won’t.

There’s plenty of joy here, don’t get me wrong, even given an annoying virus today. It’s just more of a nuanced joy, one I take personally and think about a lot, and particularly late at night. So I wrote a column, then thought I’d podcast it, and then at the end I decided it was maybe a little too somber for a birthday. “It is what it is,” Julie said, and I guess so. Again, complicated.

We were talking about proverbs, John and I, a few years ago. He actually does surprisingly well with those, given his general concreteness, and when I explained about “Not seeing the forest for the trees,” about perspective and getting the big picture and not being bogged down by details, he got it. But, again, he can surprise you.

“Sometimes it’s important to see the trees, though,” he said.