Class of '17

It's a cliché in the development of father-son relationships that at some point it will become, at its base, a competitive struggle. Typically this begins around the time of puberty, when the boy you once knew begins to look a little bit like a cross between old pictures of your granddad circa WWII and taffy in mid-pull. He neither looks, sounds nor smells anything like the thing you'd just spent the previous 13 years helping climb stairs or breaking up with even the most poorly constructed jokes so long as they involved poo. OK, not the best example as the poo jokes are still solid, but you look up and there's this unrecognizable proto-man cohabiting with you, thumping around with ear-buds in, eating tuna fish from a can with his fingers and taking stairs three steps at a lope, contemptuously unassisted. The dynamic has changed from family development to home invasion robbery. I don't know if it's competition as much as nascent self-defense.

They become completely inscrutable, total strangers, to themselves most of all. The amygdala's constant bath in new rivers of testosterone and adrenaline shoves open all kinds of new gates and pathways not only unexplored but unimagined. The girls who were once a sort of high-pitched wallpaper now become the only thing in the whole wide world worth contemplating, so you're suddenly not only incomprehensible to yourself, but you've also become the most critically hyper-aware of every social interaction and its implications. Your whole life becomes about sweat and vasodilation, never if, but only ever where exactly and how much.

They have no idea who they are or are supposed to be. The girls are in the same exact boat, and yet they're all struggling to make some kind of connection while protecting themselves at all costs, to the extent they're capable. I imagine it's like learning how to speak after having been mute your whole life: until you refine your instrument, sometimes it's just going to come out as shouting. Except with emotions.

So yeah, the competition comes out of a new unfamiliarity. If you don't watch him, he will eat all of the peanut butter in one sitting. So it becomes your job to wrestle the peanut butter away from him. Why not just ask for it? Because he's watching YouTube videos of people falling off skateboards for the eleventh consecutive hour in a row. None of your suggestions, reasonable or otherwise, are going to register, not unless they emerge from someone's cleavage or are delivered while cracking a skater in the nuts. So you have to get a little more aggressive than maybe you ever wanted to, which immediately raises the stakes and the volume of the response and just like that, you're a grown man wrestling your child for nine ounces of Peter Pan. People can take this the wrong way. You can explain all you want about the fat and sugar content.

Part of it is the built-in misunderstanding that comes with such a radical life-change, but then there's also Death. By the time you're 38, it's already occurred to you, as per Hitchens, that we are born into a losing struggle; unless you're one of the really lucky stupid ones content with your John Grisham novels and TV shows about people who kill ducks. Maybe it's the banality that makes it seem like you've lived forever in those cases, but as my boy inches closer and closer to being able to look me square in the eye, I get the stronger and stronger sense that he's coming close to achieving the mission for which I created him, which is to make my long-term care decisions when I've abandoned both reason and continence in my dotage. So I push back, not so much against him, but using him--the fleeting epitome of budded youth--as a benchmark against atrophy.

At the open house for the high school(!) my boy will begin in the fall, the guided tour included the all-turf football field. As always happens in open grass(ish) fields, this was the occasion for a foot race between all three of my sons and I. Did I win? The younger two frankly disgraced themselves. But the older one... I got him by a step or two, yes. But fuck if I didn't have to try.

One gets the feeling of being gained on.