A Redistribution

I re-read my post from last week and I realized I introduced a rhetorical framing device in the first paragraph that I immediately abandoned in the null space before I started typing the second. It's fair enough I supposed as last week I took the rare and rarified step of actually trying to Say Something About A Thing, even if the Thing was a bit of dopey sitcom nostalgia ketamine people my age use to tick over minutes and hours without noticing so much. To carry it off would have required an intellectual discipline I more of less gave up way back when I decided blogging was my best outlet for writing in the first place. If I was the kind of guy who followed through on ideas, I'd have taken all that energy and written an unfinished and unfinishable 400,000 word novel fragment like everyone else by now.

I say all that just to warn you today is going to be a bit more of the traditional slop bucket of word gruel I throw at you without much regard for your appetite or really where it lands. This time, however, I at least have the totally legitimate excuse of major life events distracting me.

No, not that life event, the COVID. Or the fires. Or the election. Or the looming fast-forward collapse of an entire third of the government. No, it's almost a relief when it's something local and personal instead of yet another sign of we as a society entering an irreversible dystopian phase. Like tomorrow, on of my kids is moving out.

It's kind of dumb that it's upsetting and distracting. For starters, it's my middle child. As a middle child myself, I acknowledge that it makes it automatically less important. He's a great kid and I'm very proud of him, but the real existential shovel-in-the-face moment is when the first one moves out, and I survived that. I miss the oldest, yes, but our relationship has evolved into something more peer-to-peer, reaching a level of understanding that was inaccessible as long as the household power dynamic remained in place. So it's not that the middle child is less important (although that's objectively part of the equation, sure), it's that, like every other parenting experience of the last 19 years, I know what to expect now.

It turns out, however, that he is a completely separate human from his older brother (and probably his younger one too, I will have to reassess over the coming month and report back), so even if in a mathematical way I can see how this is an overall good (for both of us), this was a different baby and a different boy and a very different young man. For example, he's the one who spends literally all of his time in his room when not eating food, ignoring me completely every single day since he got his first laptop, at 12 or 13. And yet somehow I know the ache of missing will be there when he's specifically not anywhere I can see or hear him that isn't just upstairs.*

The other dumb part about it? We've already done this. Not just with his older brother, but with him. He moved out last fall when we shipped him off to the dorms at the college he still goes to. Then we got the same RETURN TO SENDER everyone else got in March when the Rona spoiled everything, so he's been here since then (at meal times, at any rate). This time we're moving him to an apartment in the very exotic location of two-blocks-from-the-dorms-he-used-to-live-in. Almost literally NOTHING here is changing. Or at least nothing that isn't a rerun from this same program last season. And still? Sad dad.

So there, this is my blog about how I wasn't going to have anything coherent to say. Six paragraphs in and actually, I have to give myself credit: I was pretty bang-on correct.

Wish me luck tomorrow. Not because I'll be sad, but I'll have to go out amongst people to help him, toward a college. The downside is I'll almost definitely get the COVID, but at least I'll have a reason to stay in bed for two weeks and not admit it's because I miss my boy.

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*That sentence works, I swear to god, READ IT AGAIN.