ALIEN
My 6 year old son is obsessed with space and aliens. This is pretty normal, if you’ve ever been a little boy or ever known any, you know it to be true. There is a “cycle of interests” that seemingly all boys go through, usually starting with big trucks and equipment, then animals, then dinosaurs, then space. They will spend time in each of these zones and jump back and forth between them, because at a young age they understand diversification is key. One day he’s telling you all about black holes and what he knows about them and then two days later he’s holding a mosasaurus toy in front of you and asking you what your favorite dinosaur is. Like I said, that all is pretty normal.
There are other things about him that are unexpected, and not all of them in a good way. We’re working through some of those little surprises, and I won’t go into detail on a lot of it because it’s not really my story to tell. He’s a 6 year old boy who’s very curious and very excitable, and it’s hard parsing through what parts of that are outside the range of normal. That’s because we’re new at this, and so is he. Not long ago I was talking with some friends who have teenaged children and they mentioned that they frequently have confrontations and talks with their kids that begin with “I’m sorry if we got something wrong here. This is your first time being a teenager, and this is our first time parenting teenagers. We’re learning together.” I feel that in my bones, even if I’m years away from saying that exact sentence.
My parents, my wife, and even I would admit that there is a lot of me within this red headed stranger in our home. More than 50%, genetics be damned. But there are enough things that are different that it doesn’t feel like raising myself. There are parts about him that are unusual. Strange to me. Alien even. For all the common interests we share, there’s a host of things he wants to talk to me about that I just don’t have the interest or the brain space for. And for all the ways our personalities align, there's a spectrum of feelings and reactions he has that have never been much in my life. It’s hard for me sometimes to reconcile all the ways he feels different to me, to figure out what it means to nurture and raise this little alien who lives in our midst. So when I find common ground with him, I really rejoice in it.
Just the other day, he asked me if I knew any movies about aliens that he could watch. Star Wars is already one of those little corners of shared interests we have, so I wanted to branch out from lightsabers and Mandalorians. I have a copy of Spielberg’s classic E.T. in my collection of Blu-rays and 4K discs, and it felt like a good one to introduce to him. It’s a little slow for someone who just recently saw the flashing colors and “doot doots doots” of the latest Mario movie on the big screen, so I wondered how he would handle it. He sat quietly on the couch absorbing it, letting cinema actually happen in front of him rather than seeking some sort of constant stimuli. He took a few occasional breaks to ask clarifying questions or point out Elliott’s Star Wars action figures (look, we can only branch so far from the things we love, like lightsabers and Mandalorians) and eventually had me pause the movie for him about halfway through so he could draw some aliens, which I think even Spielberg would say is a great way to watch movies.
It was a very small thing for us to connect on, for him to love that little weird brown alien the same way I did the first time I watched it. To be in absolute awe when Elliott’s bike tires leave the ground and the two take flight over the trees and past the moon. It gave me a glimpse into the future though, all the other “movies about aliens” that we can watch together someday. When he’s old enough that he won’t get night terrors and mom won’t yell at me, he can join me on my yearly Halloween-adjacent rewatches of creature features like Alien and The Thing. He can feel his patriotism swell as we watch Bill Pullman give one of the greatest movie speeches of all time, or watch the dread build as the world as we know it falls apart in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He might not like all of them as much as me, and that’s okay.
It’s okay for us to be different, because if he’s different from me, that means he can be better.
It’s not the same world as the one I grew up in, which is and has been true for every parent that has ever existed. I was listening to an episode of Mike Birbiglia’s podcast “Working It Out”, and he and Pete Holmes got onto the topic of fatherhood. They made an analogy that growing up when they did, parenting was like a landline in a house, and dad didn’t always pick up. And now parenting is like this smartphone that’s always with you and has too many apps, and we're not even using it for the function it first became famous for. I brought that up to my own dad recently, and he more or less shrugged his shoulders and said “Hmm. Probably has changed for the better in a lot of ways though.”
I think my dad and the comedians are probably both right, and I think it's up to me to find the right balance between the “tried and true” ways of raising children and living in a different time of smartphone apps and Minecraft videos and a 24/7 news cycle that wants you to think the world is on fire. And the more I try to find that balance, the more I start to think that maybe it’s not my world anymore, and maybe my son is better suited for it than I ever could be. I’ll do my best to guide him and fix the things that I probably broke to begin with, but I’m sure I’ll get a lot of it wrong because that’s what happens when you live in a strange world.
Maybe he’s not the alien in our house after all.
