My 12-year-old is taller than me now. Earlier this week, he walked into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and according to the mirror’s reflection—maybe an illusion, I thought—he stood a full inch taller than me. “Come here,” I told him. We stood back-to-back. Upon confirming his height, I screamed out of some mix of joy, surprise, and defeat.
For these last months, I’ve been thinking about the strange comfort I take in his growth. It feels biological, evolutionary, a feeling that’s been hard-wired into me. My child (we’ll call him Twelve) is still very much a child but his height is a kind of promise that he will surpass me. I enjoy that.
Over the last pandemic year, Twelve and I have often communicated via his alter-ego, a persona he created for our corgi named Kai. To channel her, he speaks in a cruel falsetto. Most of the time, Kai comments on how I stink, how inferior I am to her, and how lucky I am to have her as my overlord. One evening, I was making Twelve a late-night snack and I asked him which he preferred, an English muffin or a bagel. He looked at me, widened his eyes, and channeled Kai: “Which do you prefer: being a loser or smelling like crap?”
There were weeks during our pandemic rut when my son and I communicated almost exclusively via the Kai voice, when he hid in his room most of the day claiming homework, but emerged near-bedtime, giddy and loquacious.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“What do you get when you cross a fart with a bozo with a turd?”
“I don’t know. What do you get?”
“YOU!”
I spent a long time wondering what the Kai thing was about, why we got so much collective mileage out of it, why it seemed to never get old. Finally, it seems clear to me. The Kai voice is the avenue through which my son arrives at teenagerhood. He gets to constantly declare himself better than me. He gets to insult me without hurting my feelings. And I get to participate in that distancing, to hold him simultaneously close and away.
This next part may be weird. For the longest time after my son was born as he grew I imagined what it would be like to still carry him in my body. For the first few months it made some sense. He was born a week after his due date, but he was not the largest baby ever. As he gained ounces and then pounds, I thought about how some babies his size were still in the womb. By the time he had surpassed any reasonable newborn weight it had become a mental habit. I still do it. I still imagine what it would mean to fold my giant lanky son into the fetal position and contain him within me. Impossible, I know, but imaginable. Earlier this week, as he got fitted for braces, every time the dental assistant asked him to open I found myself opening my own mouth beneath my mask. When he spat I quelled the urge to spit.
Some weeks ago a friend and I talked about how our kids had both made a habit of taking selfies and then using an editing app to deface them, to add mustaches, sunglasses, boogers, etc. I approved of the innovation. My friend objected. He felt that art was supposed to be vulnerable, that the photo-defacing project was all bluster. I thought for a long time because I understood his point, but also I disagreed. Right now Twelve as I perceive him is all vulnerability—a body of change and eruptions moving through a changed and erupting world. If there’s any way the apps on my iPhone can help him declare some agency in this, I’m into it.
Puberty is not an easy force to love. It’s like a natural disaster wreaking havoc on the body, an earthquake that begins as a low rumble and then topples and rearranges. There’s no fighting it or containing it. You just choose your door frame to stand in, brace yourself, and watch as the landscape shifts. When it passes you assess what remains and what has forever changed.
Book Love
I’ve got these two books on my nightstand right now:
Wait for God to Notice, Sari Fordham’s memoir about growing up in Uganda under Idi Amin’s dictatorship. It’s both epic in scope and finely detailed. I love any book that allows me to witness a complex world through the lens of childhood.
Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Homes by Lynda Mapes is the orca book I’ve been looking for. (Seriously, I’ve been looking.) It’s a close look at orca behavior, habitat, and the current challenges resident orcas face.
Elsewhere
I got to interview Queer Eye’s Tan France for Fathers Day!
The editors did not go with my suggested headline, Tan France Will Not Be Dressing His Baby in Gucci, but you can still read his thoughts on that topic here.