Not The Son I Expected

Every parent has idealized visions of what their unborn children will be like.  In our very first Lamaze class with our first child, the group was asked what we were most excited about, thinking of our children.  Dads who were expecting boys answered predictably enough: 

I can’t wait to take him on the lake and teach him how to fish

It’ll be fun to have him help me change the spark plugs in the car

I'm looking forward to having someone to throw the ball around the yard with.  

Mothers were equally predictable with their expected daughters: shopping together, painting nails together, baking cupcakes together.  And of course dads with daughters weren’t too proud to sit down and drink pretend tea with her Barbies, and mothers would welcome the opportunity to hunt for toads with their little boys.  

In all these, there is a bit of projection.  We long to see ourselves, in some way, in our children.  Only real jerks would commandeer their children’s childhood in order to fashion their offspring in exactly the same mold from which they themselves were cast.  But it isn’t wrong to see a bit of ourselves in our children. Certainly they will never fully live up to our idealized vision of them but even so, at the very least they are likely to fulfill at least some of it.  And that is what makes parenthood so fun.  When I, as a musician, see my kid learn the piano, it’s somewhat fulfilling.  It’s the same feeling I felt when my 2-year old drilled a line-drive off a tee the first time he ever held a bat.  It’s the same feeling a computer geek feels when his kid learns to hack.  Or fish, or change spark plugs, or hunt, or….

I remember the first time I cried.  About a week after my son got his diagnosis, I was doing Christmas shopping at a toy store.  I meandered up and down the aisles looking for toys and games appropriate for pre-schoolers when I came to the sporting-goods section.  There they were, in full array: baseball gloves.  I picked it up, put it on, gave it a squeeze, and then came the tears.  I am a baseball guy; it is what I breathe.  With a diagnosis like Autism, and somewhat low on the spectrum, what were the chances he would ever be able to put that glove on and throw a ball around in the yard?

Every parent has idealized visions of what their unborn children will be like.  I had visions of me and my two boys trying to out-throw one another in a triangle with a baseball.  I had visions of my sons perhaps playing baseball on the same team — they are close enough in age.  This was my childhood.  My dad and brother and I played baseball, watched baseball, talked baseball.  The three of us tried to out-throw one another in the side yard.  We even invented a baseball game that everyone in the neighborhood played: The Mini-Bat-Major-League-Baseball (MBMLB, for short) where we used those 15-inch bats and a small Nerf ball.  Still to this day, one of my dad’s greatest memories is when he got to play on the same infield as me and my brother in a church softball game.  One of my greatest memories too.  He played first, and my brother and I shared the middle infield.  I had visions of possibly sharing with my two sons what my dad shared with me and my brother.

Every one of those idealized visions shattered in the sporting-goods section of a toy store, like a bat shatters after hitting a long out to the warning track.  I could no longer envision us playing sports together, let alone baseball.  

I imagine the ancient Jewish patriarch, Isaac, felt something similar when he considered his son, Jacob.  Isaac was a man’s man with twin boys; a rugged outdoorsman who had a love for the wild.  I imagine him as a kind of frontier-man who would build a log cabin with his bare hands, whose love for venison was trumped only by the thrill of the chase.  I also imagine he and his wife sharing a Lamaze class together and being asked what he was most excited about, thinking of his yet unborn twin boys.  I can’t wait to take them out into the woods and teach them how to shoot an arrow!

Fortunately for Isaac, he had one son who fulfilled his idealized vision: Esau.  Esau was a man’s man, cut from the same block of wood as his dad.  Twin brother Jacob, however, was not.  He would rather putter around the house with his mom, learning to cook.  While dad and Esau were out shooting game, Jacob was at home perfecting his stew recipe.  I imagine that at some point, Isaac had his toy-store moment of weeping, perhaps holding a bow in his hand knowing his son Jacob would never care to brandish it.  Something tells me Isaac never came to accept who Jacob actually was, always longing for who Isaac wanted him to be.

Isaac always seemed to resent Jacob for not being the “wild-at-heart” outdoorsman that Esau was, and Jacob seemed to resent his dad for trying to impose a lifestyle on him that he didn’t want.  It was a tension and resentment that was never resolved.  

I don’t want to be Isaac in this story, resenting my son for who he can never be.  And I don’t want Matthew being Jacob in this story, resenting his dad for not appreciating who he actually is.

Here is what I learned, I think.  Weeping in a toy store at the sight of a baseball glove is okay.  But I do not have to stay in that aisle and continue to weep.  He’ll never play baseball, and while part of that bothers me, it doesn’t own me.

I have idealized visions of who my son would be.  It hasn’t worked out the way I thought it would.  I have two very different sons (and a third who is completely different from his brothers!).  My oldest son is almost a carbon copy of me: He loves baseball.  He also loves music.  He hates country music because it isn’t music.  He loves playing practical jokes, drawing, and MarioKart.  But that’s not who Matthew is.  Matthew would rather sit in a lonely corner and spin the wheels of a toy car, or water the flowers in the garden.  He would rather go for walks and bike rides.  He would rather do quite literally anything than arts or crafts.

What I have learned is that, like Isaac and his twin boys, I want to relate well to all of my kids.  Certainly that is easy to do when the child likes all the same things I like.  But with Matthew, for whom this is not the case, I can either resent him for not being like me, or I can try hard to relate to him on his own terms; to relate to him according to the things he likes; to sacrifice my idealized vision of who I’d like him to be, and let him be himself.  

I have learned to roll cars back and forth on the couch ad nauseam because that is what he likes to do.  I have had to be comfortable with giving him free reign of the hose to feed the flowers.  I have often given up my right to watch the Tigers on TV because he would rather watch Dora the Explorer.  When he was first born, I wasn’t yet a runner, and couldn’t envision letting him be my pace guy on his bike while I struggled to keep up for six miles, yet today, that very thing is one of our favorite activities together.   

Matthew is not the son I expected.  I envisioned another son carved in my image.  That was not to be the case.  But he has taught me a few things.  I can relate with him and love him for who he is instead of grieving him for who he isn’t.  Certainly he is not the son I expected, but he is the son I needed.