Lesson # 8 - He's just a boy.

The top 10 most important things I have learned in the past 12 months...(Part 3).

Day in and day out of exchanging emotional blows with my oldest son is an exhausting task to say the least.  At times I have felt that in his mind I am his greatest enemy, while many other times I have come to realize that I am his only true friend.  How an individual deals with this emotional roller coaster is something that is strongly tied to his or her level of maturity and life experience.  Being the true adult in this relationship has taught me that in order to reach him I must drop down my emotional exchange a few levels so that we can see each other eye to eye.  Otherwise it will always seem to him as if I am looking down on him with a superiority complex in hand.

Lesson #8 - He's just a boy.

One of the most difficult tasks that I have encountered with my oldest son is gauging his level of maturity.  His talents, abilities, and mental capacity paint a very deceptive picture of his persona.  As a little boy, by the time he was only 6 years of age, he was already reading volumes of books that were almost all intended for individuals much older than  him.  He always behaved like an amazing sponge, ready to suck in not just the few things that were being taught to him, but also everything anyone in the immediate vicinity would have to offer as knowledge.  He was definitely born at the right time and place in our technological evolution, taking advantage of everything from books, magazines, computers, and personal knowledge to enhance his own mind.  When he decided to learn how to play the guitar, the pace of instructors seemed too slow, too cumbersome for him, so instead he insisted in learning on his own.  Just a few months later he was not just playing the acoustic guitar, but also had learned the electric guitar, the banjo, the ukulele, and the bass.  Not everyone of those was mastered to the same degree, but the ones that he intended to use to record his own melodies were done so with so much elegance and beauty that it left me dumbfounded when I would hear him play them.  On a trip to visit my sister in Plano Texas we had forgotten to bring my digital camera so on the way we stopped at Costco and purchased another to record our 23 hour driving adventure.  On our journey he took dozens of pictures which afterwards when I was able to view them, one after the other proved to me how different he saw the world through his eyes compared to mine, and also how masterful his ability to capture the moment truly was indeed.  Go back to my earlier posts, take a look at many of the ones I included inside this blog and you will understand what I am talking about.

The more I see what he is capable of, the more amazed I am at his mind.  I  have listened to some of his own musical compositions and have truly learned to respect his abilities.  I have read his essays and can easily understand why his scores are off the chart on any standardized testing given to individuals his age.  In retrospect I can really understand now why so many times the scores were not just high scores, but also perfect scores.  He has a beautiful mind.  However, these abilities and all of these incredibly beautiful talents serve nothing for the purpose of measuring his mental maturity.  In other words, when it comes down to it he is just a child.  A bearded, long haired, much older looking child, but a child nonetheless.  Inside the differently wired mind of my son still lives a boy whom is not even 18 years of age.  Too many times I have been tempted to treat him as a grown man, when in fact the truth is that he is just a boy.

During the past 12 months I have learned that in order for me to reach my son and be able to make contact with his intellect and his heart, I have to mix it all up into intelligent conversations with small goals in mind.  In other words, I have to talk to him about all those advanced subjects that he loves to talk about, but I must keep in mind that the decision making part of his brain is still developing and growing.  His frontal lobe which in time will give him the power to say no to certain things that are not good for him instead of folding to the lure of pleasure is that of a teenage boy, not of a grown man.  So yes, we talk about space and time and dark matter and existentialism, but those are just doors to knock on in order to get inside his mind and plant seeds of love and hope and beautiful dreams for the future.  This knowledge that even though he is so advanced in so many ways he is still a boy has served me well, but also taken a long time to figure out.  I wish I would of known sooner and been more prepared for this incredibly complicated journey.  Maybe things did not have to be so hard between us if I would of learned to separate the world of intellect from the world of a child's mind.  I have found nothing out there to guide me through this, nothing at all.  In retrospect it seems so simple, so easy to understand.  Yet while it was all going down, it felt so complicated, so convoluted and hard to see.  It is almost as if I was looking through water and could not see the bottom of the glass because it was so full of bubbles or worse turbulence.  Still, it was just water, turbulent or not, just water.

I am glad that I have learned this lesson because it will apply to all of the rest of the stages in the lives of my children.  No matter how difficult it is for me to see through the turbulent times, I now know that it is just water and that if I take the time to look and listen carefully I should still be able to hear and see the child on the other side.  One day soon enough he will no longer be a boy.  It really has nothing to do with age and everything to do with life experiences.  There is no rush for him to grow up if I understand where he is at in his life.  In fact, I am happy with the knowledge that he is just a boy, which means that there is still time to grow, time to mature, and time to become a man.

Dad