An Uncomplicated Life by Paul Daugherty

Author:Paul Daugherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Kelly

How old are those guys, Dad?

—KELLY

Meantime, Kelly was a senior in high school, and we worried about him. Typical teenaged-kid worries. How are your grades? Where’s your homework? Who do you think you’re talking to? Look at me when I’m talking to you. Don’t look at me that way. I’m not telling you again. Where are you going, what are you doing and who are you doing it with? When will you be back? When’d you get home last night? Where’d you put my car keys? No, I don’t have twenty dollars. I’m your father, not your maid. Get out of the shower. Water costs money. You broke what? Don’t tell me you forgot. Do you have to wear your hat that way? Those aren’t shoes, my friend, unless you’re Jesus. Get a haircut. As long as you live under my roof . . . I can’t do it for you. How many times do I have to tell you? Pull your pants up. Turn the music down. Have you been drinking? Don’t drink and drive. Be home by midnight.

Navigating adolescence is hazardous in any family. Trying it when your focus is on another child is even harder. Because this is a certifiable fact:

Sometime between about eighth grade and high school graduation, the connection is lost, and your child stops talking to you. He seeks refuge in everything he doesn’t want you to know and hangs out with everyone who thinks just like he does. He doesn’t understand that all you really want is a decent conversation.

I wrote about Kelly occasionally in the newspaper. I called him “The Kid Down the Hall.” It seemed a properly vague reference to a typical teenager who sought nothing more than estrangement from his parents. Starting at age 14, he began digging a tunnel to his own personal China, deeper and deeper, marking each new excavation with a No Trespassing sign.

I can’t tell you why the getting-along was easier with Jillian than with Kelly, but it was. Guys are guys. Guys don’t share much of anything, really—especially when one is the father and the other is the teenaged son. The father-son dynamic is perpetual grist for fiction writers. Bookstores offer shelves of self-help, promising peaceful answers to the father-son wars. Those volumes are often larded with goopy sentiment: Fathers playing catch with sons. Or they are written by people with more postgraduate degrees than actual sons to raise.

When Kelly was 14 and 15 years old, I didn’t have much of a connection with him beyond yelling at him. Dealing with Jillian was uncomplicated, partly because she was uncomplicated. Dealing with Kelly was like working a Rubik’s Cube. In an irony only a parent can understand, Kelly became a bigger project than Jillian.

I’d tried various ways to reconnect with my Kid Down the Hall. I got him into wrestling, a sport I’d practiced with mild success for several years. He wrestled. He didn’t like it.

I’d try to engage him in sports talk. After all, that was my job, and I knew a little about it.

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