Parenting, A Son Coming of Age

Parenting, A Son Coming of Age

Today I saw my son grow up in a leap, in a quickening of my heart.

Tears welled up in my eyes.

It was at the Crowning of Mary ceremony at Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Sometimes it is just a moment when you know.

You know that everything has changed.

You know that your boy is now a man.

It is about physical maturity, but it is more about dignity.

Years of little decisions as well as portent ones had come to a point where I was watching my oldest son with a group of his peers. Boys to men, there they stood joking and teasing each other. I stood in the Narthex watching from the distance overcome with gratitude. The gratitude was for these young men who had embraced my son as one of their own even though he had joined them 6 years into their 9 years at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. He had come in as fifth grader in the confusion of the second 6 weeks no less. Most of them had been there since Kindergarten.

These were now young men, 8th graders in suites, it was the first time he wore a suite. He was talking and laughing with a group of his friends, there was a free exchange of smiles, friendly comments and warmth. Those young men had no idea the impact that they had had on my son’s life and on mine. Many of them didn’t even know who I was. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the camaraderie he had with them. This is the kind of thing a father hopes for his son. The reality is that friends have much more impact on the mental health of all of our children than we would prefer. Peers connect or reject our kids whether we like it or not. We tend to miss these moments of grace, the grace of kindness, of warmth.

This may seem like a normal moment for many kids but it was a moment pregnant with meaning for me, the end of a transformation and the beginning of new phase of life filled with promise, opportunity and challenge. You see my son, for a while, a long while, in another city, at another time which seems miles and years ago, was the boy left out.

He was the one with a name slightly different, with a shade of skin slightly darker than the rest, the one who had a bit more difficulty keeping his focus, containing his impulses. Yet, it wasn’t his behavior that kept him out it was his ever so slight differences. Truly these were and are subtle differences, yet he was on the outside, alone, or with only a friend or two. Thank God for those two.

This was not him any longer. Those free exchanges that seemed so effortless were of value that is hard to underestimate, yet so gentle and subtle that most go unnoticed, but not by me.

A mom unknown to me until that moment volunteered a comment. She said: “They really have a great class don’t they. That 8thgrade class really is a great group of kids.”

I could not agree more. It hadn’t completely registered until this day. There he was with guys considered ‘jocks’ and ‘nerds’. All of them were his friends. They were just kids, just young men finishing 8th grade at the May Crowning of Mary. There was joy and acceptance.

With such little effort young people can either embrace or alienate each other with profound consequences. Indeed in some cultures the highest form of punishment is to ostracize a person. People can actually die from such treatment. This is why isolation is considered such an extreme punishment in a prison. Isolation from a peer group, for a teen is mortifying.

I remember the first weekend when we moved to a small town a little over a decade ago. There actually had been a Klu Klux Klan rally in a nearby town. I had no idea at the time, but that was the most overt sign of a community which was socially closed. It was much more subtle than a KKK rally, but it was closed nonetheless. It was a community in which my wife, a physician and of Persian descent fit in with her colleagues, but my son with his uniqueness was not accepted by the children of that community save those two friends and I in my Mr. Mom role with my four degrees culminating in a PhD was like a duck out of water too.

My son with all his gifts knew he was locked out of the “jock” culture as he had a ‘scissor walk’ as a young boy which required orthotic inserts for a couple years and as a result his speed and agility were limited. He finally landed on soccer as a goal keeper and became quite good, but the social currency in small Midwestern towns like this one was athletic ability and ‘sports talk’. He knew he lacked these things. He was the boy left out.

We had survived this semi-isolation for 8 years of his young life almost too many years, almost to a point where the trajectory could have been inalterable. Now it had all changed.

Like my son, stay-at-home-dads were not aplenty in this middle-sized Midwestern city feeling bigger than its britches because there were no cities of any size around. So the “Mr. Mom” social experiment of mine was short-lived, but my own social isolation was not. As a matter of fact psychologists within a decade of my age were scarce. I had looked under every rock and around every bush I could find in search of my own sense of community. Besides it is difficult enough to find a ‘normal’ psychologist as it is. Here there were none within 15 years of my age, let alone a ‘normal’ person who happened to be a psychologist.

The Notre Dame club of the area was filled with very nice men in their 70s. I was in my 30s. My basketball team was filled with men in their 20s, unmarried, hitting the bars and the clubs. I was married with had 3 young boys at this point. I went to the small group bible study at my church, God loves them, but they were all women in their 60s (yes, at times I did call them the ‘menopausal bible study’, I hope I am forgiven for that) and the deacon, a warm man was in his late 50s. So my social expansion didn’t fare much better than my son’s.

So, when my wife who is a radiologist went to the ‘big city’ to look at some radiology equipment and she was recruited on the spot to come to the ‘big city’ she hesitated. She knew her salary would get cut in half, her vacation days would dwindle comparatively and she would have to begin from ground ‘0’ with no partnership. This meant 3 years until she would be a partner and even then she would not see the salary she used to have possibly ever.

This was a very difficult decision for her.

It was a no-brainer for me.

She hesitated to tell me that she was being recruited because she knew what my reaction would be. I had been ready to get out of that bunkered in town for about 4 years.

She told me and we moved.

Weirdly a tornado hit our old ‘small town’ only weeks after we moved. Sometimes coincidences are too blatant with serendipity to ignore the possibility of supernatural forces.

Yet, my wife struggled for that first year and a half. Just because of the move.

I had to take heat for much of that time.

Meanwhile my son gradually began to blossom. Today was a culmination of that. My parents repeatedly remarked how dramatically my son had changed. He was socially comfortable, humorous, well-mannered, sardonic with a heart that was uplifted, not downtrodden.

In our quest to find his talents and interests he had discovered music and became a part of the choir by playing guitar. Since he was 2 or 3 we had known his talent for technology, but he discovered making videos and editing mini-movies in the last two years. The other students and teachers had noticed his prodigious talents in these areas and freely lavished him with praise for this. They coined him the “technology-genius”.

He just continues to blossom.

This is something many parents fail to understand. They seem to think that the development of their children into young men and women is only about sports, good grades and achievement, achievement, achievement. Indeed, the focus upon such ‘super kids’ often leads to burnout and kids quitting sports or activities in which they truly do have talent.

These parents truly have forgotten their own coming of age.

Those other things matter, sure I remember those awards I got. But they are not as critical as you might think. Missing those awards are not ‘life threatening’.

Social death is as close to life threatening for a teen as you can get. It doesn’t require a psychologist, or coach, or psychologist-coach to understand that many of those horrific teen attacks on schools were perpetrated by young men who had experienced ‘social death’. If you just go back to Columbine you see the seeds of discontent and rage from such social alienation.

Yes, it is those small seemingly insignificant little things that young people do to either connect or to reject.

So, today there was my son talking and laughing with his group of friends, with a free exchange of smiles, friendly comments and warmth. Those little gestures of kindness and warmth, those young men had no idea of the impact that they had had on our life.

It is these small gestures to include not exclude, to connect not reject, to build up instead of destroy that changes lives.

They require what seems to be such small effort but transform lives.

I have tremendous gratitude toward these young men of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

When I was at Notre Dame one thing that made me well up with pride was that Notre Dame Men really did strive to be gentlemen and scholars. I still do.

It strikes me that the same is true of these young men of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Thank you Our Lady of Mount Carmel for embracing our son and our family.

Sincerely,

Charles Shinaver, PhD.
a proud father…
a psychologist..
a coach…
a reflective but imperfect parent…

A few of my recent activities:
www.charlesshinaver.com
www.fitfamilies.tv
www.ourfitfamily.ning.com
www.beachbodycoach.com/drshinaver
www.brncommunity.com

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