Hey Now, You're An All-Star, Get Your Game On, Go Play
Parenting a kid is very much like teaching a child to ride a bicycle. You start off with training wheels and tassels, making it all pink and friendly for them. You run alongside as they get the hang, shouting instructions all the while.
Then comes the day when you unbolt the training wheels. You watch in anguish as they crash a couple of times, learning with pain and proceeding with courage; you kiss their skinned knees and give ‘em encouragement.
And when you get it absolutely right, they sail away.
There’s that weightless feeling as you watch them cruise up the street, their feet pumping strong on the pedals… And your hands shake a little as you realize they’re going too fast. They might not make that turn. Maybe they’ll fall flat on their face.
It’s too late. You’ve given them all the input you can. Maybe you can shout some advice to them from afar, but they’re on their own now. All you can do is hope that the instructions you’ve drilled into them are good enough, and that they remember them. But it’s out of your hands. They’ve taken control of the handlebars, and they’re not about to give it back.
It’s strange, having a daughter who has become a person.
But it provides other lessons, because my eldest daughter Erin can run alongside me now. She’s able to give as well as receive advice; I ask her about things when I need feedback. We discuss China and the rise of a new superpower, and she raises solid points about the graying of single-child families that they’re going to have to face.
Yet for all of that, she’s still very much in the process of shaping. She partied hard as an adolescent, sometimes so hard it knocked us away, but now she’s rattling like a ball between two pinball bumpers, trying to settle into something else.
She’s wandering through that chrysalis stage between “young, partying college student” and “settled grown-up.” Erin’s tasted a lot of what crazy parties and large amounts of alcohol and beautiful boys have to offer, and she likes it, but there’s the knowledge that this will not sustain her. It’s a beautiful nectar, filled with glory and joy, but living your entire life lurching from rock show to rock show feels kind of hollow.
She wants an underpinning. She’s done the rotisserie boyfriend thing; now, she wants someone who will always be around, someone who won’t have the NRE of those fresh, hot kisses but will have the steady bedrock of someone you know you can wake up to and know they will love you just as fiercely as they did the night before.
She’s lived in the transitory space of apartments, flitting from prepackaged room to prepackaged room. But she’s feeling that call to make someplace her own, to put down stakes and say, “I own this. This is where I am.” To paint her own walls and make not just a set of walls but an entire town her own, somewhere that she knows so well it becomes a part of her.
She’s done the whole living from day to day. Now she’s searching for meaning – who does she want to be? Now that she’s formed herself, she’s looking at that distant shoal where her life comes to a stop… And she wants to know what that arc is in between. She wants a path that will give her life meaning, some great call that will let her say with pride, “I am an X,” and have X be something that people will intrinsically understand her.
But she doesn’t want to be pinned. There are still grand parties to be had. There are still wild adventures to be found when you decide you can do the impossible. She wants to build a foundation but not be buried beneath it.
So she takes baby steps once again, feeling ahead as she tries to decide what she wants.
The steps are small: her first coffeemaker, bought at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. That’s something she wanted, a comfort that she purchased with her own money and brought into her own space. Her apartment is filled with hand-me-downs and gifts – a leftover couch she swiped from the road, a TV given by her father, a bed covered in quilts from her mom – but this coffee machine, stupidly trivial as it seems, is something she brought to the party. She could have asked, but this machine is hers.
And it’s a French press, too, because the Erin she is becoming won’t stand for bad coffee.
She’s buying drapes for her apartment, because she can’t repaint the walls but she can make it comfortable. Before, in her previous life, she would have been happy just to have a stark space of her own, but she’s beyond that. Now it’s not enough just to be free – she needs to be beautiful, and so she’s redecorating on a low budget, and learning how to make her place into something a little greater.
I see her home with two sets of eyes: The cold, objective eye sees a small, well-cleaned but unremarkable apartment with a couple of cheap curtains and some framed posters on the wall – the eternal college student’s place. But the dad eyes see how much she’s changed the space she’s in already, the personal touches she’s granted and what she’s striving for. She doesn’t have the money or the expertise to Martha Stewart this place yet, but at some point she will.
Before, it was enough to survive on her own. Now she seeks to grant meaning to it all, and that’s brilliant.
When she visited us, we played nothing but Rock Band. Erin became as addicted as her dear ol’ stepdad and we all stayed up late into the evenings, churning out song after song, mastering the craft of mashing funny buttons on a plastic ukelele.
I was sad when it came time for her to go, but I also knew the routine. She’d pack, and she never packs right. We always have to ship a box full of crap back to her that she left behind, a tiny care package full of hairbrushes and jeans. I know, because it’s what I used to do when I went home.
This time, though, we played one final version of “”My Name Is Jonas” on Guitar Hero to commemorate our goodbyes, and got an 86%, for which the audience went absolutely wild. Then she put away her clothing, counting carefully. She did a patrol of the house, which she’d never done before, to mark everything she might have left. She was vigilant.
When she was done, she couldn’t find her gray cap. She’d looked everywhere for it, but it was nowhere to be found. (As it turns out, I’d kicked it under the couch during a strenuous solo.) She was disappointed by this, because she wanted to leave clean. It was important to her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “If this was Grown-Up Hero, you would have gotten a 97%. The crowd would have gone batshit.”
“Oh, really?” she laughed, arching her eyebrow – a straight steal from her mother.
“Totally,” I replied, hugging her. “You five-starred it, sweetie. You five-starred.”
That’s what she is right now. She’s learning the songs. She’s struggling with the hardness of grownup life, figuring out how to place her hands on the buttons, and getting a little better with each go-round. She’s about 86% on Bill-Paying, and has yet to unlock the advanced tracks of House Purchasing and Insurance Claims.
It’s not like Rock Band for her, though… Or so she thinks. No matter how terribly you do on Rock Band, when you complete it you have a crowd of fans going nuts for you, yelling and screaming your name because you got 74% of “Gimme Shelter.” That’s stupid. In real life, if you played 74% of a song you’d get booed off the goddamn stage.
But really. She does have it. Because there I am, pogoing in the crowd as she 74%s “Mature Relationship” for the first time ever on Expert, holding up my lighter, squeeing with fanboy goodness because she is so awesome. She might not ever hear me, but I am shouting her name, pumping my fist, her biggest fan in the whole world and so happy to watch her on stage, on her own, strong and bold and beautiful.
My little girl. My beautiful rock star.
Current Mood:  jubilant
Tags: awwwwwwwwwww, best post in a long time
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