I had four brothers, two older and two younger, so I felt the fear was completely justified. I knew that the early years, aside from anatomy and clothing, boys and girls were fairly similar emotionally. After Asher was born, I put aside the fears and we pretty much rocked the socks off of those early years. I couldn't have been happier to have a son. He was such a sweet tempered, snuggly little ball of love, and he adored his mother.
Fast forward to age six.
Asher is still sweet tempered and loving, and he still needs his mother to tuck him in and say "goodnights," but I can't help but be almost completely paralyzed by this rising feeling of panic. I can see our common ground slipping away. We are no longer interested in the same things, like ice cream and The Land Before Time, bubbles or the zoo. He still wants to go to the park but mainly to play frisbee golf, which I'm told by Elijah is a completely legitimate sport. Our conversations have deteriorated from "what did you dream about last night?" to him retelling (for the seventh hundredth time) how "the video game character Sonic has a kid and did you know that he also was the fastest runner, but not the best at archery because Waluigi is the best at archery, and did you know that Peach has the fastest car and that when you don't stagger over the finish line in a running race you lose and isn't that awesome and don't you think that's funny Mom? Mom!? MOM?!!!
Do you see what I mean? I guess what I'm trying to say is that video games are taking over my relationship with my son and I can't even begin to pretend to want to play them with him. I have a hard time faking enthusiasm and it's becoming more obvious to my darling little boy that I'm not paying attention to his video game stories. As soon as I hear anything that has to do with the Wii, I completely tune out; not intentionally, I'm just really bad at feigning interest.
In my mind this is monumentally bad. How can I ever expect him to come to me with the problems or stories that I deem important when he knows I'm not listening to his important stories now? I always tell Elijah that we have to really put in the work now in order to keep the lines of communication open otherwise we'll lose him. We won't know about his first crush or first kiss, or if he's being bullied or smoking pot behind the bleachers. I'm not saying that these are things he's guaranteed to tell us anyway, I'm just saying there is NO WAY he's coming to me for advice about social situations if I didn't listen to the time when he finally got through that race that took him two hours to finish and now he can go to another race which is even longer and harder and he gets to pick a new car and put new tires on it and do I think he should get the red one because the red ones are sometimes faster, but the blue one looks cooler and didn't I think that the blue one was cool? Didn't I? DIDN'T I?!!!!
I'm so totally screwed. I'm just hanging all my hope on the fact that we read together every night, that's our thing. We talk about the books, make special treats to watch the movies and still have that little thing in common. After Harry Potter I think we'll start the series of Oz books, there are like 14 of those. Next we'll move on to Tolkien and by that time he should be ready for Stephen King so we can bond over his 70-something works. I'll do anything to get us through what I'm now referring to as "the era of the video games," with our relationship intact.
