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I have this child. He’s 17 and a junior in High School. He is, with some exceptions, the kind of young man every mother dreams of.
He’s doing great in school, with a 3.8 GPA, and that’s taking the AP stuff. He’s well-rounded, taking everything from advanced algebra to auto shop. His teachers like him, and he is operating a small cash-only business at school, selling contraband candy bars that he buys for 25 cents and sells for $1. The school administration knows he’s doing it, and are probably so thrilled he’s not selling crack that they let him do it.
He’s inoffensive to look at, with his hair being almost military short (he has a largish head, and lots of hair makes it look bigger, plus he has this extermely cool black fedora that only fits when his hair’s short). His pants ride quite near to his waist, and fit, and he wears a belt, and they are usually the most generic khaki chinos he can find. He says they’re more comfortable than jeans, especially here in the hot part of the country. He wears plain button up shirts, or logo-less t-shirts, completely void of any offensive words or image.
He’s unfailingly polite, always punctuating his statements with ma’am or sir, if he’s talking to anyone 10 yr or more older than him. He holds the door open, and will rush to do so if someone’s pushing a stroller or has their hands full.
He works hard, having a 3-day/week job at Dairy Queen, running a sideline business of repairing computers, and keeping those grades up. His goal is to go to Georgia Tech and get a degree in engineering, with a minor in some computer related thing. He’s making SD and his Uncle S quite proud, because both of them went to Tech as well.
Sounds like the perfect kid, eh? Yeah, he does. But, you know, everything balances. If he were perfect he’d have Steely Dan on his iPod, or maybe jazz kinda stuff like Wynton Marsalis. Alas, no. In order to keep from being so perfect he’d disappear into the walls and we’d never notice him at all, he listens to the absolutely (almost) most offensive music he can find. No, not rap, and not The Black Eyed Peas. (My Humps? Who the hell wrote that song and why is it considered music?). He likes Heavy Metal. Why, when I was a kid, the only people that listened to heavy metal were the ones so stoned they couldn’t remember their own names. Now he’s listening to the stuff M. C. played on her car stereo loud in the school parking lot, and everyone was convinced she would put out for a joint.
My son, my Golden Boy, listens to the likes of Children of Bedom, Slipknot, and Meshuggah. He has Metallica and Pantera posters, right next to his Periodic Table of the Elements and Atomic Clock. And he likes it Loud. So loud I can hear it in the next room, and that’s when he’s listening with earbuds. I lecture him about hearing loss, and about moral desensitisation. “Mom” he says, “I need desensitisation. If I were any more sensitive I’d be Yanni and we both know how you’d feel about that.” Point taken.
He’s also a slob. Good Lord he’s a slob. He claims to know which end of the room is for clean clothes and which for dirty, but when your room’s not but 15×15, houses a double bed, a weight bench, a desk the size of Cobb County, dresser and bookcase, it’s hard to differentiate between one end and the other. His clothes have the alarming ability to multiply. I swear, we go through his stuff quarterly, and get rid of 1/2 of all he owns, and yet, the next quarter he has 3x what we threw out before. I think part of it may be that he and SD wear the same size (the boy, he’s built like a tank), so when SD retires something it goes to #2. Nonetheless. Too much stuff in a too small room makes for chaos. Even tho he claims it’s rational chaos. Most of the time I just keep the door shut and pretend I don’t know what’s in there, but every now and again the Mom Must Clean gland goes into overdrive and I don a hazmat suit and forge ahead. Get this: He always thanks me for it.
That’s right. He thanks me. No screaming, no whining about privacy violations. As he says, why should I worry about privacy when I don’t have anything to hide? True enough. The worst thing I’ve found is a large garbage bag full of Vault cans. No wonder he’s up til 2 am.
So That’s #2. My child of extremes. Next up, #1, and how he’s doing.
