My Happiest Child
I once heard the expression that you are as happy as your unhappiest child. I even wrote a story titled My Unhappiest Child. It is about my oldest son and I have never published it because I do not want to risk offending him in any way. I have worked with him for the past twenty years to get him on a good track and I feel he is on such a track now and don’t want to do anything to disrupt that. I am proud of all three of my children for different reasons. My proudest achievement is that despite coming from two different mothers, the three of them think of each other and treat each other as full siblings. For a father, that is a wonderful accomplishment for some strange reason. I suspect it is so because we all know we cannot control the future after we are gone, but it is at least nice to feel that we have set the stage for a positive future.
My oldest is 37 this year and selling his house and moving to pursue his own private dreams in the attractions business. My daughter is 33 and has two little girls that keep her busy and engaged and a husband that has recently undergone bariatric surgery and is down 75 pounds so far. Life is good for my two older children. And then there is my youngest son. He was the little bully of a child that did all the wrong things in school in his early years. I literally spent several days each week in his elementary school principal’s office convincing her not to expel him. His social skills were not entirely lacking, but he acted out on his every emotion. If some kid was not nice to him, he retaliated with creativity and zeal. Holding a pencil on a kid’s seat so he would sit on it was just one of his less admirable tricks. Usually his retaliation was warranted, but not defensible. I’m not so sure he was a happy child. We sent him to a therapist who worked with him for fifteen years to great results.
By the time my son went to college, he had become a social swan. He was hip and cool, but mostly he was kind and gentle. It was the sort of transition a parent could only dream might happen. I attribute it largely to his therapist and take no particular credit for it. Perhaps his mother deserves some credit for insisting that he go to the therapist for those dozen or so years and to me for agreeing to pay for it.
My son has now graduated from college with a degree in performing arts, which means he pretty much studied what he wanted to study, not what would lead to some vocation that either his parents or some societal norm imposed upon him. The world vacillates over the ages between moments of desperate and pragmatic need and casual enlightenment. I remember the Brad Pitt movie The Tree of Life and the way it juxtaposed nature versus grace. Well, we live in a world that has those two competing philosophies wrestling with each other every day. There are times when nature prevails and times when grace is allowed to govern. My older son is definitely of nature. He has to struggle for everything he has and seems to be in a constant battle for survival. He can be difficult to be with because the intensity is always just inches away. My younger son has a gentle soul that is of grace. He is easy to be with and calm in the way that people who don’t have the need to struggle exhibit. My older boy scratches at the hardscrabble earth while the younger picks flowers and writes poetry.
While I often wish they could each modify in the other’s direction, that isn’t how life works. We are who we are and we are either of nature or grace. I suspect that I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, which might make me the most vulnerable of them all. I operate in the world of nature, but do so with the thoughts of a man of grace. I am either too soft for the real world or too harsh for the ethereal world.
I think of my younger son as my happiest child. Don’t get me wrong, I wish all three of my children happiness, but I somehow think it is simply easier for him. He is not like Hubbell Gardner from The Way We Were, for whom everything came easy. He is not so fortunate. He has gifts, but they do not give him the pass to glide through any task. He has to work and work hard. But he does so with a sweet and easy manner. I remember when he was actively dating in early college he would manage to get the date with the “Perfect 10”, but by the end of two dates he would get cut loose for want of a more aggressive or tougher guy. He was a puppy dog trying to run with the big dogs and that rarely works. In a knife fight in a dark alley, my money would be on my older boy and my prayers would be with my younger son.
I would like to take a moment to delineate happiness as I see it for my three children. For my older son, I feel he would be happiest if he came up with a Disney-like concept and parlayed it into a highly successful business for which he and he alone could claim credit. He likes money, but his tastes are simple and the real prize is in the accomplishment for him. My daughter craves security and certainty. She wants $10 million in the bank for no particular reason other than peace of mind, and she wants her husband and children to be happy and normal. Normal is very big for her side of the family.
The hardest one for me to define is my youngest son in terms of what he would need to be happy. I suspect he wants to be creative and to play to an adoring public of some sort. I don’t think he cares for fame or fortune. Happiness and ease of life are probably his drivers.
Do you remember playing the game of Life when you were a kid? One of the first things you had to do other than picking a spouse and number of children was to set a goal where you split up 100 points for Money, Fame and Happiness. The older boy wants money. My daughter wants money and happiness. My younger son wants more than just happiness. He wants to redefine the game so that he can ignore money and fame and put it all on happiness and world peace.
When I talk to my older son and daughter, I always tell them to watch out for their younger brother. He’s taller than either of them and probably more fit as well. He’s smart and takes good care of himself. The reason I want them to watch over him is because he is a gentle soul and world needs gentle souls to remind the rest of us why we want and deserve to be happy.