My First Father's Day

This Christmas I was at a cocktail party with my parents and my father was regailing the other guests with stories about when I was a baby and the several times he tried to kill me. He claims all these events were ‘accidents’ and the end result of someone being too young to have or raise children.

I am, as it stands, too evil to die.

At one point he said, “When he does have children he probably will keep them away from us until they are old enough to defend themselves.” Everyone laughed but howled uproariously when I quipped, “My oldest is eleven.”

Apparently, sometimes, I’m not as funny as I think.

There are two advantages of my growing up overseas, away from relatives and the most important one is that fate has dealt me a far better hand in adopted relatives than it did in people whose genes I share. My cousin, the philosopher, has always maintained that you share genes with relatives and your family consists of the people who care about you and maintain relationships with.

With this in mind it is funny that I have nothing to do with my actual living grandparents but have a throng of ‘grandparents’ who have adopted Chaos Bean and me. This has been fantastic for everyone involved even if maintaining this army of the elderly is a little more work than enduring my mother’s biological parents.

Considering the extended family I was born into I am always a little leery of being drug into yours. I have been appointed an uncle to my friend’s children – which makes me sometimes why they hate their kid or what I did wrong. My most famous example of being assumed into people’s families is when one of my favorite professors was accused of abandoning a baby boy to pursue her career. Instead of doing the right thing and fighting back this rumor I have made it worse by claiming to be that abandoned baby boy and have offered dubious proof to that effect.

This father’s day is unique for me because in the many years of being assumed into someone’s family as an adopted brother, uncle, son, or grandson I have never been adopted as someone’s father. I was once believed to be the mother of a clutch of Cambodian refugee children but that seems a little bit different than someone believing, hoping, that I am his biological father. Among his friends he uses words like ‘role model’ and whom he wants to be when he grows up.

I found all of this disturbing, initially. I tried to discourage it by embracing it. Nothing makes something unattractive to a middle school student like encouragement from adults. I even considered taking him to lunch with me when I met with the above-mentioned professor a few days ago to introduce him to the rest of his family. However, this did not work to dissuade him. He persists in believing that I am an exemplary person and worthy of idolatry.

Chaos Bean has asserted in the past that it is the secret wish of any teacher to be someone’s role model and that I am cut out for “demagoguery.” Indeed at Saint Spritopias School for Criminally Incurable Boys in Hartford, Connecticut I was a minor deity in the universe of those intermediate students (but, annoyingly, nothing compared to the sway Chaos Bean held over the student body at the school). I was popular but even the class pet (Winkler, a koala) was more popular than I was. However, delusions of fatherhood are a new experience. My students always like me; they have never wanted me to take them home.

However, there is incontrovertible evidence that he is, indeed, my son:
• He has the same color eyes and skin tone as Chaos Bean and I
• He has Chaos Bean’s hair color and ability to tell someone to go to hell with vocabulary that leaves them groping for a dictionary
• His grammar and language mechanics are nearly perfect, which he would have inherited from Dr. Ashby
• He is really a weird kid, absent thinking I am his father
• He is allergic to koalas (which would make Winkler a natural enemy)
• He has the same OCD quirks that I do

All joking aside it, it is not ours to choose how we are loved or appreciated – but we should respect the fact that we are. It is my goal as a teacher to be a role model for responsible adulthood. I am flattered, albeit a little weirded out, that someone thinks I am their long-lost parent.

However, the brat didn’t get me a present.

Comments

[Alex V]

I think you may have to summon yourself to a parent-teacher conference if this kid doesn't at least get you a card.

[Shawn]

"However, the brat didn’t get me a present."

I dunno, I'm pretty sure that would be irrefutable proof he IS your child...

:-p

[Suburban Island]

It would probably just be a shirt or a necktie anyway.