Boy Cloud Winter Car

It’s early morning in my car and I’m driving some kids to school. Charlie, 10, is riding shotgun and my stepdaughter, Milla, 13, is in the back. She tucks into her phone as I look at the morning sun. Off to our left and behind us, she’s a burning bullet hole where the ridge meets the sky. Charlie is pulling gummy bears out of a Ziploc baggie and popping them in his mouth. With this in motion, I see that his fingernails need clipping again and I make a mental note to do that. He hates the feeling of the clippers for some reason, refuses to do it himself. In time, I guess he’ll have to, but for now I help him out when I remember. Which isn’t as often as I should.

I’ve been meaning to corner Charlie so I can ask him some stuff. He shows signs of anxiety sometimes. There are times when he reveals a kind of troubled agonizing more typically reserved for later in life. Maturity sucks when you’re young. People push it too hard, I think. Maybe I’ve pushed it him at times too, I don’t know.

Charlie is the happy-go-lucky sort, but sometimes those types hurt harder because they feel the need to keep tampering it all back down into the shadows. He can get really down on himself and say things that indicate he is struggling at times. It’s not an everyday thing, and of course most people are hard on themselves here and there, but this feels different. It feels more… involved. Some of his words, they seem to tell the tale of a beautiful kid who might not feel like he adds up to much. It reminds me of myself even now. And probably at that age too.

In school, he’ll also occasionally struggle with the big emotions when he’s knocked out in gaga ball or dodge ball. I don’t see a lot of cruel fire in Charlie/ not a lot of mean-spirited lashing out when he’s trying to find his way through a tricky moment, but I do see him lose his cool, get down on himself. Kicking the floor, talking trash on his own existence, that sort of thing. And I’ve been there as well. Oh, I’ve been there alright.

_____

I make my lame attempt at kickstarting a talk with Charlie, my words shattering all this screaming silence of the ride so far. There was the steady blowing of the defroster and the hypnotic hum of the Honda’s tires on the road beneath us, but each of those sounds are silence in their own way. So, when I finally get up the guts to emerge from the shadows of my driving gig, I know I’m about to challenge the kind of deafening quiet that smirks at fools because it understands the odds of a moment like this even taking hold at all.

I bite my bottom lip a little.

Charlie is usually in the back because his older brother isn’t into giving up his coveted front seat position. Even when there’s four kids here, Henry makes it well known he does’t want to have to squeeze into the back like the rest of them do. I let it slide, mostly because I have my own issues and I don’t want to end up in an argument with a kid. I know how that sounds, how small it makes me seem as a dad and a man. A man should be able to set things right with his kids when he sees injustices and whatnot. But, like a lot of people, I suspect, I live in these murky gray spaces on the fringes of all that downtown black and white parenting chatter. If the world of parenting is a big town built on the premise of a right way and wrong way to handle children, then I live out by the airport. Across the tracks. In a tarpaper shack. Or in a van down by the river.

I do get there though, in case you’re wondering. I break the wall/ start talking. My voice? It’s like an old bird gun going off in the next room. And there’s not much I can do about that.