Phases of the son.

Today you’ve turned 14, child of mine. You start high school later this year, you start learning how to drive in two, you start being given some of the responsibilities of adulthood in four. In between those milestones, you get to continue articulating what it means to be you.

This past year you earned hard-fought victories and suffered difficult defeats. You cemented your fierce dedication to Arsenal and have been delighted to watch them tear through nearly every team they have faced this past campaign. You dove deeper into music and history, the latter of which led to your eighth grade social studies teacher recommending you for a departmental award. You make mistakes and in most cases you learn from them.

You’re a gamer, like your mother and father before you, so I’ll use this metaphor to describe what I’m feeling right now: I hope you have the inventory and experience you need to face the bosses that are coming your way.

Sometime soon your own body will begin executing an agenda for which it has not given you any specific details. It will change your bones, your muscles, your brain. In some cases the changes will be dramatic and in other cases the changes will be an exponential emphasis of what has always been there. You will not have to go through any of this alone, even though there’s a fair chance you’ll insist that’s exactly what you want. We will give you some of the distance you need while remaining vigilant for the moment you need us closer than ever.

You will be shown more pathways from which to cultivate your skill tree. You will choose avenues of discovery that were previously locked and you will be provided opportunities to achieve in ways you might not have realized.

While I don’t make a point of saying this to you every day, you are currently living in a nation taking great gulps from a large bottle of rampant fascism. You are aware of the ways that our own government besieged your hometown this past autumn, and some of the ways that they now attempt to subdue Minneapolis, a city you have visited multiple times while competing at the USA Cup. Your friends and teammates are, like you, children of immigrants, and many of them are currently in the crosshairs of bullies and blood simpletons.

The World Cup is supposed to be in the United States this year, although the longer and more virulent the xenophobia becomes the prospect that it might not be rises higher and higher past zero. At the end of last year a tournament that you were supposed to take part in was canceled due to the number of families that feared gathering in a place that might be made a target. This cancelation happened on the same day that our mad king was presented with a concocted “Peace Prize” by the simpering president of FIFA.

I’m not saying any of this to scare you. I’m saying this because I believe in you. I believe in the heart and character you possess and I believe that despite the monsters around us you will be strong enough to withstand what it tries to do to you. You will emerge tempered and ready to push forward.

For whatever of that comes from me and your mother, be it nature or nurture, I’m grateful to see it live in you. I’m grateful to continue watching it grow.

Love and Resilience,

Dad.