Birdwatching

I am 44 years old. Fourty four. It's an incredible thing to say, to have reached this level of maturity, this sanguine, sage, and wise perch on the dim side of middle age, and I truly wish I had some nugget of wisdom to reveal to you, my gentle, inebriated readers, but all I can say is that being 44 just means I've been 11 four times.

It's not my birthday. I just that I'm coming to the realization that I will never completely grow up.

I tell my kids all the time that people don't all grow up in a straight line. I tell them that being adult is not the same as being mature. I tell them that most grown-ups are just nine-year olds with jobs. They believe it, because they've known me their whole lives.

I was thinking about this today and my son and I engaged in a little surreptitious bird watching.

A lot of people think birdwatching is for hopeless geeks or the British. But their thinking of the popular sport of spotting actual living feathered bipeds. I'm not talking about those birds, I'm talking about the finger variety.

I don't know what the hell drives me to do it. I mean, seriously, go on Facebook and look at my iRead bookshelf. I read about linguistic theory, guillouche construction, and history. I'm no idiot. I don't think I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm an idiot.

Is it possible for your inner child to be precocious?

So me and the Roon are in the eye doctor's office today and she's got her back to me and says "Ok, now look at your father," and while she gazes into his eyeball I start flipping the bird.

Where does it come from? What prompts this? I'm in the room with a dignified professional, someone to whom I'm paying a hefty bucket of coin, yet as soon as her back is turned I go tween, flipping the bird, and making my son laugh.

The doctor half jokingly asks, "Am I that funny?"

Now a normal adult would take this as a cue to drop the shenanigans. But I just amp it up so that she has to give the kid a second to cool out before she finishes the next eye.

If she had turned to look at me, it would have been one of those questioning looks often shot wordlessly between knowing adults as a kind of verification that they both consider the kid they're considering to be home schooled by drug-addled baboons. She would have seen a middle aged man with a grim, serious, no-bull-dooky look on his face. The kind of face that keeps me from getting mugged. The kind of face that scares pre-schoolers and dogs.

Unless she checks the security cameras, she'll never know that this seemingly grumpy father was practically mooning his son while her back was turned. She'll never see me mock vomiting, or pretending to eat my boogers with the melodramatic trance-like gustatorial delight of a Rip Taylor gourmand. She will always think my son was laughing at her.

And that's part of the joke, this secret stand-up routine that goes on forever between me my spawn; that it's just between us, a sacred covenant of comedy, a language of fart jokes, family guy references, and guerrilla wet willies that only we can partake of or comprehend.

And I'm OK with it. People make assumptions about me. I wear a nice suit, comb my hair, know my way around a three course dinner, and can list the differences between a Malbec and a Pinotage until everyone's eyes glaze over. But if my kids are in sight, somewhere in the conversation I'm having with the adults, I'll recognize a moment when no one is looking at me and I'll catch my kids' eye and I'll use my middle finger to push up my glasses. Or I'll say something like 'there's only one thing I can  say about . . . ' and use my middle finger to count. Or I'll tap the top of a glass with my middle finger while I'm looking at them and they'll howl in the back ground, absolutely entertained by the sheer purposeful bravado of my depraved immaturity.

Is it professional adult behavior? Is it even worthy and admirable? Is it the kind of behavior you should manifest for your progeny? Blowhard says what?

Hell if I know. No parent truly knows what works. For me, it's a combination of calculated neglect, abject clarity, and unmitigated honesty. I try not to ever pretend to them, to ever act as if I have all the answers or even the final say. And I haven't told them this part: that half the time I'm flying by the seat of my pants, figuring it out as I go and, most terrifying, I just as often base my parenting on what I learn from them. That's not a Hallmark platitude, either: my kids are frikkin smart. Most of all I'm not restrained around them. I allow my inner retard to go wild, to let my monkey brain take over, and to flip the bird in secret as often as I can. I think it teaches them that growing up doesn't mean you abandon childishness. It means you celebrate it. I think that works.

That and fart jokes.