All of a sudden, my teenage son thinks I'm not *cool*; what is his problem?
I was always the *cool* dad to my son, the dad who had rock music blasting on my car when I pulled into the parking lot to pick him up from school, the dad who, when my wife went hysterical on him after she found a Playboy under his mattress, took him aside after she left and told him, "Son, you have to get a better hiding place that your mother won't find", the dad who didn't mind if he let an occasional "dammit" slip into his conversation. Up through last year, I was *cool*, someone he wasn't embarrassed of. He's 15 now, though, and I suddenly find that I am no longer worthy of being seen with him.
I find that, although I am the only dad with rap music playing on the car stereo, he now cringes when I pull into the school parking lot with the Kottonmouth Kings cranked up. When I lean out the window and yell, "Over here, Kipper(a nickname my wife and I have called him since he was a toddler)", he turns to his friends and says "Oh damn, my mom sent our crazy neighbour again to pick me up. I hate that." When one of his friends says "Hey, I always thought that was your dad", he responds with, "No, my mom was shacking up with him for awhile, but he isn't my dad. My dad is in prison or something; I dunno, we never hear from him." My heart sinks and I, the crazy neighbour that my wife apparently occasionally bonks, am silent when he slides into the car and announces loudly, for the benefit of his friends, "God, I hope you're not drunk again today! You almost killed us last time nearly colliding with that ambulance!" His friends, slack-jawed, are duly impressed.
When we get home he scurries off to his room, and I brood, pondering over what has happened. I look at myself in the mirror. I am no different than I was back when I was *cool*; still the same dad who was tons of fun the time the two of us sprinkled itching powder inside of all the church's choir robes, then watched the gyrations during the Sunday service, still the same dad who let him stay up all night watching horror movies, then called his school the next day and told them he had a cold and couldn't make it when he was too tired to wake up in the morning, still the one he once wrote in a 5th grade school report was his hero, the person he wanted to be like. I haven't changed, so what happened?
I talk to him about it before dinner. I go to his room and ask him what happened back there at the school, why was he dissing me like that? He squirms and looks away, and finally says, "Dad, you just are so UNcool. I don't want to be the biggest jerk on campus just because I have the biggest jerk for a dad." I try to argue, to defend my points of "coolness", but the old tattoo I have of Guns 'N' Roses leaves him unimpressed, and when I mention that he has the only dad who has been mistaken for Sam Elliott, definitely one of the coolest guys ever, he just says, "Dad, that's just some OLD guy. So are you....."
So, that's it. I'm not *cool* anymore. I'm old, an embarrassment, not a dad he could be proud of. I sit in my chair in the living room with the lights off, and feel, for the first time, what it is truly like to be middle-aged. I don't understand. A short time ago, I was *cool.* What happened?