sometimes dadhood is just reliving childhood

a tale of two boyhoods

In the past year, I've splurged on only two things. Last October I ordered a pair of leather-soled Allen Edmonds loafers because I've wanted a pair for like five years. And then, last week, I spent $212.95 on a remote control monster truck. Yeah, a remote control monster truck. Which is, you know, a toy.

And not only did I spend $212.95 on a toy, I spent three weeks researching the toy in question. I was watching YouTube unboxing videos and I was scouring the comments. I was reading RC car subreddits. All this intensive research was ostensibly conducted on behalf of my eighteen-month-old son, who is obsessed with monster trucks. Every single floor of our house — kitchen, living room, bathroom, even the laundry room — is cluttered with little toy trucks. My kid won’t sit through cartoons for more than two minutes but he will sit, totally transfixed, to watch an hour-long monster truck rally in its muddy entirety. He has completely remade my YouTube algorithm — the site now only suggests that I watch monster trucks.

I didn’t show him a picture of the pricey monster truck before I ordered it because he’s still only one, he doesn’t quite understand the concept of pictures. He melts down a little bit if he sees a picture of a toy car but then he can’t have it. Even if he does get it, he’s half-likely to point frantically at the picture and proceed to melt down.¹ But anyway, the monster truck arrived and he was ecstatic. It was everything I hoped for — I drove it around through the yard and he chased it, shaking his arms above his head and squealing like a tiny fat man overcome by the holy ghost.

We went up and down the yard, we went around the neighborhood. Me driving the car and him chasing after it. When the monster truck stopped, he would stop too, stare at it for a minute and if it didn’t take off, he gave it a push. Yes, the monster truck was everything I hoped for. But of course, this isn’t really about remote control monster trucks. I wouldn’t have been disappointed if the monster truck was a dud. But I would have been disappointed if the experience of the monster truck was a dud for my kid.

And as he’s aging into toddlerhood and I’m settling into comfortable dadhood, this is a theme that I’m noticing more-and-more — these days, the best hours of my life are spent lost in reliving childhood. I’m still very much a four-year-old boy. I love driving around a remote control monster truck, trying to handle it through the tall grass and uneven dirt. And I still love watching demolition derbies. And looking at fish and climbing trees and picking wild blackberries. And, seemingly by nature, my kid loves all these things too.

In some ways, I am reliving childhood. But no, it would be more accurate to say that I’m reliving childhood from a new and distinct perspective. When I was a boy, getting tangled-up in the blackberry bushes and driving around remote control monster trucks all day, I thought nothing of it. It was an unexamined life. But now, sometimes all I want is to do those things with my own kid, to watch how he enjoys them. It reminds me of that metaphor you find in Epictetus,² when he compares the stages of life to a banquet. You know the one, you’ve definitely seen it somewhere before. It goes like this:

"Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.”

I was big on Epictetus in high school, so I’ve now had that quote in the back my head for over a decade. And at different points in life, the notion of life as a banquet means different things. When you’re in your twenties, it means that you shouldn’t feel any shame in going out five nights a week. Because you go out, drink too much and sing bad karaoke on a Wednesday night knowing in the back of your head that you won’t be able to do that sort of thing forever. And so you enjoy it more knowing that at some point, the time for such behavior will have passed.

But life, the banquet, keeps on going and you move onto the next stage — parenthood. And some mornings with a toddler feel like they last forever. They begin with screams and proceed to food thrown about the kitchen and then a gauntlet of violent diaper changes, battles with briar bushes and frantic hours of ill-minded adventures that make Don Quixote look rational. And yet, buried within those days is the knowledge that this stage is all too brief. So you and your kid spend the days doing childish things together — eating wild strawberries covered in dirt and driving/chasing around remote control monster trucks — with the knowledge that you’ll only be able to do these things for a little bit longer. And that’s nice too.

1. This has happened quite a few times and really, it’s a poetic conundrum — he wants the car that’s in the picture. When you give him the car in the package — the same one from the picture — he’s disappointed because it’s not the car in the picture. He wants the car as its represented, not as it exists. Who among us hasn’t felt that way about a few things?

2. This is not an endorsement of the stoics. But the stoics are occasionally useful.