Yesterday after work, I made a detour to the downtown barber shop where my son Ben works. It’s a great old school barber shop whose walls and ceilings are covered with all manner of sports memorabilia. From newspaper clippings and photos celebrating the local high schools, to college teams and the pros.

Barbershops are a particular right of passage for boys. Aside from the occasional mom with her toddler, it’s a peculiarly male environment and one of the first places where we are exposed to men talking about men stuff - jokes, sports, politics, women and sex. There’s an endless supply of distractions for any young man; gumball machines, pop, t.v., videogames, magazines, comic books, newspapers and sports stuff.

You find out your dad isn’t a perv too as Playboy and other girlie magazines that you’d previously only seen hidden in your dad’s sock & underwear drawer are laying out in full view right next to the local newspaper. Ah, nudie mags are acceptable here. You know you’ve arrived when you muster up enough courage to actually pick one up and flip through it in front of the other guys . . . trying not to dwell too long on the photos. You don’t want to act like a naked woman is that novel a thing to you.

As I opened the door to the shop, I was greeted with a wailing wall of screams from a little red-haired boy who was in the middle of being disemboweled a haircut by the barber at the far end of the shop. His mother had to alternately hold his legs and head still as the barber tried to trim his carrot top. Everyone in the shop was smiling and laughing at this little guy. He looked like a mini-me of Mel Gibson in the end of Braveheart where they held him down and he screamed “Freeeeeeeeedooooooommmmm!” except this little guy was screaming “Get me Doooooooowwwwwwnnnnn!!!!”

Ben called me over and asked with a laugh, “Can’t you do some Kung-fu grip thing on him and knock ‘em out?”

He quickly got to the point where he was inconsolable. Absolutely over the top - he’d reached that point where he couldn’t stop crying even if he’d wanted to. He reminded me of . . . me when the woman I thought was my soul mate left me (yes, I’m talking about you Kelly B.). The tears flowed and I howled too. Literally. I still remember letting out an unbelievable primal scream at her loss. I’d never experienced anything like that. It was as if the ground underneath me had opened up and I was falling in to emptiness. I’d lost my best friend. More than anything I miss talking to her, her smile, looking in her eyes and seeing that sparkle that tells me she loves me just as much as I her. We used to talk for hours about anything and everything, but now that’s all gone.

Looking at this child in the chair in front of me I couldn’t help but think, “Oh, there’s going to be so much more in your life to be upset about little man.”

After several minutes of screaming his haircut was finally done and amazingly he still had both ears. His mom took him to sit on one of the benches that lined the walls in the waiting area. He was still crying and in between sucking for breath, still saying “Get me down!”. His mom was more than a little irritated & embarrassed and snapped at him, “You ARE down.” Adding insult to injury, she wouldn’t let him get a sucker.

His slightly older brother was at the other end of chairs getting his hair cut too. Apparently it was old hat to him as he sat still and just looked at his dad who was standing nearby & shaking his head at his younger son. The next thing I knew this brother was done and had run over to his crying brother where he waved a shiny new Tootsie Pop in his face and proudly proclaimed, “Look what I got!”

My son waved me over to his chair. Since he moved back to town and has been working as a barber, our relationship has evolved. We’re still very much father and son but now we’re also friends. He has matured a lot in the last year. He will call me up to ask my advice or drop by to show me a new piece of furniture he got a good deal on. Like Mark Twain I think maybe Ben is amazed at how much I’ve learned since he was 14 and now he can actually stand to be around me. We talked about the Mixed Martial Arts cage fight he saw in a local bar last week (that’s real ‘guy talk’) and the new couch he’d bought for his apartment.

When he was done, I reached for my wallet but he just shook his head “no”. He gave me a big hug and said to stop by his apartment to take a look at his new couch sometime.

As I walked out of the shop I couldn’t help but think about how much worry and stress I had gone through since his mom had given him the boot & kicked him out of her house back in Junior High because her 3rd husband (at 45 she’s now on #4) didn’t get along with him and she couldn’t control him. Aauuugh! I wanted to shake her and shout “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He had come to live with me full-time at an age that was difficult under the best of circumstances and he was understandably a very angry & hurt young man. As painful as it was for my soul-mate to leave me, I can’t imagine being abandoned by my mother. Ben’s mom made it much worse by dumping trash bags full of his belongings on our doorstep. The absolute worse thing was when I came home one day to find that she had dumped boxes of photo albums and Christmas ornaments that he made for her in grade school. It was as if she was trying to purge him from her life. I hurt for him and didn’t know how to take the pain away. My black dog made sure I took the pain and made it my own.

The only thing I could do was to be a constant presence in Ben’s life. To the best of my ability I was always there for him and let him know I loved him unconditionally. He could get in trouble, wreck his car, get in a fight at school or get fired from his job flipping burgers and I would still be there to help him learn from his experiences and move on. I would not abandon him no matter how badly he behaved.

If the friends he brought home were on the rough side, I made sure to befriend them. I knew I couldn’t force them out of his life. It helped that I could show them martial arts as the discipline and ability to defend myself brought a measure of respect in their eyes. I talked to them about their lives and what they wanted. Many of them didn’t have a dad or male figure involved with them and I think they appreciated someone showing an interest. It also helped to influence Ben when his friends could say, “Your dad is pretty cool.”

What struck me was how absolutely worthless all my worry had been. I had caught him smoking weed and knew he was drinking too. He had also gotten into some fights. While I think it’s pretty natural for a parent to be concerned over their child’s welfare, the only thing my worry did was to punish me and make me feel terrible. Other than making the black dog of depression fat and unhappy, it served no purpose whatsoever. I think worry brings with it a weird sort of magical thinking. On some level we believe that if we worry then the very thing we worry about will not come to pass. Like an emotional Pavlov’s dog, when it doesn’t come to pass then the belief is reinforced. The bell has been rung and our black dog salivates.

That was an expensive lesson. My physical and mental health has been affected. In retrospect I wish I could go back even if it’s just a few years knowing what I know now (don’t we all?) but that’s not going to happen. All I can do is use it as the very valuable lesson that it is moving forward.

In spite of all the emotional screaming and kicking and “Get me down!” that I did, I am glad to say that nothing that I had worried about has come to pass. I never got a phone call saying my son had been in an accident, arrested, got a girl pregnant or anything even remotely like that. Now I know that even if something bad had happened, worry would not have been helpful at all. That, I guess, is life’s shiney new Tootsie Roll for me. It’s time to allow happiness in my life. How about you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under family, fear.