November 29, 2009
What do I know?
I've been taking Porter to the Pro Club gym in Redmond for the last five or six weeks so that I can teach him how to swim. It's become great father-son quality time and I really enjoy our discussions and seeing his confidence grow each weekend in his ability to swim.
On the way home from the gym today he was unusually talkative. Normally we listen to the radio and he looks out the window or plays with a toy or something to entertain himself. This time, however, while driving back on I-90 East he asked me, "Daddy, what do I know?"
I wasn't quite sure where he was taking the question but I suspected that he was questioning himself and his abilities...maybe another kid had told him "you don't know anything" recently. (Thinking back, I should have asked.)
I told him that he knows alot about how to fix things, rock climbining, swimming, cooking, dinosaurs...and a few others. He replied that he doesn't know as much about swimming as the other kids and that he only knows about T-Rex.
I tried to bolster his confidence by assuring him that what's important is to just keep learning. It probably had little affect in helping him, though I do think that this is one of the more important lessons I've learned in life: nobody knows much of anything, and what matters is that you keep learning and stay confident in yourself. Next time I'll do a better job of getting the point across but to a large extent these things are learned over a lifetime through lots of painful (and occasionally good) experiences.
What was important to me in this case was that he asked me the question. It's little events like these that make me realize all the things that are going on inside of their heads that we don't think about as parents. Too often I think we can't imagine that these more serious thoughts are going on inside their young brains - maybe because we can't recall them (though I'm certain we all had them); but they are in there and occasionally they make their way to the surface. These are the times that I feel the closest to Porter and Fallon.