Tuba, trumpet or... nothing at all?

By Scott T. Holland

September 27, 2006 09:50 am

— Attention experienced parents of the world: I am seeking your advice.
On a scale of one to 10, one being a coma and 10 being Kelly Ripa after a Starbucks bender, how did you react when your child showed no interest in something you enjoyed immensely in your own childhood and looked forward to vicariously participating in through the next generation?
At this point, my son is not yet 21/2, so the only thing he’s really showing interest in is working the DVD player and pretending he doesn’t need his diaper changed. But I realize now that I actually have a child just how unfortunate it may have been for me to spend all that time fantasizing about father-son activities that mostly involved me growing a junior me who pretty much liked all the same stuff I do.
Case in point: Kristie, Jack and I spent Saturday in Marion watching the Linn-Mar Marching Invitational. My wife is a band director, I’m a career band geek, my sister-in-law student teaches at Cedar Rapids Washington and I really wanted to see Independence perform, so it was a tailor-made afternoon, a real family affair.
We caught up to the Clinton High School caravan — including five buses — at the U.S. 30 off-ramp west of DeWitt and followed the whole line all the way to Marion. Kristie and I talked about what instrument we’d like Jack to play and how involved I’d like to be with the band boosters organization.
I was envisioning spending my Saturday mornings loading sousaphones and bass drums onto a trailer bound for who knows where when a jolt of reality punctured my thought bubble — what if Jack doesn’t want to be in band?
Then my whole dream world came crashing down. What if Jack hates baseball? Won’t I feel silly looking back at that little Cubs outfit I had him wear at the hospital after he was born? Will I have wasted all of those hours trying to teach him the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”? Who will I play catch with in the backyard?
What if he doesn’t like “Jeopardy!” or “Wheel of Fortune”? Will I still be the only one in my house shouting out “What is Guadalajara?” and “Who are the Parliament Funkadelic?” just to make myself feel good? What if he shows no interest in attending Coe College? What if he shows no interest in attending any college?
It’s not that I don’t think I’ll be able to make myself interested in the things Jack will find fun — even if it’s soccer — it’s just that I wonder if I’ll secretly resent that my father-son goals never hatched out as planned. Maybe I’m just bracing myself for the inevitable time where he stops insisting on following me everywhere and instead chooses not to be seen with me anywhere, but I think these are valid concerns.
It could just be that I’m not so much worried about how I’ll react if he doesn’t show an interest in something I love, but whether I’ll be able to keep myself from forcing such things. It seems awfully absurd to me to make him sign up for something that was my idea in the first place, yet I see kids in the same predicament all the time. It was a lot easier to blame parents for those situations when I didn’t have a kid of my own.
I worry, too, that I’m giving myself a little false hope. I have a toddler who says “Go Cubs!” every time he sees a baseball game on TV or a neon Old Style sign at the grocery store. This is the same kid who has always been mesmerized when a marching band passes by during a parade and will interrupt a walk around the block to watch the Clinton band practice at North Field.
He even sat in the stands at Linn-Mar tapping his fingers on his chest and his feet on the bleachers during the marching performances. That is, until he decided it’d be much more fun to go across the field to the visitors’ stands and run back and forth, investigating the gooey piles of melted candy. But still — I had a little hope.
Even now, with Jack at such a young age, I can see how tough it will be for me to let go of certain things as he grows older. There’s only so many times you can play the “Because I’m your dad and I know what’s good for you” card before your kid moves out of the house and doesn’t tell you where he’s headed.
I guess for now I just have to focus on the issues of the day — toilet training, being nice to the kitties and sitting at the dinner table with the rest of us — and leave tomorrow for tomorrow. I’m sure those challenges will be here much sooner than I ever expected.
Scott T. Holland’s column appears every Wednesday in the Clinton Herald. His e-mail address is scottholland@clintonherald.com.

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