Once a month, my wife and I alternate doing something one-on-one with our kids, and it was my week to hang with our teenage son, Tristan. He just finished his freshman year of high school, and to say it’s been a rough year for both of us would be an understatement. He’s at the age now where we’re having 800 arguments on a good day. So I confess that I got a little dizzy when he actually accepted my invitation to watch Dumb and Dumber together.
I absolutely love my son, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this raising-a-teenager thing has made parenting really hard. I can’t help but feel him pulling away from me, and frankly, it stinks. The other day I was flipping through pictures on Facebook, and I found one of Tristan and me. He must have been 3 years old. We were standing by a lake, holding hands, and he was just looking at me with these bright eyes that seemed to say, “That’s my dad!”
I miss that.
And I know, I know, rebellion, resistance and outgrowing your parents is an expected part of adolescence.
According to all the books I’ve read on raising kids, this is the age when children strive for independence and try desperately to define themselves as something other than their parents, in an effort to leave the nest. And of course, I want that. I want him to go off and become an amazing, successful human, but all this leave-the-nest talk really doesn’t capture the tug of war between longing for your child to be as excited to hang out with you as they were only a few years ago and longing for them to take those steps toward independence because you’re tired of having them question everything and glare at you because you asked them to put garbage in a garbage can.
So when Tristan accepted my invitation to not only hang out, but to watch a favorite movie from my childhood, well... I was, as he often says, “shook.” When I saw Dumb and Dumber in the theater, I must have been 13, and let me just say, that movie hit me at exactly the right age. It was the first movie that ever caused me to cry from laughing so hard.
As I looked over at my son, he was having almost the exact same reaction as I did when the movie was released in ’94. When Lloyd says, “Our pets heads are falling off,” he doubled over laughing, same as I did. During the “Want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?” scene, Tristan put his hand over his stomach, busting up, same as I did. When he first saw Harry and Lloyd riding that moped through Aspen, he shook his head with a grin. I had the same reaction.
And then there was the crescendo. The scene where Lloyd puts laxative in Harry’s coffee, and he ends up having some serious time on the porcelain throne. That was the epitome of comedy when I was 13. That’s when I cried laughing. And that is exactly when Tristan began sobbing with laughter, one hand on his gut, the other wiping his eyes, his face lit up with joy. I don’t know if I’d ever laughed so hard in my life as I did while watching that scene... until I laughed while watching my son.
He laughed, and I laughed watching him. It was the cutest, most hilarious giggle. It was an infectious joy radiating off of him. The whole moment held the warmth of a father and son having the time of their lives, watching a classic tried-and-true comedy. It was something I’d missed over the past year between us, and I couldn’t help but feel grateful.
But that wasn’t the most amazing part. We watched and we laughed, sure, but we also talked. I told him about how popular this movie was in the ’90s. We talked about Jim Carrey and other films we’d seen him in. We talked about how Jim Carrey and Lauren Holly were married after this film but it didn’t last, about how Mike Starr often played a hard-core gangster and about how Jeff Daniels usually did serious movies but totally nailed this comedy thing. We talked like all this past year of teenage drama was a thing of the past.
It was the kind of free-flowing conversation that we hadn’t shared in a long time, and all while watching a comedy classic. None of it mattered anymore. It was just a father and son laughing at a silly movie, and in so many ways it was exactly what our relationship needed. We finished Dumb and Dumber, and something truly amazing happened. My son was leaning into me. I had my arm around him, and we were both smiling. I looked down at him and said, “Thanks for hanging with me, dude. I love you.”
He looked up at me, and said, “Love you too, Dad.” And it wasn’t begrudging or mumbly. It was a very real, clear “I love you.” Maybe this raising-a-teenager thing isn’t going to be so bad after all.
