No one warned me about the headphones.
When you’re a parent, you get a lot of advice and warnings from other parents who have gone through the process. But they don’t hit everything, and you sometimes end up in situations you could never have imagined until they actually happen to you.
“Hope you like changing diapers, buddy!” they say with a slap on the back. They don’t, however, tell you that one day you’ll be crammed into a bathroom stall in a suburban mall, miserably failing in your attempts to wipe away the shrapnel of an intestinal explosion that has you wondering how a tiny eight-month-old baby could unleash such unholy hell on the world. How did he get it in his hair!? No one warns you about that one.
They warn you about the lack of sleep, but they don’t tell you that your sleep patterns will be so warped by so many early mornings that you may never sleep-in past 8 a.m. again in your life. Oh, you’ve got a rare morning to yourself with the kids staying at grandma’s house? Enjoy being wide awake at 6:46 a.m.
As your kids grow older, the advice and warnings wane as other people become less likely to sense and prey upon your new-parent terror. But maybe there should be more warnings. I, for instance, maybe could have benefited from a heads up about the level of violence that siblings can introduce into a previously peaceful household. Wait, did you just hit your brother with a dictionary? When did our house become a Martin Scorsese film?
The latest household development, however, has really got me questioning everything I’ve learned about human interaction in my previous four decades of my existence.
It’s the headphones. And how they’re always on the head. Always.
Last week I sat down at the breakfast table with my kid and started chatting with him. He did not chat back. In fact, he did not react at all. I asked him another question, again with zero reaction, at which point I became a little concerned. He’s a cheeky young fellow, but not one to employ the silent treatment. Was he asleep, in a coma, high on drugs!?
My other son came by, sized up the situation, and pointed to his ears. “Headphones,” he said.
And then I finally noticed, under a hoodie, two little bumps. I waved my hand in front of his face, and finally got a smile.
This is now a permanent state of being for the kid, at least as much as he can get away with. He wakes up, puts them on. He takes them off, showers, and puts them back on. He watches TV, and yet he still somehow has them on (listening to, I presume, something different than what is on the TV). On a family car ride downtown last week he had them on at the same time we had other music playing through the car stereo.
“Can you turn yours down?” he shouted over two sets of tunes bombarding his brain.
I guess I could have seen it coming. There is, in fact, a cool song by The Mounties with the chorus “I got my headphones on from the minute I’m up till the minute I go to bed.
“I got my headphones on every day of my life, I’m gonna wear ’em until I’m dead.”
I know kids grow up and do their own thing, but somehow I wasn’t prepared for the moment when they decided not just that they aren’t into everything that you’re into and they want to do their own thing, but that they also don’t want to share it with you and they want to do it in a way that blissfully blocks out anything you say to them. It’s jarring, as a parent, to watch that isolation chamber drop.
But I know I have to let them grow and let them go. But maybe I can get a little advice now from parents who have navigated those headphone years already. Do they ever come off? Age 18? 25? 40?! When can I talk to my kid again?
If you have info, let me know. I’m all ears.
Andy Prest is the assistant editor of the North Shore News. His lifestyle/humour column runs biweekly. [email protected]
