One night, not too long after I’d gotten married, I was hanging out with my buddy, Pete. We were discussing the highs and lows of being a step-parent. Pete had grown up in the care of a step-father, while I had recently become one. The current topic was my step-son.
“I tell ya’ what, man.” Pete grinned. “he’s turning out to be a pretty handsome cat. How are you going to keep him, y’know, out of trouble?” He nodded at me in a “wink-wink-grin-grin-say-no-more-squire” fashion.
“Easy,” I replied. We’re raising him to be a geek.”
The two of us shared a laugh at my solution. After all, growing up loving Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons certainly played a factor in our lack of popularity. Girls teased me about it all the time. In my mind, it was a proven strategy.
And, I felt, my step-son would grow up much happier.
In third grade, my mom forced me to play in a Cardinal Boosters soccer team, alongside the likes of popular kids, like Phil Boylan. Phil picked on me in school, why would my mother do that? “No way!” I told myself. “My son isn’t going to be pressured into sports!” He loved video games, so that’s what we did together. My mom told me I was going to Hell for playing D&D in junior-high. I wasn’t going to constrain my kid’s imagination. Whatever he wanted to read, we let him. I didn’t go to my first sci-fi convention until I was 25. I wasn’t going to deprive him of that community. We went to every convention we could as a family.
And so the years went by. Before I knew it, it was 2010 and my step-son was 18 years old. The wife and I were wandering around MarCon, a local science-fiction convention, together. I don’t recall if we were in costume, but my step-son definitely was. Long, hooded cloak. Dark medieval clothing. Leather boots. A patch covered his left eye while a scar across his cheek told the story behind the ocular deformity. With his dark hair and olive-tinted skin, he cut quite the dashing figure through the halls.
Suddenly, a young woman with long, blond hair dressed in a peasant blouse and corset stepped in front him. With a smile on her face, she tapped my step-son on the shoulder.
“Why hello my good sir, and what might your name be?”
Her voice oozed with flirtatious innuendo. She brushed my step-son’s shoulders and then ran her fingers through her hair. My wife’s hand grasped mine and our knuckles entwined, white over white. I heard my wife gasp.
The girl was throwing herself at our son. And she was lovely. Like, model-gorgeous lovely.
In response, my step-son straightened up, lifted the patch above his eye and said with a smugness that I have only ever heard come out of the mouths of geeks, “Actually, this is a character of my own creation. His name is Stone and-.”
And the young lady’s eyes glazed over with disappointment. Without saying another word, she skulked away. My step-son merely shrugged, placed the patch back over his eye, and resumed walking through the convention.
At my side, my wife mewled “Baby, nooooooooooooo!” But it was too late. I realized that I’d succeeded in doing what I’d set out to do. Only I’d done the job too well.
Weeks later, I was dozing off for a post-work nap when the phone rang. I heard my step-daughter retrieve the phone. It was another boy from her school. Like the el trains in The Blues Brothers, the phone calls from boys were becoming so frequent that I was starting not to notice them. I began to nod off again.
“Yes, you must chop down the tallest tree in the forest with,” it was my step-daughter yelling into the phone, “a herring!”
I was awake. I sat up in bed and craned my head towards the conversation. Had I heard that right?
“You know, like from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. What? You haven’t seen it? Whatever.”
Was my step-daughter really quoting Python? To a boy? And then giving him shit for not knowing the reference? My head buzzed with the implications. While girls from the theater clique in my high-school occasionally watched Monty Python, I never got the idea that they actually liked it. Along similar lines, it wasn’t until my second year of college that I ever heard a female quote anything nerd-culture related. What would I have done if a girl had quoted Star Wars or Python to me at my step-daughter’s age? And then the reason for the increasing number of phone calls dawned on me. The junior-high barbarians were gathering outside my gate. And I had done nothing to prepare for them.
I began to look for a more conspicuous place to hang my katana collection. I asked myself if I should put a nice, big gun cabinet in the living room and fill it with Remingtons and Mossburgs. I fancied hanging a rusty machete from a single, bent nail above the front door’s threshold. Yet as I thought of ways to prepare for the oncoming storm of teenage dating, I was struck by how differently things had turned out for my kids. Both had been exposed to the same experiences growing up, yet my step-son was a social pariah where my step-daughter was a social magnet.
Yet this story has no end. I have no pithy insights to share. Three years later and my step-son still doesn’t relate to people outside of the works of Tolkien or Hironobu Sakaguchi. It doesn’t seem to bother him, yet I can’t help but wonder if my mother had been right. Sure, the uncomfortable situations she forced me into had a devastating effect on my self-esteem when I was a kid. Yet at least I grew up to be a (somewhat) well rounded adult. The thought that I should have raised my step-son similarly is hard to bear. As for my step-daughter, I’m happy to report that she doesn’t suffer fools. And apparently I’m not the only parent who has raised a socially inept boy.