I Am My Son's Father

The older I get, the more I appreciate my Dad. Just last night he was posting photos from 鼻頭角 on the northern coast of Taiwan, one of Mom and Dad's regular hiking spots. I cracked up because he took a drone photo with a few family members in it. Everyone was smiling while he had a serious face flying the drone.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my Son. He is a textbook Highly-Sensitive Child (HSC). I can't help but think he inherited those traits from me. Walking to school this week, I asked him what the highlight of his weekend in Tahoe was. Of course he answered that it was the entire day we had spent just the two of us on the slopes. Was I fishing to have that engrained in his memory? Maybe definitely. Did he have to answer that way? No. My boy is genuine in his responses.

Sitting on the side of the mountain waiting for the boy to strap in to his snowboard bindings, I realized that I had been visiting this same mountain for more than 20 years. I have made sure that we have always had AWD vehicles in the stable for this reason and I cannot remember a single year since that I have not made it up to Lake Tahoe in the winter.

By all accounts, my daughter is "normal". Academic, yet social; sporty, yet artsy. My son and I seem to be proud of being weird. We enjoy time by ourselves. We can spend hours engrossed in the same thing, terribly frustrated, yet simultaneously enjoying ourselves. The boy and I like being on the water and being on the snow. It seems to calm our busy minds. It seems to give us something else to focus on.

I decided that next year I am going for it. After four plus decades on Earth, the background noise of life has grown so loud. I love being on the racetrack because of the sheer focus and inability to do anything but drive fast. I love being on the mountain because there is a focus on riding and the inability to do anything but enjoy yourself. 2024 is a year of cleanup so that 2025 can be sent becoming the man I want my son to become.