“I swear ever since that night, it was like Anthony Jr. just stopped growing up,” I was saying to my neighbor, Joanne, sitting on the front porch of my home. It was the same home I had lived in when my husband had walked out. But it was ten years later now and I was making the payments on the house.
“I grew up pretty quick after that. I know I was 32, but I wasn’t… I’d never been responsible for anything really before. After that, I just… I knew that I needed to do what was necessary to take care of my son. I got a job and I went back to school and finished getting my bachelor’s. I realized, when I was doing everything myself, just how little Big Anthony had been doing in the first place. And, you know, the resources I had in myself that I hadn’t even realized I had,” I said. Joanne nodded along as I spoke. I wasn’t bragging or anything. It wasn’t like we lived in a mansion or that I was making six figures. But I had, rather quickly, gotten my life in order.
“You could stand to do a little bit more yard work,” Joanne said, smiling gently and looking over her shoulder to where leaves were blowing through my fence and into her yard. But I was too annoyed to joke. I took a sip of my coffee and shook my head.
“I asked Anthony Jr. to rake the leaves,” I said sourly, “But I knew he wasn’t going to do it. I will rake them this weekend, I am sorry.” Joanne lifted her hands in front of her chest and shook her head.
“I was only teasing hun…” Joanne said placatingly. I waved my hands.
“I know, I know,” I said, “It is just… look, I know that I shouldn’t have done that. Gone into his room like that when he was little and laid all that heavy stuff on him. I know he was afraid and hurting because of what his father said and I just made it worse. That was a mistake I accept. I apologized for it the next day! I apologized for it on his 18th birthday. I get it, that was wrong. I am not minimizing it
“Well are you really sure that is the cause of Anthony Jr.’s… problems?” Joanne asked. There was a lot of stuff packed into that little word that Joanne tacked onto the end of her sentence.
Anthony Jr. had a lot of problems. A lot of problems that went back a long time. Anthony was 22 years old and he lived at home with me. That was fine, by the way. Lots of 22-year-olds, especially these days, lived at home. But he had quit school at 16, the earliest age he was allowed to. I didn’t even bother to fight him on that, because he couldn’t pull in the grades necessary to graduate anyway. And it wasn’t as though he was distracted. He didn’t have a lot of friends. He wasn’t very good at sports. No, he was flat out bad at sports. Even before he dropped out, he spent most of his time at home on the internet or playing video games. Since he turned 18, I had been pushing him to take classes to get his GED, begging him to get a job, and asking him to help out around the house. But he didn’t do any of that. He just sat around the house and asked me when dinner would be ready.
None of these problems were new, though. They hadn’t cropped up when he quit school. Or even before that. They had been lurking for some time. I didn’t even notice it at first, I guess because it wasn’t the kind of thing you could notice. And the full scope of it only came on gradually. But the overarching problem, if I had to give it a name, was arrested development.
Anthony Jr. had simply stopped growing older when he was 12 years old. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it was true. He liked all the same things that he liked when he was 12, video games and cartoons and super heroes. And that would fine, it really would, if his interests had expanded beyond that. But he had never gotten interested in any of the things that growing boys got into. He didn’t want to take up a sport or join a band or date a girl. He just wanted to play video games and watch cartoons. He was immature, he laughed at childish things, he was insensitive and self-centered. In short, he was 12 years old.
Hell, even physically, it seemed, that he was stunted. He didn’t look exactly as he had looked at 12, of course. But he didn’t seem to be fully growing into a man either. Big Anthony, for all his faults, looked the part of a man. He wasn’t tall by any stretch, but he was broad shouldered, solidly built, and bearded. Anthony Jr. was scrawny, wispy, and was still shorter than me even though I was only 5’3. He had simply not advanced, in any meaningful way, since his father walked out. Since I had told him, too early, that he needed to be a man.
“What else could have caused those… problems?” I asked Joanne, “It started that night, when I went into his room and cried. And he just… stopped, right after that. Stopped everything. And there wasn’t any other trauma in his life to explain it. I worked hard, I gave him a good life. He never lacked for anything but luxuries. I mean, you babysat him when I went to work, you know that nothing else can explain it.” Joanne shrugged.
“It was probably more his father leaving, than anything you did,” Joanne said. She had only recently stopped insisting to me that there was nothing wrong with Anthony Jr. So, I could not really trust her judgment here. I shook my head.
“If that is the case, that’s my fault too,” I said.
“You didn’t chase Big Anthony away. He is a man-child. He ran away,” Joanne said.
“Then I gave my son a child for a father, that’s my fault too,” I said, resigned. I felt a little bit better, just venting everything to Joanne. I don’t know that she really qualified as a ‘friend’ but it was nice to talk to someone about… all of this. It had been festering as a worry in my mind for so long, it was almost a relief to say it in the starkest possible terms. We sat in silence for a minute, the problem sitting unsolved between us.
“I love my son,” I said, honestly, after a pause, “And, in a lot of ways, I don’t mind taking care of him. I would miss him if he left and he isn’t terribly expensive. But, in the long term, I cannot watch over an adult-child for the rest of my life. Anthony Jr… he doesn’t even really know how to take care of himself, and he doesn’t seem to want to learn to take care of himself. What happens when I am 75 and he is 55? How can I take care of him then? He isn’t… he doesn’t have any mental deficiency besides laziness. It isn’t like I can put him in a home or something. He just…”
“You are thinking way too far ahead!” Joanne said, interrupting me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You sound like you’re ready to give up already! You are planning what you are going to do in 30 years. Your son is only 22. He is hardly hopeless yet!”
“I don’t think you realize how bad it is,” I said, looking over my shoulder towards my sons room. I knew there were Pokemon posters on the wall in that room. Mountain Dew cans. The nest of a Peter Pan who refused to grow up.
“I mean look, you came to me, so you can’t have just given up. You came to me for advice, right?” Joanne asked. I hadn’t really known why I engaged Joanne that day, to be honest. I’d found a dirty pair of boxer shorts sitting on the living room floor and knew my son had just left another mess for me and I’d lost it. I didn’t yell at him (why bother?), I had just marched over to Joanne, asked her to come over for coffee, and spilled it all.