We have always spoken with him a lot about our expectations and general life development. Now we lovingly call it the ’lecture circuit.’ Who knows how far those moments really will go with him because, unsurprisingly, we see little evidence of assimilation of our talks into his words and behavior — but I guess life is a long-term project, right? That’s not to say he isn’t a great young person; I just realize learning to shed childhood must be more difficult than I remember.

As parents I think it is important to remain aware of the state he is in — which is to say, waking up from a fourteen-year sleep walk. It must be a shocking experience to be alive and have sensations all that time, and now to mysteriously become more aware of all those sensations you didn’t really understand or even think about. What a confusing feeling it must be to realize you don’t know shit about the everyday reality you’ve been walking around in for your entire life. And yet I feel like our natural reaction to that discovery of ignorance is typically arrogance, to reassure the mind that it is not really as unaware as it now understands it has been. And who ever warns developing people of that tendency?