O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
On Dec. 29, at the Bishop McVinney Auditorium in Providence, R.I., the Providence Fire Department Training Academy graduated its 57th class. There were 16 trainees in the class, one of whom was my son, Owen.
I’m not usually sentimental at graduation ceremonies. Honestly, they’ve become so ubiquitous that they’ve lost most of their symbolic significance. When you have graduation ceremonies for preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, trade school, clown school, beauty school, college, grad school, or any other time that a curriculum is completed, the ceremonies tend to lose their shine.
But my son’s graduation got to me, particularly given Owen’s situation a few years prior, when my wife and I both believed that the boy would be living with us and stealing my socks from my dresser for many decades to come.
And Owen and I, like many fathers and sons, have had a complicated and, sometimes, tumultuous relationship. The father/son relationship is too often rooted in stereotypical and antiquated notions of masculinity.
For example, men are supposed to be stoic and not show emotion, particularly with other men, and when raising our sons, we’re often challenged with teaching them to become a “real man,” a concept that is vague, arbitrary and tenuous.
A father is supposed to raise a “real man” with the lessons passed down from his own father, and then the next “real man” raises another “real man,” and suddenly, throughout generations, you have the stereotypical “American man,” which is basically an extension of the American cowboy.
I can also admit that I struggled with parenthood, particularly with my son. While we have different personality-types—he is a high-energy person who needs to remain in perpetual motion, while on any given day, you can find me buried in the couch watching “SVU” marathons—it doesn’t excuse my incredible self-centeredness1 while Owen was growing up.
As I’m sure many parents can relate, it was many of the same traits that I dislike about myself that I saw reflected back at me by my son, especially when he became an adolescent. When he was struggling to get his proverbial shit together as a teenager, I should’ve been more present, and these are obviously things I can never correct.
In high school, Owen struggled to find himself and his place in the world. And let’s face it, schools are not designed to cater to most young men, who are slower to mature than females and often find it near-impossible to sit still and focus their thoughts for six straight hours. My wife and I white-knuckled our way through Owen’s senior year of high school, learning at the last possible moment that he would, indeed, graduate with his class.
Then, once he graduated high school, Owen found his calling.
It started with an EMT training course that he really enjoyed, then he went on to complete the New Hampshire Fire Academy before taking a full-time position with a department in Southern Hampshire.
While working in Merrimack, he decided to apply to the Providence Fire Department Training Academy.
Now, starting on Jan. 1, Owen will be working as a full-time firefighter at a busy station in the second-largest fire department in New England.
In short, my son changed and turned around his life. To change our behavior for the better is one of the most difficult tasks that any human being can perform, and this fills me with admiration for him. My son refused to let setbacks and rejections deter him—he may have gotten some of that from me, seeing writers also share an intimacy with rejection—and at 20 years old, he is now pursuing his dreams.
And I am proud of him and the man that he has become. Congratulations, son. You did it.
- I was supposed to become a famous writer, and my writing pursuits often took precedent over anything else, something I deeply regret. ↩︎
You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com