// “Anyone can be replaced”//

This one’s hard to write. My wife included that statement as part of her assessment of how my occasional moments of aggressiveness and intensity in making a point to my teenage boy are progressively alienating me from him and the rest of my family, including her. Her assessment also included her questioning what I thought would be left between us after our kids had left the nest, and noting that while 95% of the time I am a great father, the other 5% (while being aggressive, challenging and intense) make them all wish I weren’t around.

Well, aren’t I just a piece of shit?

First, some necessary declaimers - is “aggressive, challenging and intense” a euphemism for being physically or emotionally abusive? No. Does it mean pursuing an uncomfortable conversation beyond the point where one of my kids wishes I would simply let it drop? Absolutely.

Ah, there’s the rub. I am confrontational, in both the good and bad sense of the word. Good (I believe) in the sense that I refuse to ever be a victim of circumstance - when confronted with any sort of issue or problem, my reaction is always to attack said issue immediately and head-on. Bad in the sense that I can fail to sense when that approach has become counterproductive and is now making the problem worse.

My kids (my son especially) do not share this trait. Neither does my wife (though she has happily embraced it in me when it serves her purpose, such as allowing me to be the household disciplinarian). While I’m generally comfortable with the concept that my kids aren’t me (Thank God!), there are occasions when their passivity frustrates me to no end, and that is when the “bad 5%” tends to emerge. 

Typical scenario - boy brings home disappointing grade in a subject that’s not his favorite. I know he’s put in no special effort in the form of additional study or work. I ask what his plan is to raise the grade, and get something on the order of “I dunno, do better on my assignments I guess”.

At this point, three distinct points of view emerge:

My son feels as though a 3.8 GPA entitles him to some slack, and I should back off and let him worry about it. He goes silent.
My wife senses my son’s retreat from the conversation, and moves to “protect” him, pointing out that on balance his grades are great, etc., etc….
I become aggravated that he’s willing to settle for a grade that’s not commensurate with his abilities, that my wife is willing to do the same in order to achieve “peace”, and the fact that my suggestion that he ask his teacher what specifically must done to improve the grade fills him with a sense of horror at the prospect of “confronting ” his teacher in this way.
OK, so it’s not meth or teenage pregnancy, but as the teenage years progress, the frequency with which my desire to stand on principle is deemed “disturbing the peace” by 3/4 of my family seems to increase logarithmically, and just as obviously the negative impact on my relationships with them is all too real. And it’s impossible to separate the cumulative impact of my years of alcohol abuse from this assertion that my house has divided into two camps, and I’m alone in mine.

“Anyone can be replaced”. My bad behavior notwithstanding, that statement feels like such a betrayal. Any regular reader knows the magnitude of my imperfection as a family man, but I’ve always been committed to my family. I’ve never asked my wife to be something she’s not, nor have I ever contemplated an expiration date on her importance or usefulness to me. Yet that’s exactly what I feel she just articulated to me. 

So, what now? Sit down, shut up and leave my principles and convictions out of the parenting and buy the peace? Stand firm on my principles and learn just how replaceable I truly am? Neither is palatable. So instead I’ll try to challenge my kids less aggressively and intensely, and let them determine for themselves what level of confrontation serves their needs. And my relationship with my wife? She’s given me a lot to consider. After all, it I just found out that anyone can be replaced.