Sweet Sixteen

Paddy on the guitar
Originally uploaded by aderieg

As of yesterday, 19 February 2008, Patrick would now be old enough to get a driver’s license, if we lived in the US. Since we live in Austria, he is now legally permitted to drink alcohol. To be honest, I am rather relieved that Patrick is not interested in either of those possibilities. Living with Patrick is fascinating, occasionally challenging, always interesting, and it gives us enough to think about without having to deal with the more commonplace concerns of the parents of sixteen-year-olds.

Such as labels, for instance ...

When Peter and I came home from New Year’s Eve celebrations relatively early, about one in the morning, we realized that we were not the first ones home, because there was a yellow Post-it sticker on the door to our flat announcing “I am home”. We went in quietly and saw that not only were Patrick’s shoes there, but there were also more Post-it stickers: on the mirror (“I am a mirror image of myself”), on the telephone (“I am irritating”), on the light switch (“I am light”) ... This was a bit surprising, but we didn’t pursue the matter immediately.

When I got up the next morning and went into the kitchen to make coffee, I realized that these labels were everywhere. On the freezer (“I am cold”), on the refrigerator (“I am the creator of life”), the door to the television cupboard (“I am propaganda”) – literally everywhere. This was more than surprising, it was actually slightly unnerving. Following the trail of yellow labels around the house, I found the last one above the bed where Patrick was sleeping: “I am not sure.”

When Patrick got up later, he seemed rather surprised himself, and he was not able to explain the labeling action entirely coherently either. He had apparently started with the intention of leaving a note for us and it just went on from there, so that was how he had spent New Year’s Eve at home by himself, when we thought he must be having a good time at a party. Since then, some of the labels have shifted (I recently picked something up and was startled to find it labeled “I am an angel”, but then I realized that it was lying where the manger scene had been during the Christmas holidays, and the angel was obviously not returned to the cellar with its label still stuck to it), others are still in their original position (the hall closet: “I am mysterious” – perhaps slightly more promising than one of Patrick’s previous descriptions of our chaotic hall closet as looking “a bit abstract”). No one seems to know what to do with the labels, so we just live with them for the time being.

Then, of course, there is the perennial and increasingly acute problem that Patrick is bored with school, tired of the relentless pressure of schoolwork, and impatient to be finished and off and away on his own. None of the conventional arguments for why he should stay and finish school really seem to apply, but now he only has a little over a year left, so it seems – at least for the moment – like a good idea to stay and finish.

Patrick’s wanting to set out into the world on his own impresses me now again and again. When he was little, his greatest fear was that his chaotic and careless family might lose him somewhere in the big world, which led to numerous crisis situations. He projected this fear onto a very tiny little cuddle animal, Liony, which meant that looking after Liony, especially when travelling, became a matter of extreme urgency. Liony has been fished out of the Danube, snatched from a London taxi about to dash off, wandered the length and breadth of transcontinental airplanes, played hide-and-seek among the furniture of various homes and hotels throughout Europe and North America. Keeping up with an adventurous creature that small can be quite stressful. At some point, I made a “Liony-finder” out of a key chain that beeped in response to whistling, which was attached to Liony with a tiny collar. Apart from the minor glitch that Patrick hadn’t yet learned to whistle then, this was a very helpful device.

The other night as Patrick was feeling a bit low and said he would rather be a lion like Liony, I found it my sad duty to break it to him that Liony is not, in fact, a lion, but is actually a tiger. A very small tiger. Now that Patrick has meanwhile gotten some sleep, has new batteries, and has now turned sixteen, I am confident that he will be able to bear this revelation with equanimity. Seeing Patrick happy, confident, overflowing with ideas, I feel certain and reassured that – with or without Liony – Patrick is in no danger whatsoever of losing himself anywhere in the big world.