My son John doesn’t get as much air time here as Seamus, largely because he’s mostly uncomprehensible to me. The few things that he’s interested in have nothing to do with me. Even if they could, like his camping thing through the Boy Scouts, he makes sure that I am not a part of it. He hates my kind of music, he won’t cut his hair, and he refuses to participate in any number of the interesting things that the rest of the family does. What kind of kid who likes to camp won’t go camping? One who likes to push his mother’s buttons, that’s what kind.

He’s relentlessly teenaged, and it makes my mother snort. Apparently he’s just like me? Was I really that irritating? How could I have been, I was working at the age he’s about to become next month. I don’t remember having time to be irritating, although I do concede that I probably had as little to do with my family as John does with me. This has been going on long before he hit the teen years though. We clashed when he was a first-grader, I remember.

Every chance he gets, he stays at his father’s. I can see him wanting to live there full time one of these days, and I’ll probably let him. We get along better when we see less of each other.

He’s never much participated in any group sports or activities either. There were a few years of karate lessons, and I’d always go cheer him on at the belt tests even if he didn’t want me there. I ahve to make him go to his brother’s events. But this year, finally, he found something that sparked his interest.

John was invited to join his school’s Academic Pentathlon team, which surprised and pleased me to no end, since it wasn’t too many years ago that his grades were in the toilet due to a determined lack of effort on his part. He’s been practicing like crazy, making for some weird pick-up times after the buses stopped but before I got off work. I sucked it up and left early; after all these years of shuffling his younger brother to baseball and whatnot, I owed him that.

The event itself was held a week and a half ago. Most of the tests were behind closed doors, but at the end of the day, they held a game-show style quiz that the families could watch. And he rocked this section, and Seamus and I had a good time rooting him on. We could see his grin and his thumbs-up when he got one right from the bleachers.

The awards ceremony was this weekend, and Junior and Seamus and I went and watched. We were very surprised to see him nab a second place in Literature. Where’d that come from? He hardly reads anything but trashy fiction, as far as I know. I wasn’t half so surprised to see him take first in Science, in his division. He’s very good at that, and is already gearing up his high school classes to make sure he gets into the hard-core stuff. The school’s whole team did pretty well, but the best part for me was watching him be the ham up on stage, completely happy with himself. I don’t get to see that very often.

Of course, he wouldn’t even slap his brother five when he went down to congratulate him after, and he barely grunted at me when I told him I was proud of him the next day. Still, it’s good to see that he’s capable of having fun. I’d begun to doubt it.