At 8:30pm Maomao again wants to go downstairs to play. I lost my patience, scolding him for not wanting to spend more time reading or playing piano, but I eventually had to relent and let him go seeing that he’s at the brink of tears. Nowadays he plays at leat 3 or 4 hours downstairs everyday and it becomes a constant source of tension between me and him.
After he went out I sit in bed reading W. H. Auden’s Dyer’s Hand with a random symphony piece on Spotify in the background. My mind wondered to my first few years in Boston while reading the essay on the evolution of a young poet, and suddenly I was struck and weighted down by a deep sense of frustration and fulity. Not over my own laugable attempts to become a poet in my 20’s, I’ve made peace with that a long time ago. I again pondered on how Maomao is a total different person than me. This year I spent more time with him at home than ever, but instead of help us bond it only makes our relationship more and more contentious. This afternoon he was playing a song by Imagine Dragon in his room while drawing. I asked where did he learn about this song and, must have sensed the displeasure in my tone, he said, “I like Rock Music. Different people can like different things right?” I didn’t say anything and left the room. And the other day he put a song called Dancing Monkey on a loop at dinner table. He’s rather quick at picking up these random bits from kids he played with. Last week for a few days he was obsessed with Minecraft, cause kids downstairs talked about it. And before that it was Fortnite. I’m rather concerned by such indiscriminatory exposure to pop culture but I feel powerless to curb it. Conversely I’m inching ever colser to give up on trying to get him to take an interest in Classical music, a lost cause I have been devoting to from the day he was born.
I mean I know all this is me being unfair and harsh on him out of pure selfishness more than anything else. When I’m not losing my temper I put on aggresive displays of disappointment towards him just because he’s lying on the sofa daydreaming. I hate it when I’m like that but it only seems to get worse. I don’t know how to internallize this vague guilty feelings that I’m failing him in his education, so it comes out as negativity and aggression against him. Ever since he was born a recurring thoughts when I’m reading is “I wonder what Maomao will think of this when he sees it in 20 or 30 years”, as I drag a yellow highlighter across a line I like. But now sitting here it seems to me yet again that this may never happen. He’ll probably grow up not caring about books or music at all. All these thoughts I thought that I have meticulously perpetuated with ink and paper, a sort of metaphysical fist pump with him across a vast span of time and space even after I’m gone that I secretly buried between these pages, will actually all vanish with me. As that subsconscious expectation of legancy and continuity was constantly shattered and yanked away from me I suffered these bouts of futility attack.
Wang Maomao 