Offering comfort, and being nerds

The kid finished playing Undertale last Friday.

He didn’t go to school because there was this sports event and the day before, he told me he didn’t want to go. I asked him a couple of times: “are you sure? Not even to hang out with your friends?” Nope, he replied. And I wasn’t going to force him. Why make him miserable just because it’s school? He’s not a sporty kid and that’s fine, he has marching band and loves it, he loves art, he even likes English enough to have considered being an English teacher in the future.

Since he didn’t go to school, both of us slept a bit more. Didn’t have to wake up at the unholy hour of 5:30 am, when everything is still dark and now it’s also cold because of the dark season. We had breakfast and I told him to tidy his room and sent him to the neighborhood’s tiny market to buy some stuff to make the day’s meals. He completed all those tasks and then sat in the living room with the Nintendo Switch.

I was working, wearing my headphones, in the space that’s supposed to be the dining room but works as our shared workspace. We both were doing our own thing in companionable silence. When suddenly, he came to me with the Switch in his hands and puppy eyes. He showed me the screen.

“I finished it,” he said.

“That’s awesome!”

“But now I feel sad because it’s over. What do I do now?”

Ahhhh. I know that feeling. Whenever I finish a book or a show I loved, one that made me feel a lot of things and I wish I could keep reading or watching, I feel this way too, this sensation of emptiness, of uncertainty. It’s never happened to me with a game, because I’m not a gamer, I’ve never finished a game, and I’ve only played a few games in my life. The only thing I play now is Pokémon Go.

“Do you want a hug?” I asked him.

“Yeah”

I hugged him. I told him I understood the feeling and let him just be.

“I know I have Deltarune to play next, but it’s not the same. I want more of the characters like they’re in this game, but now it’s over. And even if I play it again, it will not be the same, I will never be able to play it again for the first time.”

I bit my own tongue thinking about fanfiction and what it offers, because he’s baby and well… we know what lies in that path. He already knows about the existence of fanfiction. He told me one of his friends writes fics.

After that, I made him a cup of hot chocolate and just let him embrace that feeling. He is ok now, still mentioning it from time to time, but it was an interesting thing to witness, especially having experienced it myself in the not-too-distant past.

He’s such a nerd (affectionate) and it can be so weird how living with me has shaped who he is.

Just the other day, I made mushroom soup, and he asked me:

“I wonder how people discovered what kind of mushrooms are edible.”

“Trial and error,” I told him. “I suppose that was the process with every single thing, and then passing that knowledge through generations and generations.”

“And what about the puffer fish?”

“I imagine it was something similar.”

Then we tried to imagine how it went and kept talking about that kind of stuff during the whole meal.

Being a parent is not easy but I’m so grateful for this not-so-tiny-anymore human. He’s such a wonderful being, even though sometimes he gets on my nerves, as (I suppose) any teenager does with their parents.