A couple weeks ago, my six year-old finished his first year of school, making it through kindergarten with above-average marks. I was incredibly proud of him, as any parent should be, because school is not the easiest thing for Nolan.
When the little guy was four, we enrolled him in preschool. After a month or so, probably around October of 2006, his teacher asked to speak to his mother and me. The teacher (who happened to be an ex-public school teacher and a friend of ours from high school) leveled with us; she told us that there was no way little Nolan was gonna be ready for kindergarten come this time next year. Developmentally, he was way behind the other kids, on both behavioral and emotional levels. As a parent, this hurts like hell to hear. I wished that I didn't know this woman, that I could ignore her for being an idiot, that I could stick my fingers in my ears and blather la la la la la until she went away. But that wasn't the case. She was right.
Nolan struggled that year. He made some progress, but it was at a protracted pace, compared to the other kids in his class. By the end of the year, when all the other parents were taking their children to enroll in kindergarten, while all the other children talked amongst themselves about the exciting new school they'd be attending that fall, our family's collective heart broke. We knew Nolan wasn't ready.
That year, Nolan struggled to make friends. Having a geek for a father is both a blessing and a curse. When your dad has more toys than you, you tend to look at the world through a slightly different lens. Little Nolan would walk into my office, Daddy's office, and gaze upon the walls in wonder. All those action figures! The cool posters! I gotta know what this stuff is, I can assure he thought. He'd ask me questions about Star Wars and Indy, G.I. Joe and Captain America, the Master Chief and Captain Kirk - and I'd tell him. He'd hear these amazing stories about epic heroes (and in some cases, he'd watch them), and all he wanted to do was go to school and share these wonderful tales with his "friends." But friends they really weren't; these kids thought Nolan was weird, because he talked about something other than Thomas the Tank Engine or Jay Jay the Jet Plane, because he didn't want to play football. They shunned him.
I'd often arrive at preschool to pick up my sweet little boy at playtime outside, and tears would start streaming down my cheeks when I saw him playing alone in the corner of the playground.
"I was playing Ghostbusters, daddy," he'd say - happily, but a with a hint of rejection, "but nobody wanted to play it with me." At this point in his life, he'd never seen anything more than a trailer for the flick on YouTube, but that was enough to stimulate his fertile imagination.
"Nolan," I'd reply, "You've got to understand that most of these kids don't know what that is, and without seeing it, it's just too hard for them to imagine. Why didn't you just play with them, and play whatever they were playing?"
"They just want to play football," he'd say, "but they don't want me to play with them cause I'm not on their team. Can I play football next year with them?"
This is where I would normally take a hard right and discuss the absolute stupidity of four year-olds playing football, their vampiric fathers living their own pathetic lives vicariously through the ignorance of their way-too-young sons, but I'll stay on-point.
"Do you really want to play football next year, buddy?"
"No. I just want friends." I died inside.
Around that time, maybe a little later, my XBox 360 red-ringed and bit the dust. This was before Microsoft stepped up to the plate and extended their hardware warranties to three years, so I threw the big white paperweight in a closet (I might be able to harvest a part or two from it on down the road for some technological troublemaking) and headed to Gamestop for a new one. A couple months later, Billy-boy and co. made the warranty announcement, and since I qualified, I sent my busted box off to be fixed. About a month later, I got my repaired Xbox back from Microsoft, and found myself with two consoles. In an act I'm still questioning as either brilliant or retarded, I put it up in the playroom. Nolan took to it like a nerd to a scientific calculator, and he GOT GOOD. REAL GOOD.
Over the next year, Nolan's focus on not having friends drifted farther and farther away, and his gaming prowess grew at an exponential rate. Now don't get me wrong - I didn't let the kid spend every waking moment glued to the tv. He got plenty of good 'ol normal, outside playtime, and even formed a solid relationship with the neighbor's kid. But he logged plenty of console time, too - and before long, he was burning through age-appropriate games way too easily. If games were school, you could say that Nolan was performing way, way, WAY above grade-level. He returned to preschool, and this time, he made friends, he did his work, and he excelled. Things were leveling out.
Eventually, he made it to kindergarten, and some interesting things came to our attention. After a few months, we got the call, and we went in to meet with his teacher (again, a wonderful woman that my wife and I went to high school with - small town syndrome). She was pretty sure that Nolan was ADHD, and after a visit to a behavioral pediatrician, her suspicions were confirmed. The doctor told us to be sure to keep all lines of communication open - between the teacher, ourselves and him - and if we did that, we'd get through this. And we have.
Nolan struggles with attention in a big way, and when it comes to tests, he does horribly. But the kid is brilliant, and when he's left on his own without someone demanding an answer or a timer turning the screws, he does great. His literacy teacher worked very closely with him, assessing him in alternative fashions so that he might have the greatest opportunities for success, and succeed he did. If they gave letter grades in kindergarten, he would've finished up with B average. A B average is just dandy in my book.
Which brings us back full-circle. Nolan did great on his final report card, and as a reward, I told him we'd go to Target, and he could pick out a new game for his collection. A few weeks ago, I set him up with his own XBox Live account. He can't go on and mix it up with the Underground players in a Slayer match or anything like that, but he can go on and download demos to his little heart's content. One of those demos he downloaded and fell in love with was Red Faction: Guerrilla. It's a Rated-M title, but I played through it, and I didn't notice anything overtly offensive about it, so I let him pick it up. Red Faction: Guerrilla was his I Made It Through Kindergarten! prize. Sure, it's got guns and shooting, but so does Ratchet & Clank. If it was a movie, it'd be PG-13 - you know - like the new Transformers movie. The only difference is that Red Faction: Guerrilla doesn't have a giant nude robot with wrecking ball nuts dangling in front of the camera.
Poor, poor Nolan. You see, while the demo didn't impress me in the least, the full game is absolutely badass. I haven't been this engrossed in a game since 2007's Bioshock, which is easily in my top 5 games of all time - maybe top 3. Nolan's had three or four opportunities to play the game since he got it, 'cuz Daddy's been a bad, bad man.
When we got home from Target, we threw the game in my console, which is in the living room of our split-level suburban outpost. I played through the first couple missions, and that was all she wrote. I. Was. Hooked. Even though I picked up Prototype for myself (which I hear is awesome - but I can't confirm that because I - well - I stole my son's game), I became obsessed with the eradication of the EDF from the Martian landscape. Most of my free time of late has been devoted to the progression of the Red Faction insurgency. Razing EDF property has become my free-time priority, and freeing the remaining three sectors (I've driven the EDF from Parker, Dust, and the Badlands) has become my destiny.
I'm lucky to have such an understanding son. He enjoys watching me rip across the Martian dunes on the way to a destruction target just as much as he enjoys playing the game himself. We have different playing styles, and he often suggests new strategies I might employ to better complete the mission at hand. He's usually right, too.
My precious Nolan is a wonderful, bright, caring and gentile little soul. The fact that he's let me commandeer his prize and not complained once should alone speak volumes about just how wonderful this little kid is. He's had a tough go at things in the few short years he's been with us, but he doesn't let it get him down. He's a fighter, and he's not gonna go down without a good scrap.
On Mars, little Nolan (when his sorry father lets him have the disc) is a freedom fighter, a hero in the battle against the EDF. Back in the real world, he's a hero, too. MY hero. I love you, Nolan.
Daddy
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