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Rolling with the Titanic

By Katharine Niles

Having kids means confronting The Horror on a daily basis. I took my son and his friend Aleasha to a collegiate soccer game the other Saturday, and while I sat riveted in the discovery that good soccer is just ballet at ridiculously high speeds, they grew bored. My son wanted to go back to the football field next door, where we had been at half time, because if he ran up and down it three times that would be 900 feet and the Titanic was 900 feet. He loves the Titanic. He and his dad have a model of it waiting to be built in his room, complete with newly purchased card table to accommodate it.

But the Titanic utterly creeps me out and Aleasha did not want to go to the field without me. I said I didn't think there was anything to worry about, that there were only five minutes left in the game, and I would find them soon anyway. We were at the college where I teach; we lived in a brilliant and beautiful town; I knew many of the people at the game. What could go wrong?

Later, though, I found out why she hadn't wanted to be alone. Walking home from the bus stop one day, a man had asked her if she wanted a ride. Aleasha said no. When he asked why not (persistent bastard, I thought), she said, "Because that's my house," pointing to something that was definitely not her house but mere feet away. He left her alone then, but it brought home a bone-chilling lesson: Your children could be lost to you in the time it takes to close your eyes.

Then there is The Horror you perpetuate as a parent. Chris and I, for example, are in a totally dysfunctional tug-of-war over tying his shoes. He hates to tie his shoes and at eight and a half is still not very good at it. This is partly my fault, though, because we put them on last thing before getting to the bus, and so we're always in a hurry. Though I growl and yell at him, he's figured out that if he waits long enough I'll tie them in a huff just so we don't miss the bus. I finally looked at him and said that most of my college kids who flunked out did so because they were spoiled brats who had never learned how to fend for themselves and though the shoelaces were a small thing, they were an example of this. Mother of God! What was I coming to? Poor Chris rightly face-planted in shame into the couch.

Alert now to The Horror's presence, I repented and recalibrated. I arrived at a healthier reckoning and we managed to make up in peace. In such mundane detail, however, lies the art of parenthood. It is fundamentally amazing any of us survive intact into adulthood given the demands upon parents to be as conscious as possible, all the time, of their own B.S. I like to think I do better than many, but in this example, as with Aleasha's pervert, the prevention of The Horror turns on a thin dime.

Finally, there is The Horror that they themselves potentially are. My son loves long baggie pants, army Game Cube games and riding his bike fast. He draws pictures of people shooting each other and would just as soon never cut his hair. At eight, he already looks like a miniature 15-year-old and refuses to wear many things that aren't "cool." My God! What will happen when he really is 15 and someone offers him a hit of meth? Dares him to free-climb some cliff? Will he have the sense to back down?

But perhaps that is why he loves the Titanic so much. Perhaps that is his own innate compass confronting, head on, the fact that something of such grandeur can go rotten so fast. I can't watch the movie on it. I've learned its lessons over and over again. But he needs to learn them - and there he is, smartly, figuring that out with one gigantic ship, a host of friends, a football field, and his bumbling, grouchy mother who, along with his father, love him so much they can hardly stand it.

Katharine Niles, a teacher at Fort Lewis College, lives in Durango with a dog, husband and son, Chris. Her novel, The Basket Maker, won the Editor's Choice Prize: Fiction at the 2005 Book of the Year Awards at BookExpo America.