Mini-Me
Breathtaking! I shall call him... Mini-Me.”
And so did the deliciously despicable villain, Dr. Evil, name his midget clone in the Austin Powers James Bond parody, The Spy Who Shagged Me. Mini-Me is described as identical to Dr. Evil in every way except for the fact that he is only one-eighth of his size. I chuckingly told my wife that it seems I now have my own version of the wicked dwarf. Over the past few months, my eight-year-old son has been going around and pointing out the many (and imagined) ways that we are alike. According to him, these are all because of the fact that he is “Junior.” His older sister told us the other day that he keeps quoting many of the things I say to others. He even suggested to me recently that maybe we should consider changing his first name to mine.
To my son at the moment, it seems that I can do no wrong. Yet I also cannot help but wonder how long all this adulation is going to last. For although my son cannot stop imitating everything I do right now, according to experts, the time will also soon come when he will want to be as different from me as he can be. From that time onwards, our relationship can then go either way. Psychologist Dr. Charles D. Williams says that father-son relationships normally go through five stages. He captures these stages in the acronym IDEAL. The first stage is the (I)dolatry stage, which is where I am at the moment. As my son becomes a teenager, Williams says that we will experience a period of (D)iscord in which conflict will be the central theme. This will be a time when my son and I will supposedly often clash with each other as he rejects my expectations and directions, and he experiments with other non-traditional philosophies. More than any other time in his life, however, I guess this is when I will really need to keep my cool and to be there for him (albeit discretely inasmuch as he probably would not want me around most of the time). After this tumultuous period, and assuming we haven’t killed each other yet, our relationship will then enter an (E)volving phase during his early adulthood. This is when the character of our interactions will shift from discord to something that would appear to be more like competition. According to Williams, this is not necessarily bad since competition can be viewed as “one of the most indirect but highest forms of flattery that exists.” This is therefore the period when my son will hopefully start to grudgingly realize that maybe I’m not so un-cool after all. If we once more survive this, middle age will bring forth the time of (A)cceptance as we become more comfortable with each other and become better friends. This will also be the time when my son may start to experience some of the same challenges with his own children. For better or for worse, the cycle then loops back as my son then becomes a (L)egacy of my influence. I guess you might say that my son will eventually go back to being a Mini-Me except that he’ll likely be a lot taller. Williams writes, “Time tempers painful memories and in their place often remains admiration and respect for the difficult job being a father must have been. Older adult sons who have not yet resolved those issues with their elderly or deceased fathers, however, typically see them replayed with their teenage or young adult sons.”
Fatherhood is indeed an awesome responsibility. It’s probably the closest thing to being a god. The Mini-Me analogy may seem funny, but I do know that, right at this very moment, my son is consciously and unconsciously “cloning” the way I think, act, and feel. And I don’t think the process of assimilation is limited to just his boyhood or even teen years. We fathers exert influence on our sons from the time they are born and up to long after we are gone. We also impact not just them but their children and their children’s children as well. As families, we need to work together so that only our positive traits get transmitted to the next generations and so that they do not commit the same mistakes we did.
Be that as it may, there is a time and place for everything. For the moment, I am content to bask in my son’s idolatry. To his mother’s and sister’s chagrin, we make up a pretty devious pair and routinely hatch plans to terrorize them and take over our house-world. They’re the good guys. Paraphrasing Dr. Evil, “They’re not quite evil enough. They’re semi-evil. They’re quasi-evil. They’re the margarine of evil. They’re the Diet Coke of evil, just one calorie, not evil enough.” My wife may be my queen and my daughter my princess, but my son, well, what was that other line that Dr. Evil stole from Jerry Maguire? “Mini-Me, you complete me.”
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