The Lego Build
Raising a teenager is difficult, throw in a pandemic, step parents and a society filled with sex, greed, and entertainment and it doesn’t get any easier. Oliver is my youngest son, he turns 13 in January, and our relationship is not like most. He is my step son, but I have been the primary father figure since he was a toddler. The relationship between Oliver and myself is different, but not unlike many other father son relationships, I struggle to spend time with him and when I do, I am overly critical. He’s impatient, impulsive and struggles to listen. He is a boy and I am a man and if we don’t learn to communicate, we will tear each other apart as he turns from boy to man. The best way to ensure good communication is by providing a comfortable environment for it to live. So I decided to bring Oliver and my interests together and buy us the Nasa Apollo Saturn V Lego set to build together.
Bags 1-4
The goal of this build is to create a foundation for communication and a Saturn V rocket. I picked an activity he excels, and one I am a novice, which allows him to take the lead role. It also lessen the opportunity of me being critical. He lays out the bags and directions, opens the first bag and separates the pieces by color. I sit down and he explains how the build is separated into 12 different bags, we decided we would work on one bag per day at the end of the night, after his twin sisters went to bed.
I used the time during the first couple bags asking questions on how to build or what something means. Oliver was patient and knowledgeable with his answers. We often view our children from above, but sometimes we need to look up to them as well to see who they are becoming, I was happy to see the man he is shaping into. During the 3rd and 4th bags I was getting more comfortable and we had a lot of small parts that we had to build multiples of. During this portion I could see and feel Oliver competing with me. I could even feel myself competing too, after all I am a man, but I said “slow down” and then watched him race me. He beat me. Kinda. He finished first, but when we went to compare our 4, he had an error and had to rebuild. Up to that point he had been fixing my mistakes, so I was curious to see how he handle failure from the leadership position. He didn’t appear frustrated and calmly fixed his mistakes. We made jokes about it and chuckled a little.
After finishing bag 4 we both took turns holding the rocket and admiring the design that was taking shape. We excitedly flipped through the instruction book to see what was ahead. In the first section of the build we laid a foundation, it wasn’t glamorous, but it was necessary. By allowing my son to play “father” and myself playing “son” he was given an opportunity to grow and I was proud to see how he grasped it. The trust gained will help us during the next section of our build, bags 5-8 where we will change roles and and open up the lines of two way communication.
