Ghost Recon and Loving Your Child in Every Season
This is a weird story, but still very on-brand for a #DadLife-focused Substack. Somehow, playing a violent video game with my daughter triggered an internal emotional crisis for me about the inevitability of change and loss.
Two years ago, I was enjoying some alone time in the living room playing Ghost Recon: Wildlands. It’s a truly wild game. Imagine Grand Theft Auto, but thrown in a blender with a story about CIA Black Ops taking on the drug cartels in Bolivia. You steal cars, leap from stolen helicopters, or just race stolen dirt bikes around the mountains.
My then 12 year-old daughter came downstairs. Her name is Sylvie.
Despite having more than one article on Dad Saves America now about playing video games, I really hardly ever play. Sylvie doesn’t much care for video games, and Ghost Recon is particularly inappropriate given all the violence and petty theft mixed with bad language. Normally I just turn the game off if she comes into the room. But at this moment, I could tell my child wanted to sit with me and see what I was doing. She just wanted to be together on my terms, I think.
So we played. I started by going to Settings and changing the game’s language from English to Spanish, that way neither one of us would even understand the F-bombs and potty mouth language. I looked at her and asked, “You wanna dive out of a helicopter?”
“YESSSS!” She answered with a big smile and wide eyes. Game on!
After stealthily dispatching a few low-life drug dealers holed up in a seaside mansion, I hooked Sylvie up with their helicopter to fly around the badlands of Bolivia. As she’s flying the helicopter around clumsily and laughing, I watch her, and I can’t help but notice how different my little girl is from just one year prior.
I started paying attention to her mannerisms and vocabulary.
She was using expressions I’d heard but never heard her use before. A few weird slang terms I’m unfamiliar with and a newfound dark sense of humor. “I’m just vibing,” she says while parachuting into a mountain range. I belly laughed. Where did she pick up this expression? Wasn’t us.
“Skib,” she says, as her character hits the ground and detaches from the parachute.
I guess this word is Gen Alpha slang for “cool”? Who knows.
Where Is My Khaki Kid?
Looking at Sylvie seated next to me on the couch, she’s wearing jeans…a baggy t-shirt…and a thick jacket. For three long years, my daughter had been wearing exclusively khaki clothes, in honor of her hero, Steven Irwin. We’d been calling her “The Khaki Kid” because she would only leave the house in a Dickies khaki button down, tan t-shirt, and tan pants.
For three years, this was her singular fashion choice. Like Steve Jobs and his black turtleneck.
Sadly, it suddenly ended around Thanksgiving 2022. Kids change. That’s what my mother told me to prepare for, the day when this cute khaki phase would suddenly end. And it happened almost overnight.
Sylvie started adding camouflage pants to her usual rotation, slowly at first…and then all the time. No more khaki shorts. It wasn’t until after Christmas that I noticed it was camo everything. Camo pants. Camo tops. Camo headbands.
The Khaki Kid was gone. I was just now really noticing this and quietly mourning.
The kid sitting next to me goofing off with Ghost Recon was taller, more curvy, and had a full set of teeth. She was not the khaki-clad 10-year-old with whom I’d gotten so comfortable.
Change is Nature’s Delight
I’d been fretting that entire year about what was about to happen. My little girl was going to be a teenager soon. I lost sleep over it. It was the weirdest thing, because in my dreams my daughter had sort of frozen in that time period of wearing all khaki and binging Steven Irwin Crocodile Hunter episodes.
Losing that particular version of her will always evoke sadness. My mother said to me that when she dreams of me and my siblings, we most often appear in the age 5-10 range. We’re all in our 30s today.
This is the way of life. It’s kind of grim, but certain versions of your child exist for only a brief moment in time. They live…and in a way, they die. What I understand today is that if I dwell only on the pain of one chapter ending, I’ll miss the chapter Sylvie is currently in.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Sitting next to this girl who dresses and talks differently than my girl of one year ago, I chose to smile, and I chose joy.
This is my daughter, and I’m her dad, and I have to learn to let go. It’s all training for the big event, when dads symbolically “give away” their daughter to another man by walking her down the aisle on her wedding day.
Far from being some dated symbol of patriarchy, it is one of the most powerful rituals we have for confronting the inevitability of change in our relationships with our kids. They’ll always be “ours,” but you still have to “give them up” to their passions, their dreams, or their true love.
To do anything else would be to covet and cling jealously.
Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.
- Yoda, Star Wars: Episode III
I love my daughter and will love her in all her phases. I don’t want things to change, but they will. I’m a big Star Wars guy, in case you haven’t picked up on that. There’s this moment in Episode I: The Phantom Menace when a young Anakin Skywalker is leaving home forever and says, “I don’t want things to change.” His mother responds, “But we can’t stop the change, any more than we can stop the sun(s) from setting.”
I, for one, will not be remembered for fighting a setting sun. I want to be remembered for smiling throughout. On that couch, playing Ghost Recon with my girl, I welcomed the Camo Kid and quietly said goodbye to the era of beige. Who knows, maybe khaki will make a comeback one day.
Stephen Kent is the author of How The Force Can Fix The World: Lessons on Life, Liberty and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away and writes for the Geeky Stoics newsletter about pop culture and philosophy. He also is a podcast host and frequent contributor for cable and local news, talk radio, conference panels, and more.
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