One of the fun things that happens with having Surprise Step Kids is I get to feel really, really, old.

The other day, I was trying to explain to the 12 yo about how dial-up internet worked. He knew the sound it made, but he didn't really get it. I had to explain so many pieces that to me are just knowledge.

"Well, first, we had to get an AOL CD-ROM."

"What's a CD-ROM?" (Thankfully he didn't ask what AOL was).

"You know what a CD is, right? Well, it's like that, but it could store programs on it on it as well as just songs."

"Why didn't you just download it from the internet?"

"You needed to use the CDROM to load the internet. There was no wifi. You had to plug your computer into the phone line and have a program that ran the internet in order to access the internet."

And then we had to talk about what a landline was and how it had cords that plugged into the wall and you could use one of those cords to "dial up" the internet.

Bless his heart. He was like "when I was a kid, phones only had 64 GB of data on them! And they had home buttons!" I tried explaining how little memory was on a CDROM. He did not get it. He has no concept of the world before smart phones.

But it made me think a lot about the fact that I created my very first email address when I was about his age. One of my siblings had gotten a free AOL CD-ROM, the kind that came with a brief window of FREE ACCESS TO THE INTERNET (all in the attempt to lure you into paying for a subscription). And I used it to create an email address.

Ah! The world was my oyster! I could contact anyone in the world! I wrote a grand total of one email with that email address before the AOL free access expired. I was back to living in my square little house with no internet.

It's very interesting. Being the 10th of 13 kids, especially in a Utah Mormon family, there were pieces of my childhood that definitely fit more in the 80s than the 90s. In some ways, we were behind the times. And then there are other things that I had an advantage on over other people my age. Computers were one of those things.

It's not that I was particularly gifted with computers. I'm not. But I am native to computers in a way many kids my age (at least in my demographic/area of the country) weren't. That was largely thanks to my Grandpa.

Grandpa Todd was a computer engineer. Honestly, I'm not sure that was his exact title? He's dead, so I can't ask him. But I do know that he worked extensively with computers, starting with the kinds that took up entire rooms (boy that will be fun to explain to the 12 yo someday - they took up entire rooms and could process less data in an entire day than his phone can process in 30 seconds).

Grandpa Todd liked technology. When I was little, he was buying the latest and greatest computers (he stopped doing this eventually; I think computers' capabilities surpassed his tastes at some point). His hand-me-down computers, he gave to us. So before most of my friends had computers in their homes, I did.

I played video games on them. I remember playing video games on the computer by time I was like 8, maybe earlier. We used floppy disks to load them (that will also be fun to explain to the 12 yo at some point - they could hold about 1.44 MB of data. I don't think he even knows what a MB is). Commander Keen was my favorite video game. There was also one with a kid who was wearing pajamas in a dream-land and fighting monsters. I liked that one too.

I also used computers to write. I am native to typing. It is honestly more intuitive for me to write on a computer than by hand. I type very quickly and make a lot of mistakes. I'm just very good at correcting them (most of the time).

One thing that has always been true about me is I never really kept up with trends. I do what I like, when I want. I typically adopt things much later than the general public and only when it makes sense to my brain (and as a neurodivergent human, that often takes more time than it "should"). So I am very, very out of date when it comes to what the kids are doing.

The 13 yo has started inviting me to play Minecraft every night. I don't always agree, but I've done it a couple of times. It's comical.

I actually was an early adopter of Minecraft (see above where video games were an interest from a young age). I got Minecraft when it was still in the Beta mode. I know it was before May of 2012. I loved Minecraft. At some point I stopped playing it because - life. (I guess I am an adult after all).

The game these kids are playing is not the game I played. I'm constantly asking questions about what block types are, which block types are useful for what, etc.

Also, I played it on the computer. The Switch controls are entirely different. I feel so, so incredibly old. 13 yo will make fun of me, very gently. I think next time he does, I'm going to tell him "Be patient with me, I'm from the 1980s."

It's very quickly becoming the family joke that I'm old. The 12 yo regularly calls me old. I could argue the semantics of "I'm not even 40!" But from his perspective, he's right. 37 is ancient for a 12 year old. Also, the world is not the same one I lived in at his age. I, knowing kids today don't use it, used "lol" as an example of how things change rapidly in slang and he shot back "yeah, that's a word that 40 year olds use."

Lol.

By the time my parents were my age, they had 11 kids. I've slowly been keeping tabs on that as I aged - comparing my age to theirs and how many kids they had by that point. On the one hand, what the hell were they thinking? On the other hand, what the hell were they thinking?

I'm too new at being a step dad to say I'm good at it, but I know for a fact I'm a million times better at this than I would have been if I'd started having kids when I got married at 21. Good god, 21 year olds are babies! What the hell are they doing even getting married, much less having kids!

My brain cannot compute that I'm almost 40, but it is very aware of how young my niblings and my step kids are. My nephew just turned 21. At his age, I was engaged and wanted a baby. If there is a god, the best thing they ever did for me was make that not my reality. Thank you, god.

I like being a dad now that I've matured enough to be able to be patient and kind and silly and not take so much personally. I'm also very grateful that I'm a dad who has spent the last 20 years unpacking my trauma so that I don't foist that onto these kids. I would have regretted being a parent earlier in my life because I could not have been the parent the kids deserved. Maybe now that I'm 37, I have a chance.

But because I am 37, I am old, and patience is having to go both ways. I may not know why 10+9=21, and I may not understand why it's uncool to say GOAT anymore, and I may shift (what does that even mean???) while playing Minecraft, but at least I'm good at laughing at myself.

**I will be launching a blog titled "Ask a Trans Man" sometime shortly. If you want to submit a question, use this link: https://forms.gle/toXV81A4obaBYTDU8

***Want to help us escape a state trying to ban our rights? Donate to my paypal now! https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/XGGBW2YFYKQGU