A Blog Post My Son Asked Me To Write About His Love of Ventriloquism
I’ve always wanted to be a father. My wife has always wanted to be a mother. When we started dating back in the late oughts, she told me she felt she was put on earth to be a mother.
More specifically, I’ve always wanted to be a father to a child like my nine-year-old son Declan-Haven Dilla Rabin. I wanted to be the parent of a child who is creative, funny, intense, morbid, smart, and endlessly obsessive about the many things he’s passionate about.
My son is weird. I mean that in the best possible way. I’m not sure the progeny of my wife and myself could be anything other than unusual.
Declan cycles through eccentricities. We know what he’s fixated on by his drawings. I process the world by writing about it. My son processes the world by drawing. That’s his great love.
Some of my happiest moments are when Declan and I are seated at the table together, him drawing and me writing, with looks of neurodivergent glares of furious intensity as we do what we love and that we were put on earth to do.
One obsession will lead to another. He fell in love with the aesthetic and lore of Five Nights at Freddy’s before he ever played the game or watched the movie.
What he responded to was the morbidness of a family-friendly franchise about a serial killer who shoves the corpses of the children he murdered into cursed animatronics.
But Declan was also intrigued by animatronics as a whole. They’re just so weird and creepy. I was going to use profanity unnecessarily, but I am writing this blog post partially because my son asked me to, and I do not want it to include language I don’t want him to use.
He’s fascinated by how things work. He’s a deconstructionist by nature and is fascinated by how things are made: make-up, costumes, puppets, and practical effects.
He is cursed and blessed to have a father with little useful, practical, lucrative knowledge but a head full of weird information about random detritus. I’m happy to share this information with my son the same way my dad imparted much of his weird information as a strange but welcome birthright.
I listened to my dad as a kid because I found the weird trivia in his brain way more interesting than what I was taught at school. My son similarly listens to me when I talk about weird stuff. He retains that information even when it seems like he’s not paying attention.
Declan’s obsession with Five Nights at Freddy’s, combined with his deep interest in Goosebumps in all its forms (literary, television, and film), led him to develop an intense interest in ventriloquism.
He was inspired by the legendary 1993 novel Night of the Living Dummy by R.L. Stine, the Stephen King of the twelve-and-under set. Slappy the Dummy is the villain of Night of the Living Dummy, and many books to come,.
Slappy’s malevolent influence extends beyond that: he’s also a fixture of both incarnations of the Goosebumps television show and both of the Goosebumps movies.
What about Slappy fascinates my son and, by extension, the rest of the world? It might be the fact that ventriloquism and dummies are inherently terrifying. Goosebumps consequently only have to make Slappy five percent creepier than the average ventriloquist dummy to make him a villain for the ages.
Declan now how a genuine Slappy dummy to call his own. It is just as creepy as the real thing. Now, Declan is teaching himself the lost art of ventriloquism. He’s bought a book and is studying the technical aspects of his new obsession.
Will Declan’s obsession with ventriloquism last? I have no idea. He tends to burn through interests quickly because of his ADHD and because he’s a ferociously curious nine-year-old, and the world is full of shiny new things competing for his interest.
Because Declan is now obsessed with ventriloquism, I am consequently obsessed with ventriloquism as well.
So expect a dramatic increase in ventriloquism content here at the Happy Place. I’ll probably revisit Magic, the single classiest ventriloquism-themed movie ever made, and the classic horror anthology Dead of Night, which I have somehow never seen.
My son is a lot like me. That makes me proud but also makes me worry about his future. He has the advantage of having been diagnosed with autism and ADHD at an early age when he could get the help and the medication that he needed. In contrast, I didn’t learn that I was neurodivergent until I was in my mid-40s and the father of two neurodivergent children.
My life has not been easy or light on trauma, and I don’t want my son to go through the things that I did. Thankfully, my childhood wasn’t all bad. As an adult, I am fortunate to relive elements of my childhood that I look back on with tremendous fondness. I remember bonding with my father about pop culture the same way that I do with my own son, who is a chip off the old block, metaphorically speaking.
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