Having a son is going to be metal.

I base my feelings on nothing but feelings.

I don't really know what it takes to raise a successful human being.  I am a human being that is relatively comfortable but I am not successful and I hate my job enough to think that the comfort is not worth it.  I agree that "the male child... must separate himself from the original, indispensable, nurturing mother and venture forth into a way of experiencing himself that is not her and that he cannot learn from her either by example or by instruction...  a boy must learn to be different from her without this difference deteriorating into either antagonism or fear."  Is it wrong to think that it would be easier to raise a girl who could just learn to be like her mother?

I do not want my son to be like me, but I do want to like my son.  I worry that if I like my son, then that means that he is like me, which means that he is fundamentally fearful and antagonistic.  At this particular moment in my life, the last thing I want is for my son to follow in his old man's foot steps.  So let him deviate.

I saw my father work grave yard shifts, own a bar, and go back to college and graduate Sigma Cum Laude by the time I was a junior in college. But, I think that was too late.  I saw my father hate everything about his life for too long and now I think that I have to hate mine to be a grown up.

So in a little less than two years I will be getting out of the army, pursuing a masters, and getting a job that I actually like.  So maybe my son won't have to deviate too much.  Maybe he will see me struggle and disagree with my choices.  But he will see that I have made choices that have made me happy.  He will not come to the conclusion that being a grown up means sacrificing dreams for comfort.  Let him deviate!  Let him deviate just so long as he is being himself.  So long as he isn't doing it to not be me.