She gets off the phone and sighs and says, “Dad says he’ll go to the park with me for a little bit, but he doesn’t want to stay too long because he gets bored.”
He comes back from riding his bike around the block and says, “How come dad doesn’t ever want to do what we want to do? If he does finally do what we like, he mopes and pouts and tells us he has to get going.”
He shows up at the house with a new baseball mitt for him, and nothing for her.
He sits on the step and pretends to listen to her talk about her imaginary pony until an adult walks up. Once he sees the opportunity a new audience provides, he stands, turns to this new person and tells him tales of mountain bike rides and how many hours he logs at the office. Realizing that he is no longer listening, she looks down and continues drawing her pony.
He tells me that he’d like to call his dad and tell him about how high his ollies are now, but his dad doesn’t listen and act excited. He’s thinking that maybe his dad says that it’s cool that he loves skateboarding, but he can feel that his dad is pretending to care.
They have both told me that they don’t know why they can’t be themselves around their dad. They don’t show him their silly sides or their tired sides, or the side-splitting funny sides because they fear he won’t approve.
It’s exhausting having to be perfect all the time.
It’s no fun pretending to be something you aren’t all the time.
“How come he doesn’t want to love who we really are?”
__________
After the last visit, he turned to me and said, “I think they’d want to spend more time with me if they weren’t missing you while they were with me.”
Beware of men who cry.
