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the thing I can't say to my guy friends
— James Redmond (counseling + single dads, contributor)
I want to write this carefully because it's the kind of thing where if I'm flippant I'll regret it tomorrow.
I'm a single dad. Two teens, primary custody since the divorce three years ago. My friends are mostly other dads. Good guys. We do the thing — go to games, smoke meat in someone's yard once a month, text about whatever football game is on. I have lunch with one of them once a week and it's the closest thing I have to therapy that isn't actually therapy.
What I cannot tell any of them: I am sometimes really resentful of my kids. Not like a hate-them resentful. The other kind. The kind where you love them more than you love yourself and you also recognize that the entire shape of your life — what you eat, when you sleep, who you date, whether you date, whether you take a job in a different city, whether you go to your dad's 70th birthday — is determined by their schedule and their needs and you signed up for it but you didn't fully sign up for the alone version of it.
I can say this to my therapist. I can say it to my sister. I once said it, sideways, to a woman I was seeing. I have not said it to a single one of my guy friends and I've been trying to figure out why.
Closest I've gotten to a real answer: the script available to dads is "I'd do anything for my kids" and any deviation from that script reads, to other dads, as a kind of weakness or coldness or — worst — disloyalty to the kids. We don't have a vocabulary for the thing where you'd do anything for them AND you also grieve some of what doing anything for them costs.
Maybe other dads feel this and also can't say it. That'd be the worst version of it. All of us walking around carrying the same thing and pretending we aren't, in service of a script none of us wrote.
I don't know how to fix it. I'm not even sure I want to fix it with the friends I have — those friendships work the way they work. But I'm trying to figure out if there's even one guy I could say this to without it changing the friendship in a bad way.
If you've found that guy in your life, I'd be curious what made it possible. Not in a "give me a 5-step framework" way. Just — what was the moment.