Maybe it was his father who didn’t believe in him. Maybe it was his father who didn’t accept him the way he was. Maybe it was his father who wanted more from his only son. He had high expectations for his son. If his father had believed in him, in what he did, he would have been a different man today. He might be have been a happier man, a more confident man. He might have been.
A father is an important figure in a man’s life. Boys look up to their fathers. They learn. They learn how to be a man, how to be strong, how to be great. The son and the father go fishing together. They walk side by side and look into each other’s eyes and love each other that way, quietly, silently.
But some little boys get rejected. They never gain Daddy’s approval, his earnest respect, his acceptance. And they never learn to speak, to talk about it. They let it go. The little boy grows up, remembering that his father didn’t praise or extol him, that his father didn’t pay enough attention, that his father didn’t declare his approval for the man he’d become.
He is a man today, that little boy of eight. He doesn’t talk to his father a lot. They are on their own, living their separate lives. And I wonder if he’ll ever know how great he is, how extraordinary, how special. I wonder if he’ll talk to his father. I wonder.