Egbert: I think the most difficult struggle when raising John was the simple act of being a single parent. I think that every new parent has experienced that moment when it’s late at night, your baby is crying and being unresponsive to everything you try, and you realize, “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” At least when you have a partner when raising a child, you have someone else to bear the load with you and to confess those worries to. When John entered my life, I was single at the time and had just lost my dear mother, so it got lonely at times without a support network available. Another challenge was balancing work with spending time with my son, which was not an easy task, especially when he was very young. I was fortunate enough that my workplace had a daycare that employees could use, so I made use of those services. I could visit him during my lunch-break, and I made it a point of leaving work early so that we could spend time together at home as a family.
Egbert: As for another struggle that I had not foreseen when raising John… well, as he got older, I think he realized that he didn’t really want to spend time with his old dad anymore. He made friends elsewhere and wasn’t interested in doing anything with his father, not even things we once enjoyed doing as a family, such as baking cakes or playing the piano. I thought that perhaps his interests had shifted, and after finding drawings that he had made of harlequins, I tried to reciprocate those interests in the hopes of closing that gap between us… well, that was disastrous, and he finally told me that he hated harlequins and must have been sleepwalking when he scribbled those drawings. When we moved to Texas for my job, I made it a point to leave that behind and to start anew. Things seemed to improve between us, and he opened up to me more. I suppose he was just going through a moody preteen phase at the time, but still. I have to wonder where I failed as a father to make him close off to me like that and make him want to avoid me. Did I not spend enough time with him and too much time at work when he was young? Was it because he didn’t have a mother in his life, despite my efforts to be both a mom and a dad to him? I don’t know.
Bro: You did good, Egbert, raising him. You’re a good dad and a good man. It ain’t easy, raising a kid by yourself. And maybe John’s still too young to appreciate all the shit you went through trying to do that, but fuck it. He still turned it out alright in the end. You did a good job.
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