You know, there’s a funny goddamn thing they never tell you, not really. They sell you this whole beautiful, phony romance about love, about partnership, about finding your “other half.” What a load of horseshit.
For a man, there’s only one person in this whole miserable, beautiful, fucked-up world who’s ever going to love you unconditionally. Just one. And it’s your mother.
Yeah, I know. It sounds like some cheap, sentimental greeting card bullshit. But think about it. Really think. From the day you slide out, covered in blood and screaming, she’s the one. Everyone else? Everyone else you meet from that day forward, they love you conditionally.
You’re only as good as your last paycheck. Your last joke. Your last goddamn movie. Your kids, they love you… as long as you’re providing the roof and the toys. Your employer loves you… as long as you’re making them money. Your church loves you… as long as you’re singing the right hymns and putting enough in the collection plate. Society loves you… as long as you’re a quiet, respectable, and completely predictable cog in their machine.
The second you start to slip, the second the battery starts to run down, the second you show a little bit of the ugly, beautiful, and completely honest weakness that makes you human? They turn on you. The ones you cared for, the ones you bled for, they’re the first ones sharpening the knives. It’s not personal. It’s just the quiet, brutal, and completely honest math of the jungle. A weak animal is just meat. That’s a man’s prerogative. His duty, maybe. To provide, to be strong, until he’s not. And then? Then he’s just in the goddamn way.
And you add to that beautiful, ugly equation the fact that the whole goddamn structure has collapsed. The family, that old, beautiful, and completely necessary fortress against the storm? It’s a ruin now. We’re scattered. Wisconsin, Mexico, LA, Colorado. A diaspora of broken homes and quiet resentments. The old ways, the traditional values, where the whole damn tribe lived in the same zip code, where you spent weekends together, where you had a place… that’s gone. It’s a goddamn ghost story.
And that rot, that scattering, it affects us. It changes the air we breathe. We’re like fish who don’t know they’re swimming in polluted water, but we’re all getting quietly, slowly sick.
And what happens when the one source of that unconditional love, the mother, what happens when her love is conditional, too? What happens when you’re raised by a woman who’s just as broken, just as needy, just as goddamn fucked-up as everyone else? Or you watch your own kids, buttering up their mother, playing the game, because they know, deep down, that her love isn’t a given; it’s a goddamn performance review? That shit leaves a mark. It affects your self-esteem, your self-worth. It turns you into a quiet, desperate animal, always looking for the next hit of validation, the next quiet nod that says, “You’re okay. For now.”
Single mothering. Christ. Don’t even get me started. They sell it to you like it’s a goddamn heroic act. What a load of horseshit. It’s the worst goddamn thing for a boy. You can’t be a mother, and a father, and a friend, and a disciplinarian, all while you’re sneaking strange men in through the window after the kid is asleep. It ruins them. It destroys the whole goddamn map of what the world is supposed to look like. It replaces the beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary chaos of a real family with the quiet, orderly, and completely soul-crushing dysfunction of a one-woman show.
So you find yourself, at fifty-seven, standing on the edge of the world, ready to jump. And the quiet, respectable, and completely brainwashed people, they look at you, and they say, “But what about your family? Aren’t you going to miss your father?” And you just have to laugh. A real, ugly, gut-shot laugh. “My father?” you say. “He’s in Colorado. I see him once a year, maybe.” “Your aunt?” “She’s in Long Beach.” “Your brothers?” “Haven’t spoken to them in ten goddamn years.”
What family? What ties? We’re all just a collection of lonely, beautiful, fucked-up atoms, bouncing off each other in the dark. The nucleus exploded a long time ago. Now it’s just fallout.
And they tell you it’s a man thing, this running. No. It’s a human thing. It’s the quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary instinct to run from a fire. Once the illusion cracks, once the layers of bullshit responsibility start to peel away, once you stop being the fat fuck playing video games in the basement and you actually step outside and feel the goddamn sun on your face, you realize you don’t have to stay in the burning house.
You think your wife is going to sit Shiva when you leave? Christ, no. She’s already got the next poor bastard lined up. She’ll be on Tinder before your side of the bed is cold, selling the same beautiful, fraudulent story to a new sucker. And you? You’ll be happier than you’ve ever been, breathing free air for the first time in twenty years.
You quit the job. You take the fifty grand, you cash out the 401k, you burn the whole goddamn bridge, and you just… go. Somewhere exotic. Somewhere cheap. Somewhere honest. You try new foods, new women, new ways of being a beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up human being. You learn about yourself. You learn to cry again. You learn to yell. You learn to get mad at the right things.
And why doesn’t everyone do it?
Fear.
Pure, simple, beautiful, and completely paralyzing fear. They’ll give you a thousand excuses. Responsibility. The kids. The mortgage. It’s all just bullshit. Pretty, respectable wallpaper pasted over the ugly, honest truth: they’re scared. Scared of being alone. Scared of failing. Scared of the quiet, beautiful, and completely terrifying possibility that they might actually be free.
But if you understand love, real love, the quiet, ugly, beautiful love you owe to your own goddamn soul, if you understand that the clock is ticking, that you only get so many spins around this beautiful, indifferent sun, then you know what you have to do.
You have to exercise a little self-love.
You look at the people in your life, the family, the kids, and you realize they don’t belong to you. They’re not your property. They’re their own beautiful, ugly, and completely sovereign nations. Their environment, the shit they breathe every day, that shapes them more than your quiet, desperate love ever could. You gave them your DNA. That was your contribution. Honor it. Love them from a distance. Give them your best, and then get the hell out of their way. Stop being a goddamn burden. Stop being another mouth to feed, another ghost haunting their house.
Walk away. Watch them grow. And watch yourself grow.
That’s the best goddamn thing you can do for anyone. Especially yourself.
