A Pretty Glaring Gap

There’s a dad with two young daughters at a table nearby and when he bends down to help retrieve a dropped item for someone passing by, I spot a look I recognize.

It’s coming from the older of the two girls and she looks momentarily confused before catching herself. By the time dad turns back to her, she’s wiped the expression clean from her face and doesn’t say a word.

I’m at a local cafe, sitting along the wall of windows sipping my coffee while the rain pokes and prods at the glass. It’s not all that busy; it seems to just be me and a revolving door of parents with kids age seven and under. I’m not sure if that’s a Saturday thing, but it occurs to me each group consists of kids with mostly one parent—a mix of moms or dads, but not both. So I’m wondering if this is a common meeting place for a custody swap.

When that girl looked at her dad like that, I'm reminded of someone I went to summer camp with. They were younger than me and had younger siblings that ended up going to camp, too. I’ll never forget the way they bristled when their dad came up in conversation. I remember the instant feeling of "oh... oh shit" when I'd seen the complete change in their demeanor. I didn’t ask any more questions after that, and we never talked about it explicitly but I could tell they appreciated me for it, in their own way. I'd always figured it was just me so, up until then, I hadn’t ever really avoided talking about other people’s families.

I do now.

A few years later, I wound up working the front desk at camp for parent drop-off and pick-up. You learn a lot about kids through the context of their parents. For example, how their parents treated me and how they interacted with other parents could be vastly different to the way those same parents presented themselves to their own kids. Sometimes it was a pretty glaring gap.

A couple of times per summer, we'd have “parent’s night” where families came to camp and where us counselors got to see entire family units, sometimes for the first time—moms, dads, siblings, step parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or other guardians. My front desk duties, combines with those parent’s nights, gave me a pretty comprehensive view of the gap between a parent’s outward facing persona and whichever one they used behind closed doors. Obviously, I didn’t have a line of sight into what that really looked like, I'd just know that it existed... that there was a difference between who that person was and the person they wanted to be seen as.

Kids notice.

So, sitting against the windows in this cafe, I'm watching as this girl goes back to coloring with a straight face and a racing mind. Her younger sister hadn't reacted the same way, and I'm wondering who the girl's performing for: her sister or her dad.

For me, it'd been both.

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Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
293/365

Can you think of a time you swallowed a question instead of asking it? What'd the internal back-n-forth sound like before you decided to do it?

onward.

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