So, from previous posts some of you know I have a son I didn't raise due to complicated relationship dynamics and the fact that his mother and stepfather and I both prioritized him being in a stable two-parent home.Rolodex wrote: ↑Mon Dec 04, 2023 1:21 pm I bet they don't have gif or emoji battles by phone. I bet they don't have inside jokes. I bet they never had tickle wars when Barron was 3. I bet they don't have a secret handshake or special nickname for something. I bet they don't laugh about the time they had a flat tire, made a world record on changing it and then the spare went flat or the time mom burned soup.
When he was 19, he came to stay with me for a few months while trying to turn the rest of his life around after a string of disappointments and the man he'd called Dad no longer wanted to deal with him. After six months of futon-on-the-porch-sleeping in a one-bedroom retirement condo with his old man, where any day we could be fined huge by the condo commandos, he realized he couldn't make the relocation to my area work even with what limited financial help I could give him at the time, without a roommate, and he couldn't find one he liked, and none of his friends would step up, so he had to head back to his mom (she and the stepdad had since divorced) in New England. His mainconcern was that I not be disappointed with him. Because he had come to know me, and was still hurting over one Dad's rejection of him. I told him I could never be disappointed, because I saw how hard he tried and what he was up against.
We kept up a running social media correspondence -- like we'd had before he came to live with me but it had more depth and humor and warmth now because we'd spent 6 months sharing meals and staying up late watching movies and running around to my family's gatherings together -- and he came to visit me for a weekend while I was in training in D.C. for the Foreign Service. He had a brief dream of joining this life as well, but met a girl who's a nester and they've been together 4 years and the idea of world travel isn't in her brain so he's nesting and happy. I share pictures and thoughts and whatnot that I don't share with the general public or even my small friends group, because I've learned that part of our relationship is that we both have come to trust each other with the things we don't tell other people.
He's going to be 27 in May. He doesn't talk to his stepdad anymore. In the end, I missed out on SO MUCH of the formative stuff to keep him in a stable two-parent home. And yet just based on everything over the past 8 years of his adulthood, I probably still have a warmer and more loving and more non-transactional relationship with my son than Trump has with any of his kids. And that, more than anything else, more than the criminal acts, more than his ranting and raving, is why i think TFG is not recognizably human in a psychological sense.
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