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You are your father’s son, she says, with the false face of pride and a weary tremor in her tone. He is perceptive to these emotional paradoxes in his mother, but it will take many more years to understand what this one means.
You are your father’s son, and his pride is real, a swelling of his chest bursting forth into a feeling of true accomplishment. This is what matters, that he is a younger version of this man who is only next to God in importance. When this observation is made, he smiles as much as he feels comfortable doing within sight of others, but it’s ear to ear on the inside.
You are your father’s son, she states flatly, a note of apology wrapped around it with a bow. Her father, too, but the relationship is not the same. She is their mother’s daughter, aching to be heard. He looks away with a frown, his own apology clinging to the inside of his throat with razors for claws. Some days he would prefer her invisibility.
You are your father’s son, reputation preceding him, expectations set at a bar so high he has to squint to make it out. The climb seems impossible, but all other paths are blocked off. When he jumps too far into the deep end, fights an undertow dragging him mercilessly out and out and out, he’s too tired to climb back and instead takes a deep, deep breath, and dives.
You are your father’s son, with quiet anger boiling inside and an arsenal of subtle knives in his vocabulary. With a stubborn streak a kilometre long and twice as wide. Clinging to the wrong ideals like the mast of a sinking ship, intractable in all areas out of fear and spite. When I was your age, and he snaps a retort before the sentence is through like a bear trap closing on ambling prey. The struggle leaves blood on the dining room tablecloth, white-knuckled nail marring the wood.
You are your father’s son, trading one set of rules for another, replacing one ideal with another similar enough that they could pass for mirror images. It’s sunk into his skin, into his marrow, not a coat he can shuck off. Pride makes the distance between their shores grow farther and farther.
You are your father’s son, smacked across his face with such disdain that leaves him breathless. Pulls no punches. Pride goeth before, and he falls hard enough to break both bones and trust. Some obligations are more important. But it’s up to him to decide which ones.
You are not your father’s son. He is his own man who refuses to walk in the shadow of someone who blocked out his sunlight and blamed him for the dark. Who puts others before reputation, himself before pride. He has identity separate and whole, blood that runs for others instead of family history alone. He is not his father’s son.