TANGLED PLANS

17

Max

Waking up on the couch in the Madden household isn't new. It was pretty normal for me to be here at least once every week. What wasn't normal was the fact that I woke up in the worst mood ever. My dad had texted me so much to the point that I had to call him in order to get him to stop. The capitalization and perfected punctuation had freaked me out.

Most of his texts went like this:

Where are you, Maxwell?
Have I raised you to leave home without telling me?
Do you have any respect for me— for yourself?
What would people think if they knew my son was running around without my knowledge?
Text me back.
Do you have your father on silent?
I do not pay for your phone. Bill's to get ignored, son.
When are you getting home?
I wonder if you would treat your mother this way—constantly making her worried. She dodged a bullet there.

This is where I start to lose my temper. This is where my empathy for my father stops. I knew my dad was a hard worker, and I knew that whatever we had was because of him. I knew that it was because he had worked his ass off to make something of himself. I knew that he was just working hard to make amends when my mother left him.

I'm not saying my mom leaving my dad—and the rest of us—was entirely a mistake on her part. I'm not saying that my dad hadn't driven her away with the long nights and lack of attention. I'm just talking about the times where my dad came home tired and exhausted to the point of falling asleep on the couch, all while my mom was worried about when she would see her friends next.

She had worried about my father's lack of attention, but whenever he would need it, she wouldn't offer it to him. I knew of my parents' marriage and situational status as well. I knew that they were both okay with seeing other people. I knew that my parents loved each other, but they were having an open marriage for the most part.

My dad loved my mom more than my mom did. I wasn't sure of anything other than that. I knew that; I saw it in the way he would talk about all his pride with a smile and his eyes trained on my mom. He had loved her a lot. A lot more than she loved him.

When she had left, I felt empathy for him. My dad was all alone now, and the woman he loved most in the world had up and left. I knew that his heartbreak was immense and that he would need a few months to recover. I had stopped feeling empathy for my dad when he started to put that heartbreak—all those pent-up feelings—on me.

I couldn't feel empathy for him when he made it entirely hard for me to look him in the eye without the fear of him seeing something he didn't like. My dad loved me; yes, there was no question about it. I just didn't think he was proud of me; I thought he was disappointed in me.

My dad worked so hard for what he got. He didn't have money growing up; he didn't have a house that wrapped around itself. He worked for it. All of it.

He just expected me to be as hardworking and determined as him. He was in his twenties when he started the grind, so it didn't make sense why he was pushing me to do certain things now. I'm only seventeen and going into my senior year in no time, but I still had time.

It wasn't that I was throwing away my life, either. I was doing good. I had good grades—good enough to get an extra cord on graduation. I had a good future with football. But none of those mattered to my dad. What mattered to him was that I devote my life to the business. His business, the one he worked so hard to get,.