No Atticus

Today at Support for Special Needs:

Excerpt:  

When I look at the work I do, at the life I live as a father, I see a lot that I don't understand. I don't always think I'm providing what Schuyler requires, and I don't feel like I set the kind of example that she needs. She sees a father who has to watch pennies, who raises his voice sometimes, who gets impatient with the world and with her. She observes a father who gets so frustrated with the unfairness of her world that he seems to feel a kind of low-grade anger most of the time, and one who increasingly likes people less and less. I think she sees my fear. I'm pretty sure she understands how terrified I am about so many things, about a future that I can't see or understand, and about a little monster in her head that continues to cloud her future and whose fang and claw I underestimate at my very foolish peril. I'm afraid sometimes of the father she sees, of the sadness that I try so hard to hide from her and from the world.