Say What You Mean or Don't Say You Love Them

Love isn't a secret you keep to prove it's real.

Michael Owen is in the papers again, and the fuss around it is something else. For those who missed it, the man is a footballer who has decided that never telling his children he loves them is a kind of proof. That the silence is the statement. That they ought to feel it without him having to go to the trouble of saying so.

I have heard this argument before. It doesn't improve with age.

Here's what I know about love, and I know it the way I know which floorboards to avoid and what the sky looks like before the weather does something it'll need to apologize for. Love is not a secret you hoard to prove it's real. Love withheld on principle is just withholding. Call it what it is.

Now, I'm not saying words alone are the whole of it. They are not. I have known plenty of people in Harrow Corners who said "I love you" the way other folks say "have a nice day," which is to say constantly and without meaning a single syllable. Words without weight are just noise. I have also known people who showed up every single day, who fixed the broken thing and drove the long distance and sat in the hard chair in the bad room, and never said much of anything, and their children knew exactly where they stood. I am not arguing against that kind of love. That kind is real and it counts.

What I am arguing against is the man who mistakes silence for depth. Who thinks that because he doesn't say it, the feeling must be more serious, more dignified, more his. That is not love talking. That is pride dressed up in a good coat, and I have seen enough of that to recognize the cut.

Gregory chopped down the oak in my backyard decades ago. Tree's been gone long enough that most people in Harrow Corners can't remember it standing. But nobody around here can see through to the house from the road, either, because the absence of that tree is still part of how this yard works. You want your love to be like that oak. Something so present in the growing years that even after everything, the shape of it is still there. Not a gap. A foundation.

Your children are not going to rifle through your silence and find the tenderness you buried in it. Children are not archaeologists. They are children. They need you to show up and they need you to say so. Both. Not one or the other. Not the grand gesture at the school play and nothing in between. The between is where they actually live.

And I will say this plainly because nobody else seems willing to: a man who decides his children should simply know, without being told, without being shown with any regularity, without being given something they can hold onto when things get hard, that man has made his own comfort the organizing principle of his family. That is not strength. That is a man who wants credit for a crop he never planted.

I have had children in and out of this house since before some of their parents were born. My front door has been open so long the hinges have opinions. Not one of those children ever suffered from being told too clearly that they mattered. Not a single one. But I have seen what grows in the kids who were left to guess. It is not confidence. It is not resilience. It is a question they spend the rest of their lives trying to answer with the wrong people.

So here is what I have to say to Michael Owen and anyone else running this particular experiment on their family: your children are not a puzzle box. You do not get points for being hard to read. If you love them, say it. Mean it. Back it up on a Tuesday when nothing special is happening. Say it until it becomes part of the air in your house, the kind of thing they breathe without noticing, the kind of thing they only notice if it stops.

The love you keep to yourself does nobody a damn bit of good.

Say it out loud. Make it plain. Then do it again tomorrow.

Mind your people and say what you mean. -- Aunt Dot
Got a problem worth answering? Write me: [email protected]