You don’t want to spoil them. You don’t want to undermine your authority…your masculinity. You don’t want to sound like a broken record. They already know, right? They have to know?

That you love them. That you care about them. That you’d do anything for them? That you’re proud of them just the way they are?

No, they don’t know. They don’t know because you don’t say it as much as you think you do. They don’t know it because the world is scary and confusing and they hear so many mixed messages. They don’t know because they also hear you get upset, criticize them, harp on things that seem like they don’t really matter. So no, you’re not getting the message across. You’re closer than you’d like to admit to those parents we’ve talked about before, whose children find, after they are gone, the big pile of press clippings, all the artwork, that hear at the funeral just how proud mom or dad was.

“Whom was I keeping it for, that knowledge of the special love I harbored for him in my soul!,” Monsieur de Monluc told Montaigne (our previous message on this here) after losing his son. “Should he not have felt all the pleasure of it, and all the bonds of gratitude? I forced myself, I tortured myself, to keep up that silly mask, thereby losing the joy of his company—and his good will as well, which must have been cold towards me: he had never received from me anything but brusqueness or knowing anything but a tyrannous facade.”

Don’t be that person. Don’t keep it to yourself. Don’t wait. Give it to them now. Give more of it that you think they could possibly want or even that you yourself even have. Let them feel it. Let them enjoy it. Let them live with the knowledge of all the love you harbor for them in your soul.

They deserve that.