A Father Thought He Was Present. His Sons Disagreed.
Liam Heneghan's essay in Psyche opens with a line that cuts against the shape of most parenting memoirs: he thought he was a present father; his sons said otherwise. When his granddaughter arrived, he made an offer. The disagreement is the interesting part. A father's account of his own attention is memory; his children's is a verdict, and the two can cover the same years without matching. That gap is what the essay works from.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Take
Presence isn't a quantity a parent gets to measure alone. Heneghan hands the audit to his sons in the first sentence.
Pushback
That assumes the sons are grading the same thing he is. Two people could describe the same childhood as attentive and as absent without either of them lying.