I’m 66 and my adult son sent me a text last Sunday that just said “thinking of you, hope your weekend is nice” — and I read it four times trying to understand why it had landed so hard — and I finally realized it was because he wasn’t asking me for anything, he was just reaching, and I’d apparently reached a point in my life where being reached for without purpose felt like receiving a gift in a language I’d forgotten I spoke
A father discovers that after decades of equating his worth with being useful to his children, a simple "thinking of you" text from his adult son hits him like a revelation—he's been so conditioned to being needed that being wanted feels like a foreign language.