You know that feeling when you're washing a dish, maybe a casserole dish that's been sitting with dried-on gunk for a day or two, and you’re scrubbing at it with real elbow grease, thinking you're doing a grand job, only to hold it up to the light and see a faint smear, a ghost of the mess that refuses to truly disappear? That's what it feels like sometimes, these last few months since Peter's divorce. He’s 48, you’d think he’d have the sense of a housecat by now, but there he was, sitting on my worn floral sofa, telling me it was over. His face had that same dull, bruised look his father used to get after a particularly loud Saturday night. And you wonder, don't you, if that lingering residue, that faint smear of old arguments and slammed doors from when Peter was just a kid with knees perpetually scraped, somehow transferred to him. Like a poorly maintained engine, sputtering after years of bad fuel. Sometimes you just… you watch your child repeat a pattern, not quite identically, but with enough echoes to make your stomach clench. You remember the way Frank and I would argue, the kind of fights where the air itself felt thin, sharp, like breathing glass. We never threw things, not usually, but the words were projectiles. I remember one Tuesday, around 1985 maybe, I’d just got paid, and we were fighting about the gas bill again, whether we could really afford to heat the whole house when Peter kept leaving lights on. Frank had this way of going completely still, a kind of catatonic withdrawal, and it drove me to distraction. I’d try to provoke a reaction, any reaction, just to know he was still there behind those empty eyes. I'd raise my voice, maybe say something cutting about his mother, just to break through that wall. And then Peter, ten years old, would come out of his room, his little face a map of worry, clutching his G.I. Joe. He'd stand there, one foot tapping a frantic rhythm, like a metronome gone mad. And you realize, looking back, how that constant, low-level emotional dysregulation, the push and pull, the silence and the shouting, it was just… *there*. A constant hum in the background of his childhood. Now Peter, bless his heart, he tells me his ex-wife just wanted him to "engage" more, to "talk about feelings." And I see a mirror. I see Frank. I see that same inability to meet someone in the middle of a difficult conversation, that same retreat when things get too hot. And you wonder, did I set that stage? Did I, with my own frustrated attempts to chip away at Frank’s stone wall, inadvertently teach Peter that this is what relationships *are*? A constant, exhausting excavation? It's not a comfortable thought, knowing you might have passed down something more insidious than just your slightly crooked pinky finger. Just another layer of grime you can't quite scrub away.