I remember sitting on that goddamn park bench, the splintered wood digging into my ass through my jeans, watching these other fathers, these civilians, with their perfectly coiffed little ones. My son, God love him, was playing in the dirt with a plastic shovel that had seen better days—a hand-me-down from my sister’s kid, then her neighbor’s, then ours. His jeans, faded to near white on the knees, also clearly second or third generation. And it was just… glaring. These other toddlers, all dressed like they’d just stepped out of a goddamn Pottery Barn Kids catalogue, their little outfits so pristine, so *new*. One kid, a girl maybe eighteen months, was already stacking those wooden rings in the correct order, colors matched, while my two-year-old was still mostly just putting everything in his mouth. My mind, I swear, immediately started running a diagnostic. Is this a developmental delay? Is he behind? Or is it just my own damn inadequacy manifesting as a perceived deficit in him? The comparative analysis was automatic, a reflex I still haven't managed to disarm after all these years of attempting to integrate back into... whatever this is. And then I caught this look, you know? Not overtly hostile, nothing dramatic, just a fleeting glance from one of the other dads—a man probably ten years younger than me, all fit and trim, pushing his kid on the swing like it was a goddamn Olympic sport. He saw my kid’s threadbare clothes, saw me, a man whose uniform has been replaced with a permanent slight slump in the shoulders, and I felt it. The judgment. Or maybe, more accurately, the pity. Like I was failing, not just as a father, but as a man. It wasn't about the clothes, not really. It was everything underneath—the unspoken narrative of struggle, of not quite keeping up, of being perpetually out of sync with the polished, effortless civilian parenthood I saw unfolding around me. It makes you feel… observed. Like you’re being graded on criteria you didn’t even know existed, and you're already failing. It’s been decades since I left the service, but that internal review board never really adjourns, does it? My mind, always assessing threats, always looking for weaknesses, always judging. But now it’s turned inward, and then outward onto my own flesh and blood. And it’s a vicious cycle, a self-perpetuating mechanism of anxiety. My kid is fine, of course. He's a happy, messy, dirt-loving little boy, utterly oblivious to the silent skirmishes I’m waging in my own head. And yet, there I was, caught in that moment, wishing I could just… blend in. Wish I could just exist in a park with my son without feeling like I was under some goddamn microscope, my worth as a father, as a human being, being quietly tallied by strangers. It’s exhausting, really. The perpetual awareness of being slightly off-key in a symphony of supposed domestic harmony.