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I was stuck in traffic on I-20 just east of Birmingham Thursday evening when my phone rang. In the previous 30 minutes, traffic had inched forward only about a hundred yards as emergency vehicles dealt with a wreck a mile or so ahead of us. I glanced at the ringing phone.

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect to see her name. How long had it been since we had talked? I didn’t recall. Why was she calling?

Part of me wanted to let it go to voicemail. Things hadn’t ended on a pleasant note for us. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear from her. But I decided it would be cowardly to ignore the call, so I answered right before it would have gone to voicemail.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to answer,” she said.

”I almost didn’t,” I admitted.

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Some men are better grandfathers than they were fathers. That puzzled me for a long time, but I finally figured it out.

These are men who adore cute little children in their lives. They’re full of warmth and love for their grandchildren. They’re eager to see them. When you see men such as these you assume they must have been great fathers, but I’ve found that’s not always true.

Did these men just get more mature with age? No. There’s a joke you hear sometimes that’s not really a joke. Grandparents often seem to love children more than their own parents do, because grandparents can enjoy children for a little while — and then send them home to their parents.

What I’ve realized over the last year or so is that a lot of men act the same way with their own children. They want the cuteness. They want to be adored. They like being god-like figures in their children’s eyes. But when it matters, that sort of man is absent, at least emotionally and often physically.

I call these men “faux fathers.”

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Maybe I’ve always wanted to be needed. I’m not sure. I just know I wasn’t aware of it until the last few years.

For the past two days, I’ve been stuck on this idea of being needed. Almost three years ago, I wrote about how the best relationships are centered around mutual need and “mutual rescue.”

But this thing that’s been nagging at me is different. It left me feeling down, because it emphasized how much I miss being needed. Feeling that made it hard to make it through work Friday, because I was feeling lost — as though I no longer had any direction or motivation.

On the way home Friday evening, I snapped this photo of myself in the car. I had spent the day pretending to care what others had to say — talking to them about the expensive house we were looking at — and I knew that my fake smile had been pasted on too long.

As I drove home, I realized how little I cared about any of it. None of it mattered to me. What was the point without feeling needed by a family who I loved?

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