David McElroy

I don’t really want to sell you a house. I wish I did.

You know how you sometimes admit something to yourself that you’ve been trying to hide? I had one of those moments this week — when I couldn’t even try to lie to myself.

I was waiting inside this nice $425,000 house for a potential buyer to arrive. I had arrived 15 minutes early and had the house to myself. I decided to record an impromptu video that I could use as a promotion. I started recording about half a dozen times but stopped in disgust each time.

“I don’t want to sell houses,” I suddenly said out loud. And I was glad no one was there to hear me.

For the last five or six years, I’ve felt as though my life was on hold. I felt like someone treading water. I’ve worked in real estate — because it was a convenient opportunity — but I’ve hated work every day. And it makes me long for the days when I was excited about work instead.

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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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