The other day, as I was loading my kids in the car, I realized I forgot something in the house.

“Shit,” I yelled when I recognized as much. If you’ve ever tried to get two kids to transition to a new activity, especially one that involves getting them in a vehicle, you can understand my frustration (I also curse too much in front of my kids. Something I’m working on… with futility).

“Did I do something wrong?” my son immediately asked. I could hear the nervousness in his voice.

I assured him that he did not and, as I ran back in the house to grab whatever it was I forgot, his question hit me like a freight train. I stood motionless in my kitchen for who knows how long, wondering how thoroughly I’m fucking my kids up. Otherwise, why would he have such a reaction? Because, according to his question, my son equates my anger with his actions.

I returned to the car, opened his door, and got down on my knees, that I might be at his level (unsolicited parenting hack: whenever you really want or need your kids to lock in to whatever you’re trying to tell them, get down on their level and speak to them eye-to-eye). There, I asked him if he felt like it was his fault whenever I got angry.

He shook his head yes before qualifying his answer.

“Well, sometimes,” he said.

I repeated a mantra Emily and I almost always repeat after losing our tempers that goes something like this: Do I love you? Am I always going to love you? Is there anything you can ever do to change that?

Thus far, his answers have always been “Yes. Yes. No.”

But when he tells me something as Earth-quaking as that, the fact that he feels my anger is often his fault, I need to do more than just reassuring him. I need to recognize my own shortcomings as a father, to recognize how I can improve, how I can be softer and more patient, and to recognize that I need to do a significantly better job of harnessing and expressing my anger.

Because I do get angry. We all get angry. Hell, I’ve been exhausted for nearly eight years now. My nerves are constantly frayed. For as amazing as they are, my kids are almost constantly doing something is, at best, a little bit annoying. Of course I’m going to get angry.

But now, for whatever reasons, my son thinks that my anger is his fault. And even if it’s only sometimes, it’s a problem. A big one. And one that’s incumbent on me to fix.

My son’s reaction knocked me off my feet and I spent the rest of the afternoon questioning everything I’ve done and everything I do as a father.

What am I doing that caused my son’s reaction?

Am I too hard on him (probably)?

Do I require too much of him (probably not)?

Am I somehow saddling him with a victim’s mindset or somehow creating a people pleaser?

Why, when I get angry, does he assume that it’s his fault?

How can I fix this?

How can I untangle the mess that I somehow have created?

The fact that my son equates my anger with transgressions of his doing proves that, somewhere, somehow, I have failed majorly as a father. Luckily, I think there’s still plenty of time to fix it.

Seems like the solution is that I need to fix something inside me first.