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The other day, I drove to daycare to pick up my three-and-a-half-year-old son Cedar.

While I was driving, I listened to a court-mandated session about how to create a working relationship with my ex-wife so that our child wasn’t completely messed up. So, as I arrived, I was feeling generally pretty miserable about myself and the ways I had caused harm in his life because of this life event that was happening.

Upon walking into the space, the woman who runs the daycare comes out and gives me a shrug with a smile. There is a waist-high wall near the door with a shelf the kids love hiding under when their parents arrive. Cedar especially loves to hide and is still at that stage where his eyes and head being covered counts as a good hiding spot, so when I walked around to get him, I expected him to be giggling.

Instead, he was clutching a stuffed bear with a scowl. He declared he wanted to stay at Ms. Katie’s and didn’t want to go home with me. After a few minutes of discussion, it seemed that we could settle on hugging her and then leaving.

On the way home, he did not want to listen to music, so I sat in a quiet car, thinking about how much I had destroyed this boy’s happiness, how he would forever hate me, and the day he would decide never to talk to me again.

Then, about 10 minutes into our drive, he said to me, “Papa, I am not sad anymore.” Relieved, I told him that I was happy to hear that. I then ventured to ask what it was that was bothering him.

“Well, I wanted to tell Riley goodbye out the window when she left daycare today, but it was shut, and she didn’t hear me, so I was sad because I really wanted to say something to her through the window.”

I had to pause and chuckle; while I was important in this child’s life, I was not the central thing this child thought about.

No matter how old we are, it is so easy to lose sight of the fact that just because we are at the center of our story, we are not at the center of everyone else’s. Sometimes, when we leave the room, people stop thinking about us for a while.

There is a freedom in this fact.

Let go of some of the pressure you create for yourself…because sometimes it is just a missed hello through an open window someone is sad about, and it has nothing to do with you.

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