“When I arrived Dad was at home. He was in the laundry room at the bottom of the house. He turned to me, anger in every movement.
“I picked you some flowers,” I said.
He reached out with his hand, took them, and threw them in the large sink.
“Little girls pick flowers,” he said.
He was right. And he was probably ashamed of me. Once some of his colleagues had come home and they had seen me on the stairs, with my blond hair quite long, because it was winter, and I was wearing red long johns.
“What a nice girl you’ve got,” one of them said.
“It’s a boy,” Dad answered. He had smiled, but I knew him well enough to know the comment had not gladdened his heart.
There was my interest in clothes, my crying if I didn’t get the shoes I wanted, my crying if it was too cold when we were in the boat on the sea, indeed my crying if he raised his voice in situations when it would have been absolutely normal to raise your voice. Was it so strange he thought: what kind of son have I got here?
I was a mama’s boy, he was constantly telling me. I was, too. I longed for her. And no one was happier than I when she moved back for good at the end of the month.”
―
Karl Ove Knausgård,
Min kamp 3