Description
“I don’t remember the exact date. I remember the blow.” That’s how J. G. Varela begins the morning he discovered his oldest son had blocked him on Facebook — the moment that forced him to ask what kind of father he’d actually been during the years he spent following his two sons, tournament after tournament, board after board, through competitive chess.
I’m Not Your Friend, I’m Your Dad is not a perfect parenting manual. It’s the honest confession of a father who got it wrong more times than he’d like to admit — who pushed when he should have stayed quiet, who stayed quiet when he should have spoken, who confused love with control — and who, twenty years later, with one son who left home and another still competing, finally tells what he learned.
Across twenty-seven chapters that travel from Barquisimeto to Puerto La Cruz, from the forbidden question to the hug that had a temperature, this memoir follows the question at the heart of every parent of a young competitor: how do you support without smothering? How do you correct without crushing? And how, in the end, do you learn to let go?
Written for the parents who wait in silence outside the tournament room — this book is the company no one offered them.
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