The strongest thing a man can do is say it out loud.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about mental fitness. But I keep hearing this same quiet pain everywhere lately. It comes up with the men I ride with. My wife hears it from her friends too. It’s something I live with myself, so I want to talk about it openly in case you’re carrying it too.

It’s about adult children who walk away from their parents. They are calling it “Adult-child Estrangement“.

If you’re a Gen X parent, you’ve probably felt it. There’s a sense that this is happening everywhere right now and nobody warned us about it. Maybe every generation dealt with some version of it. But it feels like a wave at the moment, and a lot of us are standing in it quietly, not saying a word.

Let me tell you my version.

I have five kids. Four of them are my stepkids. Two of them include my wife and me into everything, the jobs, the spouses, the grandkids, baseball games, family dinners, the ordinary Tuesday phone calls. The other three are an empty echo chamber.

I text my daughter a several times a week. I call every week. Most of the time it goes nowhere. No answer, no reply. But, every once in a while she picks up, and we have a great conversation, the kind that reminds me exactly what I’m missing. She answered on her birthday back in May and it was so good to cath up, but that was the last time we spoke.

I watch her life on a screen like everyone else does. She’s built something real for herself, a life full of spotlight, surrounded by thousands of people who adore her. She is a huge success and I’m so proud of her. There’s room in her world for all of them. Somehow there just isn’t any for her dad.

It took me about ten years to really accept that this isn’t my fault. And I’ll be honest, some days I still don’t believe it. Some days I go back through the past looking for the thing I should have done differently. I always told myself my job as a parent was to raise kids who could live without me. I guess I was good at it.

I have to be careful here, because there’s an angry version of this story and there’s a wiser one, and I’ve lived in both.

The angry version says society has gotten soft, that kids today quit their parents over things our generation would have just put up with. I feel that pull. When you’re hurting, blame is a warm place to stand. But sitting there doesn’t actually help me. It just keeps the wound open. In my own case, a lot of this has less to do with weak kids and more to do with the wreckage of divorce. An ex-spouse, manipulation, children used as leverage in a fight that never really ends. You don’t win that one. You endure it. You take the high road and do what’s right even when nobody’s clapping for you.

This is where the bike comes in, and where I think Rollfast actually earns the phrase mental fitness.

I ride with a lot of dads who are divorced like me, with kids in the picture and an ex somewhere in the background. Being a dad is hard enough on its own. Add an ex-spouse and there’s a whole layer of pain most of us never say out loud. But out on the road, somewhere deep into a long ride, it tends to come out. And every time, the same thing happens. We realize we aren’t the only one. We aren’t broken or uniquely bad at this. We’re just men carrying weight nobody ever asked us about.

And men are carrying a lot of weight. Most of the guys I ride with are the breadwinners. The pressure to provide, to be successful, to never let the family down is non-negotiable and it never lets up. Most of them won’t talk about any of it with their wives, because admitting you’re struggling feels like weakness. Like failure stacked on top of failure.

So they don’t talk. They just carry it, until they find a place where they can set it down for a minute.

That’s really what we’re building. Our members have lost spouses suddenly. They’ve lost children. Lost jobs, lost pets, lost the thread of who they thought they’d be by now. Every one of those is an “I don’t see a way out of this” kind of moment. And every time the light gets dark for one of us, the rest of us step up. That’s Rollfast. The rides are just the excuse to be in the room together.

So what do I actually do with the estrangement? I’ve landed close to a piece of advice I heard recently and haven’t been able to shake. Let them go. If someone doesn’t choose you, you can’t let it become the measure of your worth. I can grieve it, and I do, but then I have to keep living. I’ve got maybe forty years left and I’m not going to spend them stuck, waiting for the story to rewrite itself into the version I want. I keep the door open. I keep calling. But I’m not going to set myself on fire just to keep someone else warm.

I couldn’t have gotten to this point alone. My wife has been my rock through all of it, patient with a grief that isn’t even hers to carry. And the men I ride with have shown me, mile after mile, that the strongest thing a man can do isn’t carrying it in silence. It’s saying it out loud to someone who gets it, and then go ride.

If you’re in this too, ghosted and aching and blaming yourself in the quiet hours, you’re not weak and you’re not alone.

Come ride with us. We’ll help carry some of it.