Category: Family

Of Coffee and Weddings

I see my older daughter Callie most Fridays for coffee before we begin work. It is one of my greatest joys, and I regret that my younger daughter Addie and I don’t live close enough to do the same (instead we talk by phone on Wednesday evenings).

Callie and I talk about all manner of things, and while our relationship will always retain the parent-child dynamic – heck, that dynamic still remains between my parents and me at my age of 62 – I think we’ve moved past it in many regards. I delight when she gives a different perspective to mine, and she does that now regularly.

Last week she talked extensively about her wedding.

She’s not engaged yet. And the timing of her wedding is uncertain, but according to her it is at least another 18 months off. So why were we discussing her wedding?

I’m not sure.

Callie just started talking about it, and there was no diverting her. (Not that I tried very hard. I might indulge my daughters just a bit.) It was clearly on her mind, and when Callie has something on her mind, it tends to come out. She never could keep a secret, and she doesn’t do a great job of keeping her thoughts restrained either. No one ever has to worry about subterfuge with Callie.

And, boy, did she have thoughts. Lots and lots of them. She was very animated, and the ideas were just spilling out of her. The possibilities are nearly endless, and she was knocking them down with alacrity. Outdoor wedding. Remote location. Something in the area. Party. Dinner. Friends playing songs in the wedding. A simple ceremony. Family staying together before, during, and after. Flower dudes. Lots of attendants. Few attendants. Lots of friends. Small wedding. No bridesmaids’ gowns or tuxedos.

I’m usually pretty outspoken with my kids, but I couldn’t get a word in.

On reflection, I think this might presage some imminent change in her relationship status. I suspect an engagement announcement might be soon forthcoming.

Perhaps on Monday, five days from now.

My suspicions were heightened last night when my younger daughter asked their mother and me for a family Zoom call on Monday evening, and when I pointed out that we have many days between now and then Addie replied that she and Callie were busy. And then Callie cancelled our standing coffee date tomorrow morning, claiming illness.

It’s possible Callie is ill, though she hasn’t missed work as far as I can tell from her BeReal posts this week. It’s possible Addie has some news for us, though the last time she initiated a family conference it was to tell us that she was going to finish her degree in Audio Engineering but was going to pursue a career in animal conservation instead. Hard to imagine what is going on in her life that rises to that level of importance, especially since I spoke with her for an hour just yesterday.

No, I think it’s more probable that Callie is sporting an engagement ring she doesn’t want me to see, and that she’s enlisted her sister to help her organize the announcement. I could certainly be wrong, but I suspect that soon our family will be growing by one son-in-law.

And I’m very fine with that.

Epilogue

So it seems I was more than a little off-base about this call.

Our daughters called my soon-to-be-ex-wife and me on the carpet about the information we have been sharing with them about our divorce. I was surprised, Dawn less so, which leads me to think I may have been a misdemeanor offender (but an offender nonetheless). Still, I applaud the courage our children have in tackling the issue and setting their boundaries.

But, at least for the moment, there is no wedding to plan.

New Year, New Home

2023 will be one of significant change for me (I hope).

Change in how I spend the bulk of my working day. How I earn a living. Where I earn that living. With whom I share my time. Yet as we turn the page into the new year my thoughts are with my parents, who will make just one significant change (I hope).

They are leaving their 4-bedroom home with its huge patio and multi-terraced garden in favor of a 2-bedroom apartment in a senior independent-living complex. I’ve been staying with my parents while waiting for my post-divorce life to begin, and though I was initially opposed to their move – they love their house, and my father is an enthusiastic gardener – I’ve come to see the wisdom of the move. They just don’t have the stamina they once did. My father is 87, my mother 82, and keeping up with the house and garden takes more energy than they want to give them. The reason for the move makes eminent sense. And I get it.

So they are not leaving their house kicking and screaming.

And yet it’s still not without stress.

Odds are that this new apartment will be the last place they live together. If – really, when – their health fails, it’s unlikely it will afflict them at the same time and in the same way, so even if they are in the same facility they may not be in the exact same place. And while we don’t talk about it, I think it’s clearly on their minds. How could it not be?

Mortality is the tie that binds us all. We all come face-to-face with it eventually, with varying degrees of grace. And this move for my parents is the most tangible evidence to date that they are approaching that point of their lives when their deaths are real possibilities. Not likely, but definitely possible, and more possible than it’s been before.

My father faced prostate cancer a few years ago and kidney cancer last year. He had moments of fear during each scare, but the information he got from his doctors in both cases was encouraging, and there were other options for treatment if the procedures didn’t succeed. We are eternally grateful that they did succeed. He was also in a small-plane crash in Tanzania 28 years ago, but that happened so fast he didn’t have time to reflect on his risk.

My mother has age-related macular degeneration, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Those illnesses erode her quality of life and hint of struggles to come, but none of them are currently life-threatening.

But moving into a smaller apartment with no yard to maintain is a tangible admission from them both that the scope of their remaining time is narrowing. My friend Jim’s parents lived in a retirement community that talked about the go-go years (where people were able to do anything they wanted), the slow-go years (where they could still do some of the things they wanted to do), and the no-go years (where they were limited to things in their residence). My parents are still enjoying their go-go years, but the end of that freedom is in sight, and the implications for what’s ahead are sobering to them.

And they are feeling it.

They’ll still make the move, but settling into a new community will include living with a new awareness, that, after a lifetime of moving about in the world, they might finally be in the last home they will see.

Loss and My Friend John

I saw my good friend John yesterday.

John is a man who delights in his family. He revels in their company. His wife and daughter are always – and I do mean always – in the forefront of his mind. He feels very close to his sister, and he relished his relationships with his parents until they recently passed away.

Every weekend, every vacation, every spare moment he has available he wants to spend in the company of his family. He chooses them first. Every single time. And his devotion isn’t forced. It comes from a heart filled with love and gratitude for having people to care about.

John has hobbies – he enjoys sports, both playing and watching – but even those interests he shares as much as possible with his loved ones. I can think of no one who gets more fulfillment, more satisfaction from spending time with his family. His unadulterated joy in their presence just radiates from him in big, happy waves.

Which is why the death of his son earlier this year is simply the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen.

John’s son was 19, in his freshman year of college, and he was killed by a quick and sadly painful illness.

His death is devastating to everyone who knew him. But depriving his father of his presence, the father who pulled limitless joy from his son, feels so despicably merciless and mean. And John is shattered. His infectious energy is now subdued. He looks so very sad.

I have hope for John though.

Perhaps it is merely wishful thinking, but I can’t think so. Relegating my good friend to this level of suffering indefinitely is inconceivable for me. How could anyone withstand it? I don’t know how I could cope if one of my daughters died now, and I don’t know how John has been able to function at all these past few months. I fervently wish I could heal him somehow, make him whole again, but he will never be whole again while he walks this earth, and I can’t offer anything that will help him through this trial.

Still, John has two advantages that not everyone in his situation can claim.

First, as he has given his complete devotion to his family, they have returned it to him in full. His wife and his daughter and his sister and the rest of his family loves John like he loves them. The enormous hole left when his son died won’t ever be filled, but the relationships he shares with his other loved ones will continue to grow and deepen as the days and weeks and months and years pass by. They won’t erase his loss, but their love will fill him nonetheless.

Second, he is a faithful man. He believes – strongly – that God exists, that He is benevolent, and that He cares for his flock. I don’t claim to understand faith (I don’t have that tool in my toolbox) but I can see that John, despite his overwhelming grief, believes that the death of his son serves a purpose, inscrutable as it may be. John has found occasional peace and some solace in his prayers and meditations, and as skeptical as I usually am about spiritual things, I believe him in this: his son may be physically absent from his life, but John experiences him in any number of ways that prove to me that his son is very much present. I am far beyond my depth in all things spiritual, but given my own admittedly limited experiences I believe that there are dimensions we don’t understand that nevertheless touch us. And again, maybe I’m naive or simply willing something to be that isn’t, but that’s not how this feels to me.

I grieve with my friend John, even as I can’t fathom the depths of his loss. I also acclaim his humanity, his faith, his stalwartness to move forward in the face of such complete devastation. And I pray – in my own way – that he finds comfort and meaning and relief in his family, including his late son, so he can heal from this wrecking blow. And that no other parent ever has to face something so calamitous.

My Niece

I saw my niece yesterday.

She’s had a rough go so far. She calls herself the “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Failed by adults during her formative years, she doesn’t feel worthy even now in her early-thirties. She doesn’t deserve to be happy, to find purpose, to be loved. So she punishes herself with drugs and sex and booze and people who steal from her and, recently, beat her. Badly.

After all, she’s not worthy of care, compassion, and love.

And yet, despite all of her self-flagellation, something at her core, an indomitable spirit, won’t let her succumb to desolation, won’t surrender to the voices that tell her she doesn’t deserve happiness. It insists that she matters and that she must persevere, no matter how much pain she feels.

She is extraordinarily brave. She is also often self-centered, regularly manipulative, and less-than-honest at times. I suspect much of that is survival response, but her behavior still raises questions among her family and friends, and she’s been abandoned by more than one of the people she cares about. Mostly because she treats them badly. It’s hard to think of others, to empathize with them when you feel shitty about yourself.

But no matter how much abuse she heaps on herself she always pulls back from the brink of complete self-destruction. She does cut it close sometimes. She’s been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and she regularly chooses people who have problems with impulse control and suffer a great deal of pain themselves. I guess those folks are plentiful when you’re living on the margins of society, but everyone needs friends, so like the rest of us you take what the universe provides. They don’t always prove to be reliable.

And she can’t catch a break. She’d worked very hard for about three years to bring herself from homelessness to a sober, employed, independently-functioning member of our community. And four months later a global COVID-19 pandemic closed the retail store where she worked, and without a job she was soon without a place to live again. The pandemic has challenged us all, but it’s one more thing on top of a staggering pile of challenges for those people like my niece.

She’s a hard worker. She likes to do things. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she laughs and jokes with people regardless of how well she knows them. But she has just a high-school diploma, and ADHD makes traditional school hard for her. And her history with adults has left her with a towering distrust of authority figures. So building skills, which requires learning from either books or from people who know how to do things, goes against her talents and life experience.

I don’t know how her story will develop. I worry that the mountain of crap into which she was born that also encouraged her dodgy decision-making will ultimately be too much for her to surmount. But I am heartened by her absolute refusal to take herself beyond salvation. I am hopeful she will find enough people to trust, enough resource to give her the knowledge, skills, and experience that will enable her to function on her own, enable her to find a tribe that values her for who and what she is.

It’s the same hope I have for all the people I love.

Failure

No one I know likes to fail.

If you’re raised to honor your commitments, then failing to do so feels mortifying. Humiliating even.

I am on the precipice of the two most significant failures in my life, and yet I don’t feel humiliated. Or even mortified. I’m not ecstatic, but I don’t feel bereft. I guess I feel modestly hopeful.

I regret that I haven’t been able to deliver on my promises in both cases, but I’m an analyst, and circumstances being what they are I understand why I am in the position in which I find myself. That understanding has led to acceptance of my situation. I have regrets, but they are mild. I would have liked to achieve success, but that just isn’t where I am.

The most immediate failure is of the business I share with my wife. Opening a shared workspace business was a good decision. The sector is booming, and the social and professional dynamics around work support the move to more flexibility. Opening a shared workspace business a few months before a pandemic swept the world for two years (and counting) was an ill-timed decision. The pandemic destroyed any chance to grow a shared workspace business, and while our landlord deferred some of our rent, it didn’t feel benevolent enough to forgive any of it. We’ve hung on as long as we could, putting a lot of our own money and sweat equity into the business, but as surge after surge of Covid delayed a return to the office our cash reserves steadily dwindled until we are now out of room. So we wait to see if our landlord will make some concessions that allow the business to continue.

I’m not optimistic.

The second failure has been 34 years in the making. My marriage hasn’t always been bad, but it decayed as small hurts created distance, which in turn led to greater emotional injury. And over those years, despite many successes – the greatest being our two daughters – my wife and I didn’t tend to our marriage often enough. Though my wife isn’t blameless, I bear the largest share of responsibility. I am uncomfortable engaging with emotions, so even as she would sporadically ask me to work with her, I didn’t trust her – or myself – enough to make the effort. I didn’t make conscious choices to avoid difficult discussions, but benign or not, the effect was the same. And now our differences are irreconcilable.

So my business is failing, my marriage has failed, and I am left to start again.

It’s liberating in many ways though, which is in sharp contrast to the last time I had these few commitments – when I left college about forty years ago. I don’t feel intimidated or rudderless. I can make many different choices, and I feel excited about the opportunities ahead of me. And with our assets split and the kids launched, I’ll have few encumbrances, which expands the field of possible paths.

So while I wouldn’t have chosen to be here, I am here nonetheless. And it could be worse.

Divorce

My wife and I are divorcing.

We’ve been married more than 32 years. There’s no precipitating event. No outburst. No affair. No abuse. No addictions.

So why are we divorcing?

I don’t think we’ve ever been well-suited for each other. She wears her heart on her sleeve, sharing her thoughts and feelings broadly. I am very private. She tests ideas out loud, working through her thought processes verbally. When I speak, I’ve already decided. She seeks validation, and I am parsimonious with feedback. She lives spontaneously, changing her mind frequently. I make a plan and stick to it.

Early in our marriage we invested the time to resolve our conflicts and differences. And then, as time passed, we stopped trying. Cracks developed. And, unresolved, the cracks widened into fissures, the fissures into gaps, the gaps into chasms. Dawn made more of an effort than I did to fix what was happening in our marriage, but I didn’t have the emotional awareness to deal with our problems. Or the will to find it.

And so we find ourselves after 32 years not strangers but friends.

But not more than friends either. We are divorcing amicably, as you’d expect of friends, even friends who share children.

We have wounds. We don’t trust each other with our emotional well-being. I have hurt her by rejecting her (her version); she has hurt me by not following through on commitments (my version). Both have merit. Neither is the full story. As with most things between married couples.

In spite of our wounds, we don’t harbor ill will. Or at least not enough of it to complicate our dissolution. In fact, because of lower expectations with the transition from spouses to friends our relationship has been smoother. I hope it continues. I expect that we will remain friends, though it will likely be at a distance, at least until grandchildren pull us back into the same orbit. Among our differences are weather and social preferences: she likes active social scenes and cooler weather, while my ideals are warmer temperatures and few but meaningful interactions with others. Funnily enough, I’m likely to head to colder climes while she makes a go of it in the hot valleys of northern California.

Our daughters are taking the split well. We don’t blame each other, so they don’t either. And they do love us both after all. Damaging our relationships with our daughters is a worst-case scenario, and we are thankful that at least we made a very effective parenting team.

We’ve set intentions to treat each other both kindly and fairly, and we are walking that path. We have a long distance yet to go, and there are potential stressors related to our financial situations that could still roil the waters. We have engaged professionals to help us untangle our emotional wounds, handle the legal process, and counsel us on finances, so I hope that they can help us navigate those potential pitfalls (to mix a lot of metaphors!).

In our latest session, our divorce therapist asked us how we were feeling about our divorce and to what we were saying goodbye as we split. Dawn feels the loss keenly, though she fully believes it’s the preferrable outcome. I am not sad or grief-stricken but rather optimistic that we can have a more emotionally satisfying relationship once we say goodbye to the stress and tension that marked a lot of our married interactions.

Time will, of course, tell the tale. As it always does.

But I am hopeful.

Dad

My father is getting old. He’s working towards 87, though you’d probably guess at least a decade younger if you saw him.

He grew up a farm boy, so he delights in physical labor. Professionally, he spent 40+ years as a geologist, hiking around mines and mountains looking at rocks. His hair is no longer red, but it hasn’t gone gray either. It’s kind of a medium brown.

He repeats himself from time to time now. And he doesn’t hear very well, so he’ll sometimes start a new conversation while another is going on. He’s lost one kidney and his prostate to cancers and a gall bladder maybe in sympathy, but he still climbs on the roof to clean off debris and goes up on a ladder to retrieve boxes of Christmas decorations despite his wife’s protestations.

He and my mother travel extensively, often internationally, often to see opera performances, and he remains curious about genetics and stock investing and politics, though the last aggravates him as much as it aggravates everyone.

He revels in family gatherings, which I understand more and more as I age too. His nine grandchildren are individually fascinating to him, and he thinks about them a lot. In the way of grandparents everywhere he expects nothing from them, and he is genuinely grateful for whatever time and attention they give him. He wasn’t quite as generous with his children, though he was always fair and attentive when he wasn’t away working.

My father is not especially articulate. He struggles to express his thoughts sometimes, and it gets harder the more wine he drinks. It frustrates him in the moment, but his frustration rarely lasts long. After all, there’s always a new idea to explore.

At his retirement party 25 years ago, one of the administrative assistants he worked with for a few years gave me a deep insight into the man I’d known by then for 35 years or so. After my father talked about his career, largely thanking people for their contributions to it, she said it was typical of my father to list his regrets as things he wouldn’t have the chance to do. He accepted everything, good and bad, that had already happened, and he never thought of changing any of it. He didn’t look back with regret, but he was sad about missing projects yet to come. That remains true. He desperately wants to ride in a self-driving car.

He hasn’t figured out most of his iPhone yet, but he’s not intimidated by it. In fact, he discovered how to emphasize delivery of texts by playing around with them, and it amused me – and probably him – when he taught me how to do it too. Our texts to each other are always delivered loud or gentle or slammed. He loves tech stocks as much for their possibilities to change our world as for the financial returns to his portfolio. He’s excited about the future. Politicians aside, of course.

He laughs often and smiles more. He and I like to sit together at family dinners, and we amuse ourselves with running commentary and asides to the topics of conversation. His trademark phrase on parting with colleagues has always been, “Have fun!”

Because he does. Not every minute, but many times every day.

He is, in sum, a happy man.

I want to be like my dad.

Emotions, cont.

Here no longer works very well for me.

I’ve been intellectually precocious for most of my life. I’m smart, maybe even very smart. (Obviously humble too.)

Ideas have never intimidated me, and I think I can consider most ideas without much emotional baggage to get in the way. Mainly because I keep my emotions at arms length. Or securely locked away from my consciousness.

Emotions, though, are relentless.

I’m currently experiencing quite an emotional upheaval. There are many reasons for it: My business, into which I’ve invested much of our retirement savings, is under significant stress, so I’m feeling anxious about that. I can’t dispel the anxiety without support, and I recognize that I don’t have much emotional support that I can comfortably access. So I am questioning my relationships, which brings more anxiety. I feel lonely and sad. With much of my current situation in flux, my future is uncertain. Which feels even more stressful.

I’m not in a good place. I don’t like feeling stressed, lonely, and sad, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

I am where I am largely of my own making.

Some of it comes naturally. I am generally shy to those I don’t know, so it takes time for me to establish emotional connection. I am both reserved and a bit self-centered, so in my relationships I tend not to reciprocate with proportional emotional intensity.

Some of it is conditioning. My family moved every 2-3 years as I grew up, and not just down the block. From Illinois to Maine, to Ontario, Canada, to Chile, to Vancouver, to Tucson, to Denver. I don’t have lifelong friends. I had to make new friends every time we moved, and since I am shy in new situations, I felt emotionally isolated a lot during my formative years. Isolation is familiar to me, and it feels like my default state. It is comfortable. My parents – and theirs – kept tight rein on their emotions, so the examples that I saw showed me that emotions must be leashed. Like everyone, I feel emotions, often strongly, and the intensity of my most powerful feelings terrifies me. If I can’t control them, I feel like my emotions might destroy me.

Some of it is choice. My wife is my opposite. We complete each other, but we don’t mesh well. Natural tendencies and habits developed over 30+ years of marriage have left raw friction points and hidden fault lines in our relationship, and trust is not complete between us. Where she reaches out broadly at times of emotional stress, I withdraw into myself. There is no small amount of pain and resentment (though our marriage is not just pain and resentment). And I have no one else I share my feelings with either. I withdraw to avoid emotional intimacy, because I lack confidence in my ability to manage my emotions in important relationships.

The combination of nature and decisions, initially by others and then by myself, have left me here. And here no longer works very well for me. I don’t want to feel stressed, lonely, and sad, but I wonder if I have missed the window to make that work with my current relationships and if I have enough runway left in my life to make it work with different relationships.

And I’m not sure how I will decide.

Adulting

My daughters are going through the change.

Not menopause. (At least I hope not – I don’t have grandchildren yet!)

Their change is from learning to doing, from studying and practicing to working and producing. My oldest graduated college a couple years ago, my youngest will graduate in a few months. Their transition to full-time contributors to our society is going about as well as expected. Which is to say they are confused, anxious, and highly stressed.

Like most of us who have gone through it.

I don’t know that we’re failing our young people as they move from school into working, but I do think we’ve not been able to articulate a path that illuminates what will be different and how they will be able to successfully manage it. Which is weird, because the answer(s) seem simple.

First, find work that fills a deeply-felt purpose. If the goals of your work align with your values, then you can stand doing the boring stuff you’re going to have to do as the noob, because you know it moves the ball forward on things that are super important to you. And you don’t have to make a lot of money, because A) you don’t have a lot of expenses, and B) you’re not going to make a ton more money in another entry-level position this side of Wall Street. So embrace your ideals and find work that results in something that feels important to you.

Second, tend to your health. That’s health writ large. Get daily exercise. Pray. Journal your feelings. Meditate. Do puzzles. Eat regularly. And for God sakes, get enough sleep every night. When you keep your physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual selves in balance, you can manage the ebbs and flows of your life much more capably.

Third, tend to your relationships. Your partner. Your family. Your friends. Your colleagues. Text them. Go to lunch and dinner. Have coffee or beers. Invite them over for game night. Go for a hike or a run together. Call them on their birthdays. Share what’s happening with you, and take interest in what they’re experiencing. The more vibrant your network of people is, the more enriching your life will be, and the more support you can pull from it in your times of need. And there is always times of need. When you are present for them, they will be there when you need help too.

And that’s really it.

If we helped our young people – and ourselves – concentrate on these three ubertasks, then this whole adulting thing wouldn’t be so intimidating. There’s plenty of distractions out there to dull our focus – our phones, TVs and streaming services, booze and pot and other consciousness-altering temptations – and those are among the reasons we struggle with this transtion, but I think if we could present these simple steps in a way that resonates as truth, perhaps my daughters and their peers would heed them and save themselves a lot of agony. And just maybe this transition wouldn’t feel so daunting.

“Smart”

My Uncle Jim and I will never be mistaken for each other.

I am a college graduate with a double major in Economics & Management and English Composition and a year of graduate business school under my belt. He dropped out of high school. I have lived in Canada and Chile and several of our United States, and I have traveled in South America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. If Uncle Jim has spent any time at all outside a 100-mile radius of Rockton, Illinois, I would be shocked. I have worked in Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, most recently launching a franchise shared-workspace business. When he worked for someone other than a neighboring farmer, Uncle Jim drove a local delivery truck.

I don’t say this either to demean this most generous man or to extoll any talents of mine. These are facts, easily provable even in this charged political environment that doesn’t seem to recognize them.

I say all this because I was having a discussion with my brother on a drive back from southern California yesterday, and we landed on the word “smart.” He said he didn’t think he was as smart as our sister (kindly, he made no comment on how he thinks she and I compare!).

I’ve thought for some time that “smart” is a uselessly imprecise term, and I feel more strongly about that with every passing year. And when a man as talented as my brother feels like he is lacking, I know why I feel that way. “Smart” is such a nebulous concept with so many variables that it cannot be commonly defined. To wit:

If you wanted someone to build a business performance model, relating processes to each other, and associating costs and revenues to products and services, then you would be far better served to hire me to do that if your only other choice was Uncle Jim. I don’t think he’d be able to even comprehend what you wanted when you started to describe it. When it comes to creating a quantified reflection of what a business does, I am much smarter than my uncle, which is to say I understand the concepts, I know how to dissect a business, I’ve mastered the technology that allows me to build a pretty sophisticated model that can accommodate many scenarios, and I can communicate my findings.

Getting a truck or a tractor to run is a completely different situation however. I don’t know how an engine works, or how that engine transfers power to move not just the vehicle but also any equipment that it uses, or what that equipment even does. But Uncle Jim sure knows. Anything you find on a farm, he knows how to get it to work, and then he knows what to do with it once it’s going. When it comes to machines or farming, Uncle Jim is way, way smarter than me.

So when it comes to being “smart,” I think any assessment has to be contextual. There is just too much difference between people and their capabilities, knowledge and experiences – to say nothing of how all of that applies to the question at hand – to be able to declare definitively who is truly smart.