Tag: 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.

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.

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.

My Mother

I’m not a particularly good son to my mother, I think.

I do love her. Very much. More than I can articulate actually. I tell it to her on occasion. If you asked my mother I suspect she would say that I am haphazardly attentive. And she would say that she feels loved. Because she is a mother she gives her son the benefit of the doubt.

And I have probably left doubt.

I could do more. I should do more. But I am very self-absorbed. Not selfish. Not punitive. Not spiteful. But self-absorbed. It never occurs to me to do more until well after the fact.

I do live most of my life between my ears. I am marginally more present now than I was when I was younger. The benefits of exercising. It turns out that using your body is a very good way to get out of your head. But you can only make so many purses from a sow’s ear, which is to say I still think a lot. And most of that thinking is not about my mother. Or any other individual really.

And I feel guilty about that.

I believe relationships are a critical part of life. Connecting with others. Sharing experiences. Developing ideas informed by other people. Settling on a philosophy, on a world view, that includes other people’s perspectives. I do spend time thinking about how life works. For me. For others. Individually and collectively. But I don’t spend much time thinking about the people I know. What they may be doing. What they may be experiencing. And, most importantly, what they may be feeling.

Mild transgressions perhaps, at least when it comes to most other people.

But my mother?

Outwardly I am my father. I have his face and his voice and his mannerisms. We share many interests (except opera – he loves it. Really.). I am even-keeled like him. But inside, where my emotions meet my mind, I am my mother’s son. Smart. Maybe even very smart. Perceptive. Attentive to both context and details. We anticipate well, and we connect dots faster than most. And emotions terrify us, because we feel them so intensely we think they will unhinge us. Because emotional control is vitally important to us. I can’t explain why. It’s just very uncomfortable to feel like we aren’t in control of ourselves.

And yet I struggle to find mental and emotional space to consider this woman who is most like me. Who birthed me, fed me, nurtured me, taught me. To whom I owe more than I owe any other individual. I can’t seem to be bothered to repay that debt. Which probably makes me like every child ever, but still doesn’t assuage that guilt I feel.

At least when I think about it.

Intelligence

It’s better to be smart than not smart, I suppose. But intelligence is still way overrated.

“He’s so smart.” “She’s very intelligent.”

Observations, perhaps, but meant to explain outperformance and convey expectations. Being smart is supposed to be the ticket to success. In a binary world, a world that demands the simplicity of an A or B choice, being smart is held up as the determinant of success. We all want our children to be smart, even more than we want them to be attractive or funny, kind or curious, even more than we want them to be happy. Not because we’re jerks. Because we think that if they are smart, they will be successful, and that their success will lead to their happiness.

Putting aside that there are many paths to happiness, and putting aside that assessing both intelligence and success are largely subjective exercises, being smart is nothing but one of several factors that affect outcomes. Even if we say success is excellence in a chosen area, intelligence alone is no guarantee that someone can achieve it.

Take me, for example. I am smart. Even very smart.

But I am not excellent in any field. In 30 years spent in the employ of different companies large and small I ascended to middle management. And I wasn’t held in high esteem in my later years, when I reached an age where my future potential was no longer as significant as the possible trajectories of others in my firm. I am an endurance athlete, but I’m not an elite performer. I have thrown pots for a dozen years or more, and I still have yet to create a single work that would be considered sublime. I don’t suck at any of those things. I’m just not excellent.

Being smart is almost certainly better than not being smart. But you need many other attributes to be excellent. Awareness. Determination. Curiosity. Organization. Focus. Commitment. Discipline. Prioritization. There aren’t many people who live at the intersection of all of those characteristics, so there aren’t many people who can be truly excellent. And as Malcolm Gladwell helpfully pointed out in his book Outliers, you also need luck.

Excellence is a complex brew, and we don’t do complexity very well. We want things to be simple. And obvious. And we’ve settled on intelligence as our proxy.

But we’re wrong. Not for the first time, and probably not for the last time either. But we are wrong.

Regrets

Parenting is many things. I just wish I knew how to make all of them easier.

I have found, however, that it’s easier on my children when I temper the regrets I feel about my own life and the choices I’ve made in it. I have many regrets. And I have finally learned that they color many of my interactions with my daughters, and rarely in a positive way.

I was a timid kid. By nature as well as circumstance. I tended to sit back and observe when faced with a new situation, and moving as my family did every three years in my formative years meant I was often in a new situation. I was also self-conscious about entering late into an activity, so even after I felt like I understood what was going on I was reluctant to engage. So I regularly sat apart and wished I could be a part of the action.

My daughters are reserved as well. Which was evident from their births. They are decidedly different in many respects, but in this area they are the same. They are shy on first meeting, like me. They are slow to jump in. We’ve moved just once though, when they were both very young, so I think perhaps their comfort with familiar friends and familiar places is higher than mine was at their ages..

Knowing how excluded I felt as a child, and knowing how sad that felt to me, I encouraged my daughters to throw themselves into new situations, to embrace change, to step forward at every opportunity. I did so with the best of intentions, trying to help them avoid the isolation I felt when I was their ages. But I fear all I did was add stress to their lives, which is, of course, just what kids these days need more of. I forgot the first – and really only – rule of successful parenting: love the child you have, not the child you want. Or, said specifically to me, love the child you have, not the child you were.

I did the same with sports and with musical instruments, insisting not just on their participation, but their dedication. We did let them choose their activities, but we also insisted that they have activities, their mother for her reasons, me in the hope they would engage more fully than I did with the world I so desperately wanted to be more a part of. But rather than let that be the end of it, rather than let them decide how much of each activity they’d bite off, I tried to force engagement. Which runs counter to my daughters’ natures. And mine too.

As adults, they both feel anxious at times, and I wonder how much of that is just their nature and how much I contributed to it with my prodding. They are also more accomplished than I was then, so how much of that is their nature and how much the result of my hectoring? I tend to give them credit for their achievements and take blame for their stress. If happiness is the goal of life – and I believe it is – both stress and accomplishment are important parts of the happiness equation. I hope I’ve balanced some of the stress I induced with some of the striving they’ve experienced. But I don’t really know, and I suspect they’ll never know either.