A Twenty-first Birthday

Yesterday was my daughter’s twenty-first birthday. She is my middle child. This is not new territory for me. So, I was surprised when I woke with every memory of her life rocketing Matrix-like through my brain all at once.

There was the night her mother and I made her. (That was fun.)

The night she was born. (Exhausting.)

The night she woke me screaming because all the stuffed animals in her room came alive in the middle of the night and wouldn’t let her out.

The time her baby brother threw up in her hair.

The day we had to explain to her we were holding her back in first grade.

The day I realized she was having so many problems with the other girls at school because she was the only one in her class who no longer had the same body shape as the boys.

The struggling to understand her during her teenage years.

The day she came out to me at Chic-fil-a (hilarious) during pride week.

The look on her face when I told her I’d already known for two years and I loved her.

And dozens of others.

For a moment I thought, “Wait, am I dying? And, if I am, why is my daughter’s life flashing before me? Shouldn’t it be my own?”

OK, that last part didn’t actually happen, but it illustrates my point. My daughter’s life is not mine. The entire point for the last twenty-five years has been to prepare her and her brothers to be able to live independently of me – or anyone else for that matter. And yet, our lives are so intertwined, in a small but significant way, her life is mine.

I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life focusing on helping my kids become healthy, fulfilled adults. So much so, that when I look back on my life it is filled with them. My kids are definitely not my entire life, but they are the most important part of my life’s work. For someone who set out in life to never have kids, I’m a little taken aback by this outcome.

And I wouldn’t change it for anything.

What about changing it to do it better? 

That question assumes I could.

Don’t take that answer the wrong way. Everyone who knows me knows I have to work hard to let go of the guilt I feel over the many ways I’ve failed my children through the years.

I’ve learned that from my mother – and, I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.

I know better than anyone I’ve been nowhere near the perfect father.

At the same time, with the mind, character, and personality I have, as well as, the upbringing, the time I had to devote to raising them, along with the amount of time it took for me to grasp reality and learn how to ask better questions, I’m not convinced I could have done any better.

I have three great kids. None show any signs of becoming icons of our culture. In fact, I tried to raise them to be exactly the opposite. All three are flawed human beings. All three strive to be good at what they do and to be even better people.

They are starting life in a far better position than I did. They will be far better spouses and parents than I’ve been – if they choose that route.

I have a musical body of work I can be proud of. I have a growing written body of work I will be able to be proud of someday.

I have a family body of work I can be even more proud of.

I am a blessed man. 

Remodel

Over spring break I remodeled my music studio. This is the place I’ve written my last four CD’s and recorded the last two. In here, over the past eleven years, I’ve taught hundreds of students to make music. It has looked the same the entire time. I decided a face lift was in order.

Before:

When I was working for other people, I’d heard that a simple paint job or changing light fixtures was all it took to reinvigorate employees with lagging motivation. I thought it was hogs wallow until, while working for a Fortune 100 company that paid its employees next to nothing, I watched it happen.

I was amazed. None of us got a raise. They moved us from a number of smaller offices into a bullpen full of cubicles. We all got “new” desks and chairs. They were new to us, anyway. This was not a better work environment by any means. More distractions, more oversite, less privacy. Yet, we were all excited and productivity rose for a few months after we moved across the hall. It was impressive. I’m not even sure the higher ups at the company were aiming for the bump in productivity. It was just that the company was growing so fast. We needed the extra space for all the new employees.

Remodeling my studio was difficult work because I don’t really know what I’m doing. But, it was a nice change of pace. It reminded me of why I am so happy teaching music. Years of construction work was not only unfulfilling, but incredibly hard on my body. My favorite thing about the drywall business is that I am no longer involved in it!

Although, I still remember driving my oldest son around Omaha and pointing out buildings and homes I’d helped to build. I did feel a strong sense of pride in the work I’d done.

Other Remodels

When I was twenty-four, I was involved in a multilevel marketing company. My up line (the couple who recruited my wife and I into the business) decided to get a large office just inside the 610 loop west in Houston. I helped paint the new office. I didn’t feel the excitement or any extra ownership in that office. Probably because I didn’t really work there. I’d show up for the Tuesday night recruiting meetings and the Saturday morning trainings, but I was rarely in the office. I was always out and about in Houston, meeting new people, delivering product, coaching my downline and my customers on how to get better results. That’s where I was happy, excited, and engaged. Ultimately, it didn’t work out, but I had a good time while I was working the business sixteen hours a day.

At thirty-two, my last year in construction, I helped my church remodel a new space they’d rented. It was an old building in Council Bluffs, IA. At one point, we knocked out a wall to make the sanctuary space bigger. The pastor had located the breaker box and turned off the power to all the outlets. I was tearing out the wall. When I got to the wiring for the outlets, I asked if he was sure the power was off. He assured me it was. I tentatively tore out the wiring for the first outlet. All good. I began to work more quickly. When I got to the third outlet, I grabbed the wiring and pulled hard enough that my hand slipped to the end where the wires were exposed. I large spark and a shooting pain emanated from the contact point. I’d burned the pinky on my fretting hand pretty badly.

It turned out, the previous tenants had used the third outlet for the copy machine and, instead of using a forty watt breaker they used two twenties. You live. You get burned. You learn. I finished the remodel with a badly burned hand. I didn’t even attend the first service. I never felt any extra motivation or ownership there, either.

Back to the Studio

After: 

The space looks completely different. More vibrant. Larger. I am looking forward to teaching here. I am looking forward to creating new music here. I am interested to find out if the color I chose for the walls really does improve the concentration of my students. That’s what the research I found says the effect is supposed to be.

I am more motivated by the facelift, but I did all the work and made all the decisions. One would expect me to be excited. I am interested to learn whether any of my students become more motivated by the new look of their learning space. 

Uncle Jim

My uncle Jim died last week. He was in Panama. He got the travel gene from my grandparents. He seemed a perpetual motion machine his entire life. He fell from his scooter and cut his arm. He didn’t have it looked at, apparently trusting his body to do what it always did – recover. After a few days there was obviously something wrong and a neighbor or the family he was renting from (details are a bit fuzzy) took him to the local clinic. The clinic sent him immediately to the hospital in Chiriquí, but it was already too late. He died of the infection.

One thing everyone agrees on about Uncle Jim – he lived. To learn of his life ending from a simple cut that went septic is strange. I still have not found what feel like the correct words to describe my feelings. They will come in time. I hope.

When he was a kid, he was caught raising a chicken in his bedroom when, one early morning, the chicken revealed itself to be a rooster.

As a teen, he was found to be selling golf balls for twenty-five cents apiece to golfers who had lost theirs on the course. Eventually, someone figured out he was in fact “ransoming” their own balls back to them.

He was shipped out to Viet Nam in 1967. I was born in May of 1968. The winter before I was born our grandmother asked our mother to name me after him. He hadn’t written home in many months. She was certain he wasn’t coming back at all. My mother refused. I think her superstition overcame her great desire to please her parents. She had a deep fear of naming her baby after a newly dead relative. Also, she had a deep, irrational fear that, if she named me James, her baby brother really would be dead. She just couldn’t do it.

So I was christened Dean Ronald and Uncle Jimmy came home a few months later.

We had intermittent contact through the years. When I was ten or so, he brought his speed boat to the family camping trip in Virginia. When I tried to ski behind it, he accelerated like I was one of the teenagers and not the fifty pound wisp I was. The powerful engine pulled me up out of the water and the tips of my skis under. I did a flip and landed on my back, knocking the wind out of me. My family being who we were, I wasn’t allowed out of the water. I skied behind his speed boat, but I don’t remember it.

Was I concussed?  Maybe, I doubt it. If I was, it was not my first or last concussion, so it mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

At another family camping trip at the same campground, I was probably fifteen. I demonstrated I had no concept of discretion or decorum. As he and some of the older cousins sat around the fire, I asked him if I could buy some pot from him. He was visibly shocked. After a few seconds of calculation, he recovered and demonstrated why he was everyone’s favorite uncle. He said, “I won’t sell you any, but I’ll give you some.”

He gave me a little baggie of roaches and dried leaves. One of my cousins and I smoked it all that night. I remember being really high and then going to sleep.

Over the past week I’ve been privileged to learn a few more stories from other cousins. He went home to the Lehigh Valley a few years ago and settled down in the same house he grew up in. I am a little envious of my cousins who got to spend more time with him. Their kids got to know him, as well. Lots of laughter. Plenty more craziness I hadn’t known about.

We only saw each other a couple of times in our lives after that. We were both busy running around this vast country of ours.

Uncle Jim was always thinking outside the box of normal. Even spending winters in Panama because it was warm and inexpensive.

He lived his life as a creative force.

I hope he enjoyed it.

The rest of us did. 

How I Could Have Saved Time and Pain

To fully understand this post, first read Learning to Do Life Well. My post from 1/9/2017. 

It turns out some accomplished philosophers and psychologists have written about what I was going through in my twenties and early thirties. First, I had to do the work of living the ancient Greek maxim:

Know Thyself

The ancient Greeks claimed they got it from the even more ancient Egyptians. Had you asked me during the nearly two decades I was trying to figure all this stuff out, I would have said it was probably Shakespeare.

As I was learning about myself, I was also engaging in what Nietzsche called “The Will to Power” and what Jung called “Individuation.” Had I been exposed to these things before or during these particular struggles, I might have been far less concerned about why I didn’t seem to fit anywhere and never being satisfied as a joiner or a follower.

The process of learning who we are is often uncomfortable. Jung encourages us to confront and acknowledge our darker sides and to neither be ashamed or afraid of them. Nietzsche admonishes us to revel in the pain of the struggle. To see it as an opportunity to show the strength of our internal metal.

All through my mid- and late-twenties I had this recurring vision in my mind. I’d be working a job I hated for three to six months, falling farther and farther behind financially the entire time. I’d be working so hard to conform to what “god,” my church leaders, and society expected of me. And I’d be growing more and more miserable.

I could see this “other” me inside myself. He was nearly naked. Long hair, dirty. Aggressive. I had him in a cell of stone and ancient iron bars. There was a single, bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling that was always swinging side to side so no one could ever get a good look at his face.

I knew I had him caged, but any moment he was going to trick me into letting him out again so he could destroy the nice, sanitized, middle class life I was struggling to create. Complete with the two car garage and the white picket fence. Even though I didn’t want any of it.  

I was terrified of this other me and I knew I had no real power over him.

Had I been exposed to Nietzsche, Jung, and others, I might have learned this is normal. Instead of keeping this other me caged, I needed to learn to compromise with him and figure out how the two of us could live together in this one body and enjoy it.

It was perfectly fine that I wasn’t cut out to live the Monday through Friday life of modern Americans. Jung calls it the “average ideal.” I wasn’t designed to help fulfill the corporation’s vision, or the pastor’s vision, or anybody else’s vision. I was supposed to be finding and creating my own unique path. And I wasn’t supposed to be fighting my path, avoiding my path, or being ashamed of it.

On his debut EP, singer songwriter Joe Pug has a line I love:

I’d rather be nobody’s man than somebody’s child

This is how young Joe expressed his struggle of finding his unique path in life. I think he summed it well.

In trying desperately through my twenties and early thirties to conform to the jobholder lifestyle of the masses, I was literally harming myself and my family. It wasn’t who I was or who was designed to become. When I finally gave myself permission to accept myself as an artist I began the process of self actuation and my life began to get better. It was a painfully slow process, but it has made an enormous difference in every area of my life: mental, physical, emotional, financial, social, and career.

Life as an individual is good. 

Learning to Do Life Well

When I was thirty I met a cousin on my father’s side of the family. He’s about a decade older than me. We discovered quickly the differences between us were vast and probably too difficult to overcome for there to be any kind of friendship between us. He grew up in the family business. I took it up out of desperation. He was an artist. I was a guy who was there to get paid.

What was the family business? Drywall.

Hanging, taping, floating, and finishing.

He was great.

My skills were passable – mostly.

We were both doing work for the same company. He was an hourly employee and a highly valued one at that. I was a subcontractor. The lowest one on the totem pole. Right where I belonged.

He’d show up at 7 am and work until at least 3:30 pm Monday through Friday. I’d get there shortly after nine and work until six or so. This habit quickly got in his craw. He took me to lunch so he could explain life to me.

“You know, there’s a reason school hours are from 7:30 am to 3 in the afternoon,” he informed me.

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“It’s so that you learn to be disciplined and show up to work on time every day.”

Sounded more like programming to me. I didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing. I could see the value in it, but the trade-off didn’t seem worth it. And I definitely didn’t want to continue working in construction the rest of my life.

I knew he was trying to help me, but I couldn’t stop myself. “So, my showing up every day at 9 and staying longer than most isn’t disciplined?”

We had a short conversation about conforming to norms and expectations, but it didn’t take. Just like the hundred or so other conversations, consultations, and commands of this type that came before it from bosses, managers, sergeants, captains, and teachers. It wasn’t so much that I was rebellious, which I was until I was about twenty-one, but I was just never able to fit into the work-a-day lifestyle I was being encouraged to adopt.

My entire adult life I hated sitting in traffic with everyone else every morning and evening, traveling to and from jobs I either hated or could barely stand, just so I could get paychecks at or below subsistence levels. I simply wasn’t cut out for it. I got called things like, “lazy,” “flakey,” “flighty,” “weird,” and numerous other derogatories I feel no need to mention.

In my work-a-day life, whether in the military, on a construction site, or in the offices of a Fortune 100 company, I always felt out of place. I knew nothing was going to feel like being on stage. There’s just nothing else like it in the world. I also knew most of the rest of life was supposed to be enjoyable, as well. The problem was all other work felt as though it was making withdrawals from my life’s accounts and the meager paychecks at the end of the pay period never balanced the books.

When I got a chance to teach music to supplement my income and then make a fulltime livelihood, it was like coming home to a warm, welcoming house in the middle of a windy Nebraska winter. Don’t misunderstand. I still have to make sacrifices and compromises with my work, but they easily balance out with the rest of my life. I don’t wake up every day excited about work, but I do most days.

Finding what I’m good at and how to make a life with it took a long time. Mainly because I was distracted by what others were telling me I was supposed to do with my life and what advertisers and MTV had trained me to want as a musician. It took years of doing things that took from the quality of my life before I became brave enough to be creative and do something that enhanced and added to the value of my life and to the lives of others.

These days I try not to waste time wishing I’d gotten up the courage to do it earlier. I try to be thankful every day I get to build my life around teaching people in my community to have fun and make music.  

I don't know if I am doing life well, yet, but I do know I am getting better.