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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

Can’t Blame My Mom For This One


I have an unnatural aversion to old people. I know a lot of people shy away from old people out of some desire not to interact with the inevitable, but mine is really more of an aversion I think, than just a simple “ick” influence. And I think I know where it started…

When I was young, my brother and I would spend a couple of weeks each summer with my grandparents in North Carolina. This was back when the airline industry was revered and you got those cool little gold “Delta” wings when you flew. We were only like, 6 and 9 years old then (I was 6) and we flew by ourselves. The crew always made sure we were safely tucked on board and they walked us off the plane upon arrival into the waiting arms of my grandparents. The funny thing was, once there, we didn’t do a whole lot with my grandparents and because of that, I gravitated to my grandfather’s sister, Aunt Marjorie.

She was old back then even. But she lived in the house with my grandparents and pretty much acted like the maid, butler and all-around babysitter. I loved her like…well, like nobody really. I slept in her room in a twin bed on the other side of the nightstand from her and at the crack of dawn, we’d both get up and start making breakfast. I can still smell the frying bacon and taste the cool, graininess of the homemade apple sauce that she’d bring up from the bare-earth basement.

But once breakfast was done and the house chores were finished, often Aunt Marjorie and I would go for a drive. In her younger years, she worked at the Biltmore House and we would often drive around the estate and she’d rattle off how she used to do so and so there, and over there she took care of this or that. We’d also usually drive parallel to the French Broad River—a deep, fast river that runs from North Carolina to Tennessee and that I simply loved.

On rare occasions, we would stop by one of the many volunteer stations where my Aunt worked and one day we went to an old folks’ home. We didn’t stay long, but I remember walking in with her and being told to “stand right there” while she dropped off some covered dish or something. She turned to speak to someone and, like all little boys, I had to look around and see what was going on. There were old people everywhere, which was fine…I was OK. But then, this old lady about ten feet away, sitting in a chair, beckoned to me and said, “Come here. Come here little boy.” Now, being used to doing what adults told me, I obeyed. I walked over to her, a bit stiffly and she reached out and with preternatural strength, wrapped me in a sinewy, old-lady bear hug and began to squeeze the ever-lovin’ life outta me!

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t call out. After what seemed like ages, finally someone noticed what was going on and a bunch of them came running over and had to literally pry the old lady off of me.

I was scared…shaken, and apparently never the same again. Today, I like old people from a distance. And I like old people in general, but there comes a point at which I go from looking at them as just older versions of myself, and start seeing them as these not-quite-human “things” that I’d just as soon avoid. And this is bad because CareerMom’s grandmother has recently taken a turn for the worse and has been here visiting. We’ve done a couple of big family get-togethers and while everyone else is gathered around her trying to make the most of her remaining time, I have to literally force myself to even go into the room—and it shames me. I pray she hasn’t noticed with everyone else gathered around. To cover myself, I follow the kids around, pretending to be watching them, when really, I’m avoiding.

I know…one day it’ll be me in that chair and I’ll wish I could reach out and squeeze my grandkids. I pray I’m still lucid enough to show some restraint.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Life in these United States

Blame it on tha rain’…(it was fallin’ fallin’…)

My oldest son has developed a seemingly irrational fear of thunderstorms. True, we’ve had our share recently. Already, it’s been an unusually active season, and summer just started. But still, we’re not even talking dark clouds and high winds–no, from the moment he gets up in the morning, he’s peering at the sky and if there’s a hint of even puffy white clouds up there, he heads for weatherchannel.com.

In my infinite parental wisdom, I’ve decided that I have no blame here. No, I blame school. I blame those snotty little five year olds who come on the P.A. system every morning and tell the rest of the student body what the weather is going to be. And then I blame the school system for too many dad-blamed storm drills. A couple of times this past school year, by the time he got off the bus in the afternoon, storms or no, he was already wild-eyed and near tears over the fact that there was a ‘chance’ of evening thunderstorms.

Now this goes hand in hand with another fear that seems to have come out of nowhere…and that being, that we’re going to leave him alone. I can’t tell you how many times in the past six months I’ve had to answer, “Where’s mommy?” or “Where are you going?”  And heaven forbid, when you drop him off at the kids’ play area at the gym while you work out, that you’re even a minute later than you told him you’d be–NIAGARA FALLS!

OK, maybe  I share a little of the blame here–but indirectly. As a child I was also a bit of a worry-er. But the things I worried about were just a tad more serious that this stuff. And by serious, I mean like, “Oh crap, what now?” kind of stuff.

But I didn’t worry about the weather.

In retrospect, I suppose if he’s going to be worried about something, it could be worse. But we’ve tried reassurance; we tried fussing at him; nothing seems to work. And while I know that mostly he’ll grow out of it, I know I still carry some of my childhood worries with me today. Even now, when I hear footsteps above me in the house coming towards me, for just a second, my gut clenches up and my heart jumps ahead. I wish I knew how to take these fears away from him.

Hmm, I’m sure I’m the first parent to have ever said THAT.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Life in these United States

Why it takes a village

To say that mental problems run in my family, is like saying the Obama administration is moderately disliked by Republicans. That is, we have a bevy of problems, ranging from the debilitating, to generally just being an annoyance for everyone around us. There are probably a couple dozen people in this world outside of my immediate family who are familiar with my story in-total from having been adopted at an early age, to living through two divorces; an abusive mother; and any number of a dozen other things that alone, might explain some of the problems I have.

If I had ten thousand dollars for every time I’d heard someone say to me, “It’s a miracle you turned out as well-adjusted as you did,” I’d have at least…I dunno…a hundred thousand dollars! Though perhaps after blogging all this, I’ll hear it more often. If I’m being honest though, my problems pale in comparison to others. My problems don’t require medication. They don’t cause me to completely withdraw from the people I love for long periods of time. And they don’t make me want to act out on the society at-large, so generally speaking, I’m doing alright.

But there are times. Oh yes, there are times.

For instance, parenting. Parenting has been a challenge as I’ve discussed on numerous occasions and it continues to cause personal problems for me. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, parenting is not for everyone. There is a line that each person much recognize within his or her tolerance and they must adhere to that line, for when you do not, THAT’s when you make the morning news.

My personal “line” was crossed the moment I found out we were having a third child (and yes, I’m probably going to hell just for saying that out loud). But I’m not going to spoil the literary moment here by telling you how much I love my children and how I wouldn’t trade a moment of it for the world, because frankly, that’s a bunch of crap.

After 11 years of marriage, my wife has learned the tell-tale signs of my having reached a point, which manifests itself in one of two ways:

– either via a sudden, violent outburst at one of the children in the form of a “STOP IT!” or a “SHUT UP!”

– or more often, the tightening of my jaw, the narrowing of my eyes, and an obstinate will to keep perfectly quiet. Don’t try and draw me out of it. Don’t ask me what’s wrong. Just leave me…the hell…alone for a while.

I think one of the failures of the human race is our desire to compare ourselves to others. I do it; I’m sure you do it to. We each hold ourselves to this impossibly high standard that’s based solely on the public persona shown to us by others who are privately just as screwed up as we are. I’m sure, to that divorced lady who lives up the street and who only sees me when I’m outside playing with the kids, that I embody everything a good father should (perhaps with the exception of Ryan Reynolds-like abs). Because all we see of people is what they want us to see.

But I do wonder how I compare. Oh, I know that I could search Google right now for, “Fed up Dads” or “My kids make me want to just walk away” and I could find thousands of people who have expressed similar feelings. But, we’re still in the minority when you consider how many parents are out there.

I look at people like “Father of Five” and that dude just makes me feel A) ashamed and B) proud all at the same time. Ashamed because he has way more kids than I do, plus works crappy hours (on second thought, maybe that’s WHY he’s such a patient dad…) and Proud because it’s nice to know we’re not all as screwed up as me.

So, my hat off to you FoF and all you other Fathers and Mothers out there who make having families bearable for the rest of us.

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Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States Society

Saying Goodbye to a Simpler Time

Ray lived next to me in our old house–the one in the neighborhood that real estate agents like to call “transitional.” What transitional means in land-ease, is that most of the neighborhood is made up of older people who are starting to leave (read: die off) and the influx of new home owners tend to either be “fixer-uppers” or the type of people who want cheap housing in a good school district, but who really can’t afford the upkeep on an older home. They call it transitional until the majority of the neighborhood goes one way or the other at which point it’s either “improving” or it’s becoming a ghetto. We left, so you can guess which way the pendulum was swinging.

Ray is one of the older people. At the age of 70 now, he still stands about 6′ 8″ tall and weighs roughly 230. He played basketball in his youth for the University of Houston and racked up some serious points back in the mid 50s.

I saw Ray out in his yard a lot and for a long time, I just called him “Old Man.” He was eccentric even before I formally knew him. I’d watch from my kitchen window as he dug weeds out of his grass using only a kitchen spoon. I’d shake my head and mutter, “They make spray for that you know,” as he spent hours at it. Thanks to several old pine trees, his backyard was devoid of any grass, but he maintained a couple of  bird feeders and even threw out corn for the squirrels, so at any time I could look out and see squirrels and chipmunks running back and forth across the fenceline that separated our yards.

When I was outdoors working, I had my dogs with me. My dogs were/are quiet and not the kind to run away. Eventually, they sniffed their way over into Ray’s yard and it wasn’t long before he was bringing them treats and talking gently to them in order to coax them over. Turns out his wife fancied herself a cat rescuer and so their house contained–at any given time–approximately 4 to 6 cats and from what I could tell the couple of times I visited (briefly), they didn’t change the litter much.

Eventually I got to know Ray pretty well. Ray is old-school. And I don’t mean that to say that he’s a debonaire old gentlemen who sat around listening to Sinatra. No, I mean he’s from an era when people said what they meant and they didn’t care who heard it or what people thought. By today’s standards, Ray is a raving racist; but by his era’s standards, he’s a man who has worked hard his whole life and doesn’t want to live around people who don’t want to take care of  “the place.” For people like that, his patience was thin–even for his own son-in-law who was a licensed electrician but who refused to hold down a regular job, preferring instead to constantly beg and borrow from family members.

I laughed at what Ray said–a lot–primarily because I was afraid someone else had heard what he’d just said and I didn’t want to get caught up in it. But there was truth in it too and deep down, I think many people would agree with him on some level; they just wouldn’t say it out loud like he did.  All in all, Ray and I became good friends. He’d regale me with stories from the hayday of the neighborhood, when he and his wife hosted “block parties” and he had all the alcohol people could drink because he was a liquor supplier. In return, I’d talk “dogs” with him and occasionally rake his yard when he wasn’t looking because I knew that he was having trouble getting along at times.

One day I came home from school–this was when I returned to college from ’02-’04–and found him lying in his backyard. He’d fallen off his ladder while painting. The drop was about 20 feet and he’d fallen hard. By the time I found him, the blood oozing out of a dozen scrapes and cuts had attracted both the ants and the mosquitos and he was covered in angry whelts. He’d been lying there, as near as we could tell, for about six hours unable to move. Turns out he’d shattered his pelvis upon falling, along with breaking a half dozen other bones.

Ray finally got out of the hospital, but he never really recovered. To this day, he’s limited to the walk from his lazy chair to his bed. He does some very light yard work, and that’s about it. The last time I talked to him, he told me how the people who’d bought our old house had trashed the place and one of the grown sons who lived there with his equally grown brother and their dad, had gotten chased out on the roof by four cops–and still managed to get away. The bank finally foreclosed on the house, but it’s too late to matter. No one is going to buy the house now and fix it up. The neighborhood isn’t worth it. Ray doesn’t care who lives there, as long as they aren’t a minority of any type (my words…his were far more colorful). And as for our President…well, let’s just say that IF Ray could travel to D.C., he’s not too worried about what they’d do to a 70 year old cripple.

In many ways, the world will be better off without people like Ray, but in some ways, it’s going to be a damn shame when the people of his generation are gone. They are a different breed. A more honest breed to be sure and in some ways, I feel that if this country were still run by people like him, we wouldn’t be having this discussion about illegal immigrants, or welfare states. Of course, we’d likely still have slavery too, so I’m not sure how you square that.

I miss Ray–I do. I didn’t have to watch my words around him and he loved my dogs as much as I did. My neighbors now are fine, but we never talk to each other. We’re all too busy working to afford our houses and our cars to stop and have more than polite, surface conversation.

For now, Ray is still living over in the old neighborhood with the chihuahua his wife saved from some shelter or other. Ray refuses to walk him though for fear people will laugh at the disparity in size between the basketball player and the smallest species of canine known to man. But he’s there, and that’s comforting to me even if I rarely ever see or talk to him.

You’re (basically) good people Ray. Here’s to you. May your heaven bring you peace.