This Christmas my siblings and I are getting together for the first time in over a year, but not to celebrate the season like past years. This year, we're moving our dad into a home. Technically, he's been in a facility in his little home town in the Midwest for a few months, but once we were able to shift our focus away from him and his health we started noticing the decline that our mother had been hiding behind her role as caregiver. So, for her sake as well as Dad's my sister has graciously arranged for a home for Dad in her city, and a place for Mom in her home, until she can't meet Mom's needs anymore.
It's a really strange time for us all, particularly because the three of us siblings have never had a good relationship with our father. I remember when my wife still hadn't met my folks after we got engaged, and she thought maybe they were super racist or that there was some other dark reason why I hadn't formally introduced them. It really wasn't that at all. I told her it was because they were older and lived so far away, but that wasn't entirely true. The uncomplicated truth was that I was embarrassed, especially of my father. And it wasn't that I was embarrassed that he would say something racist, even though micro-aggressions were not off the table. No, I was just embarrassed of ... him. It felt stupid at the time, like some teenage angst that I really should have gotten over already, but I've learned that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time: that my embarrassment can be perfectly legitimate, and that I shouldn't allow it to hold me back from being honest. Basically, my father was a genius at bad decisions. It's like whatever situation he found himself in, he discovered inventive and previously unfathomed ways of choosing the worst possible route out of it.
Honestly, everything I learned from my dad, about manhood, about parenting, about life, I learned through negative example. In the days leading up to this trip, my brother and sister and I have been talking more frankly about our upbringing and how we learned, and unlearned, some bad habits and negative ways of being.
So, this is the best I can do to share the wisdom I've gained from my father, the top three lessons I learned in reverse.
Lesson One: Take care of yourself, or else someone else will have to.
Some people think I'm obsessed with the gym and eating right. Mostly my wife. Pretty much mainly my wife thinks that. But the thing is, I watched my dad retire before he even turned sixty-five and then just ... quit. He had saved enough to get by for the rest of his life, he thought, in his tiny home town where houses, even today, cost less than $60,000 for three bedrooms. After that, he maintained some rental properties for a while, did odd jobs for a few years, and then just kind of settled. He decided that he was retired and he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to. That included anything difficult like exercise or reading books. He's ninety-one now, so nobody expects him to be in peak shape, but, really, he's been more or less like this, lethargic, forgetful, uninterested, and inactive, for as long as I can remember. And for everything that he gave up doing for himself, someone else - my mother, my sister, the community - picked up the slack and did for him. I might be a gym rat, and I might be obsessed with reading books and playing games and taking classes, but one thing I'm not doing is giving up and decaying. At some point, I'm sure I'll need help. We all do at some point, with all our different abilities and disabilities. But what I'm not doing is treating life like some cosmic trust fall test to see if my loved ones will catch me when I let go.
Lesson Two: Put family first.
This has been a hard one to balance, because I've also swerved too hard in the opposite direction by failing to set boundaries and read people who don't have the best intentions. Still, I can look back over my childhood at so many times where my father put himself ahead of the family. I don't know if was just his personality or part of some macho biblical manhood thing, but it was as if our well-being never counted for much. We never knew when he was going to make some crazy decision and change our lives overnight. And when he wasn't putting himself first, he was putting strangers first. I can remember so many times when he would go out of his way to help some stranger or community member and completely wreck our home in the process. From the outside, I'd bet people thought he was so generous, but from the inside, it was just chaos. I've had to work so hard to be the kind of husband and father who's present and available and contributing in the home, and not just present on the couch. At the same time, I have my own goals to pursue, so in some seasons it's like a tightrope walk, trying to balance on that thin line between being good to my wife and kids and being good to myself. One thing I can say, it's made me great at tracking time, because I've learned that every minute I spend on myself or my work is a minute that I could devote to my family.
Lesson Three: Let go of things more easily.
As we're cleaning out our parents' house, and by "we" I mean mainly my sister and her husband, since they're actually doing most of the work, we're finding so much junk. For instance, there were about twelve hundred vinyl records in the house, stacks and stacks of them. I remember my dad having records when we were growing up, some Perry Como and Dean Martin, and a whole bunch of cowboy songs. Once, when Dad was out, which was pretty frequent, I even tried using the old wooden record player in the living room to scratch like Jam Master Jay. It wasn't very effective. I'm not sure if the failure was caused by the ancient technology or my lack of skill or the fact that I was using a Bing Crosby record, but it killed my burgeoning DJ career. Obviously, my dad had very specific musical tastes, so imagine my surprise when my sister says that his collection included not only Stevie Nicks (I can sort of see it), Whitney Houston (shocker, but ok), and KISS (which I was never into, but was clearly told was satanic). I don't know if he bought these records thinking they would be worth thousands one day (perhaps a peek into my dad's decision-making) or if he just didn't know what he was buying. What I do know is that all those records sold to a vintage music store for exactly $56.30, while the bins used to carry them out of the house cost about $150. The kicker? These records and other items were the prized possessions that he couldn't possibly leave behind when we tried to get my parents to move back down near us so they could spend more of their declining years with their grandkids. I don't want to have any books, cars, game systems, clothes, or any other possessions that either prevent me from loving my kids and grandkids or become a burden to them when I do finally leave them behind.
Since it's the season of wishes, I wish I could say I had some pearls of wisdom from my dad. I wish I had stories to tell my kids and grandkids about his brave exploits and all the fun times we spent together, but the truth is, the more I find out about him, the more I realize I barely knew him when I was a kid. I wish I had a happier post for this Christmas, but this is what I'm doing with my break, and we're not sure that it won't be the last Christmas with dad.
But one other thing I learned from my dad is that wishing for something doesn't do much. My Christmas present to my dad is helping, in whatever small way I can, to make sure that he's in the best place he needs to be. But my Christmas present, every Christmas, to my wife, kids, and grandkids is myself. It may not always be what they expect, but it's the best thing I have, and I'm working on making it better as much as I can.
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