-J

Your mention of Olivia reminds me of a thought I had as soon as finished this post: I wonder what my [not yet conceived] children’s perception of my essence will be. Wonder what I’ll pass to them… The strength, and the weakness that they’ll “understand” about me. Joey and I come from very different places, and I wonder what are those two poles that our children will learn to reconcile.

I discovered this young. My father was not the kind of husband a woman would want, especially a woman far from home with two small children. When my parents divorced, the bitterness my mother felt toward my father was palpable and when my mother would say things that parents say like “You’re just like your father!”, it would offend me. So my personal pendulum would swing away from everything he was. Except that I was missing one key thing, he was part of me and so I cut out a piece of myself possibly ugly but ultimately, not MY reality.

Being a bad husband translated in some ways into being a bad father, but he wasn’t a bad father in my world. I only knew my mother’s point of view. After I realized that, I strove to understand the good in him. To understand that they both SURVIVED in different ways. Mom survived abuse at many hands, including verbal abuse from my father, and my father survived the Vietnam war and personally, I think he never fully recovered from the aspects of war that no one is truly equipped to manage. Neither, in my opinion have moved very far beyond their survival and to me, life is more than that. It HAS to be more than that, because I’ve lived in survival mode and it’s kind of a dark place.

I live in a world between them and beyond them, for my beliefs are not truly theirs. I hope that I have learned what the best of them is and plucked that from the rest and then added a dash of the things I’ve learned throughout my life, including my Faith in Christ, to plant the seeds of life in myself and in my offspring.

I use that knowledge to form my foundation and test who I am. To leap or stay put. And I see that our daughter does the same based on her own reality that her world is stable and she can move forward knowing there is some place for her to come back to quickly and easily. I LOVE that.

It’s not about happiness to me; happiness is transient. It’s about fulfillment. I was not happy when my baby died. But in a strange way I will not be able to understand, Christ stepped in and filled the emptiness, with a fullness that is so much more than having that baby in my arms. A trust that extended past my small grief. Believe me, I felt the emptiness and wallowed in the dark places during the time of his death, but in the end, life was affirmed and fulfilled. Happiness comes and goes but I always know that my life has purpose whether I know that purpose or not and that is what keeps me going from day to day.

Say, my dad is second in command, but he wants to be first. He wants to run the show, but the guy above him seems like will never leave. I know many people that would stay there… waiting for something or somebody to promote them. Instead, dad will find an opportunity to become first without losing. He’ll go somewhere else, or do something (never hurting the guy above him). For instance, one thing he did in this case was to come up with a new business for the company and convince everyone that he should run it. And so he did.

“That’s life” comes up for events out of his control. Or for personal feelings that go against fulfilling your responsibilities. While my mom will think of how some problem should’ve been avoided, dad thinks “Oh well… I can fix it” (if he can), or “Oh well… I have to suck it up” (if it is completely out of his control).

“That’s life” also comes up when Mom and I get engaged on philosophical conversations about how things should be. “Countries shouldn’t get in war”, “People shouldn’t steal”, “My boss hates me”, etc. Dad’s response to that kind of ponderings is always along the lines of “suck it up… that’s life”. He doesn’t “waste” his time thinking of how he could fix the crazy world. He believes you just have to deal with it.

I hope I’m not making it sound like my dad is awesome and my mom isn’t… They are both masters of different (and opposing) domains, and looking back at my adult life, it’s clear to me that I’ve kept doing things to reach some balance between both of those worlds.

Then later you say, “He doesn’t wait for good things to happen to him. Instead, he goes out and makes them happen. Without paralyzing fear, he lets go of what he has, and brings to his life whatever it is that he wants.”

I feel those two statements sort of contradict one another in that the first makes it sound as if he really is of the “That’s life” mentality, whereas the latter sounds a bit more spiritual. By that I mean, if he doesn’t wait for good things to happen, it doesn’t seem that he’s strictly a “that’s life” guy. Also, by “bringing life to whatever it is he wants,” he is conquering a world that may not have been predefined.

Anyway, those were the thoughts I had as I read your article.

Finally, you do sound a lot like your father in how you chose to change careers. You accepted life for what it was for you and went with it. You brought life to the things you wanted. So, you are both of your parents, very clearly, to me :)

-J