Month: October 2016

Yesterday would have been my dad’s 62^nd birthday. Birthdays, death days, holidays, and other milestones are minefields that I try my best to navigate through. The lead up to the day comes with a certain level of uneasiness and nervousness because you don’t know how your emotions will hold up. The day itself sometimes crushes you. Sometimes it passes with relative ease. When it passes easier than you anticipated, the day after it sneaks up and punches you in the stomach like a bully as if to say…”one more year without him, how does that make you feel?”

The passage of these days is brutal because it always signifies time since you last celebrated that day. It’s a bitter reminder of the insensitive and overused phrase “Time will heal your pain”. Fuck that…Time will lessen your pain and that’s because you learn to live with it. And then you come to hate time for its ability to desensitize you and then you hate yourself for allowing time to have its way with you.

It’s not his 62^nd birthday to me as much as it is the 14^th birthday I’ve celebrated his life and old age without him. He was always sensitive to getting older…losing his hair, the thought of losing his hearing or physical strength, or mental faculties. I remember how he struggled with the fact that his own father was getting older. I could see the pain in his eyes when he told me his dad had backed out of the driveway and not even realized her had run over the trashcans. He feared becoming a burden to his loved ones in his older years. Well no need to worry about that… at 48 years old he remains forever young and strong in mind and body.

I find myself making a concerted effort to be eternally grateful for 10-13-54. Without his birth, my brother and I would not have life, and I would not have these two beautiful sons and soon to be baby on the way. Life is truly an amazing gift when you look at it that simplistically.

What I find incredibly difficult sometimes is trying to keep his memory alive…my immediate family doesn’t know my dad. Liz never met him and my kids obviously never did either. I think Liz wishes she could roll back the clock to meet him just to know who this man was that helped create me. Gabe is too young to really understand for now. And McKay, my emotional twin, feels all the feels with me. When you have kids you wish to pass along only your best qualities but with those often times come all the baggage that you didn’t want to pass along. McKay got my emotional side for sure.

A few months ago after we moved to California, McKay went over to the bookshelf and started to stare at a picture of my dad for a long time. Liz noticed him first and realized that his eyes were beginning to water. She asked him if he was ok, he slowly and silently took the picture off the shelf, hugged it and then he walked over to me. He buried his head in my lap and began to cry uncontrollable sobs. I was shocked and I didn’t know what to say or what to do, so I just held him tight. I asked him what was wrong and through his tears he said, “I miss your daddy and I just wish I could see him”.  I reassured him that I miss him too and that there is nothing that would make his Papa happier than being able to hang out with him and his brother.

I started to tell him stories about my dad from when I was younger, about how he taught me to cheat my Papa out of money in a card game or how we pretended to steal his dad’s car one day. Laughter slowly replaced the tears and both of the boys wanted to hear about him. It felt good to tell them stories about him and to see their eyes light up or hear them say, tell that again mommy. At the same time it tears at your heartstrings because the words that came out of my 4 year old’s mouth were so simple and yet so precisely accurate. Out of the mouths of babes…

So one more year has passed, not made easier by my travel schedule. This year I was in a hotel room outside of Vegas instead of with my family. But I got a video of my boys in my dad’s old race car t-shirts, down to their knees of course, singing him Happy Birthday. Per McKay’s request, that picture of my dad now has a permanent spot in the boys room, right next to his racing helmet. I like to think he watches over them every night and I don’t think he’d have it any other way…

When I took this job I knew exactly what I signed up for…running ½ of the country from LA. One would think that’s everything West of the Mississippi but really it’s a bit more. I have California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, Ohio, Minneapolis, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Nebraska. To be honest, I had to look at the map to piece it together for this blog. And even though I have regional managers in each of my 6 territories I have to go spend time with them in their regions…so travel was a given. I’m on week 12 of California living and I’ve done more ‘elsewhere living’ than Cali living. I’ve been to Sacramento twice, Illinois, Colorado, Baltimore/Richmond area 2x, Texas, Vegas, etc…

I managed to stay home for the first two weeks of our lives here. Week one was just me trying to get my office settled and figure out what the heck I was supposed to do on a daily/weekly basis (still a bit of a work I progress) and week two was the week our stuff arrived and Liz had a job interview. I also managed to stay home the last week of August which coincided with the first week the kids started school and Gabe’s 3^rd Bday. I know…mom of the year right?!

I’m fairly certain that the kids think I live in hotels and on an airplane…somewhat true. Time is a strangely difficult concept for kids to grasp so ‘I’ll be home on Thursday night’ doesn’t really work for them. We started measuring my time away in number of sleeps I will miss…’mommy will be gone for 3 sleeps this week’. They like to Face-Time when I get to a hotel so they can check out where I’m staying that week. It has morphed into a virtual tour of every Courtyard Marriott I stay in. I’ve heard some interesting questions out of them during all of this rapid fire travel….mommy, where are you? A hotel in (blah blah) sweetie….ahhhh, again mommy? Mommy, why do you have to get on so many airplanes? Mommy, is that your new house? Mommy, is that where you live now? Mommy, why do you have to travel so much? I want to snuggle you mommy….each one of these little questions/statements are like tiny daggers in my heart.

I have some stay at home moms (friends or otherwise) who come up to me and tell me how much they admire me for ‘having it all’….To be clear, these are their words not mine. They say, you have a successful and demanding career and you are a great mom. I politely thank them and tell them they have a really hard and amazing job of their own and that if I could stay home with my kids I would. I think they partially believe me and partially think I’m full of shit. What I want to tell them, and sometimes do is that I actually feel like I’m “half assing” my way through all of it. I NEVER feel like I’m giving work or my kids enough…and don’t get me started on my spouse or myself. Because after kids and work those two things are on the back burner or maybe not even on the stove yet. What I have come to appreciate is my friends who can keep it real and be vulnerable and just admit that this (having a career or being a stay at home mom) is hard and they don’t have it figured out…because to be perfectly frank, no one does. We are all just doing the best we know how to do.

I try my best to enjoy every moment with my kids when I am not traveling…I wake up with them early on the weekends even when I feel like I could use a few more minutes sleep, I stay in the pool until I’m a shriveled prune, I take them to do exciting things and fill our every living moment with activities. And I buy them ice cream way too much…overcompensating much?! Maybe, but I don’t care. Because I’ll sleep when I die, water pruned hands go away in 10 minutes, and who the hell doesn’t like ice cream? My kids are everything to me and I can only hope that the example that Liz and I are setting for them is a good one. That woman are strong, specifically their mommies are strong, that hard work pays off, and that we will do whatever it takes to make sure they are provided for in life. I also hope they are learning to make the most out of every moment you have with the people you love. “Quality not Quantity” to quote my mom. I don’t know if I can or will want to do this job forever. For now, we are counting sleeps and doing our best to ‘live the dream’.