Everything Happens for a Reason

Author's Note: I started writing this blog post yesterday. And then I tried again today. But the story was getting so long and wordy that I didn't think anybody would want to read it. My dad used to say this about people who talked too much: "You ask 'em what time it is and they tell you how to build a watch!" I didn't want to be that guy, so I decided to try and distill my story down to fewer words, and put it into a format that (hopefully) won't bore people to tears. Enjoy!

"Everything happens for a reason."

I used to have a hard time subscribing to that theory, but as I've gotten old(er) it seems like as good a way as any to explain some of the weird things that occur in our everyday life. Especially the things that start out bad, but end up maybe being blessings in disguise. And the things that make you stop and think hard. Really hard. Case in point...

Afternoon of December 21st: My neighbor sends me a Facebook message asking me if I could come over and give her a hand, because her adorable seven-month-old baby, who was sick, had just thrown up again and it was "everywhere." So she needed help holding the little guy while she cleaned up the mess. I run next door to help--the puke really was everywhere--and eventually my wife shows up, too. My neighbor asks us: "What if you guys get sick?" My wife answers: "We'll just deal with it."

Wee Small Hours of the Morning of December 23rd: I get up to go to the bathroom and I feel super dizzy. A few minutes later, I'm the one who's puking my guts out. Multiple times. After making a mental note to never eat Chinese food again, I wake my wife up and tell her she has to take me to the hospital. I guess this is "dealing with it."

At the Hospital: The doctors and nurses (eventually) take good care of me, and several hours, IVs, and medications later, I'm finally starting to feel like I might live after all. But the powers-that-be decide to keep me overnight for observation. Woohoo!

December 24th: It's Christmas Eve day and I'm feeling reasonably okay. I've even progressed from being on an all liquid diet to eating real hospital "food." My stomach appears to be fine. But wait! The doctors tell me that my stomach x-ray and CT scan seemed to show something abnormal with my right kidney. So now they want me to have an MRI done. Wonderful.

I get the MRI done, but not before I almost throw up in the MRI machine. (Apparently, I had some kind of reaction to the contrast liquid they put in my IV before the test.) Now I'm anxious to go home. But a doctor comes in and says the MRI confirmed that something is indeed amiss with my kidney, and that he doesn't feel comfortable reading the MRI and talking to me about it, so I have to have a urologist do that. And the urologist on call has already left for the day, so I have to spend another night in the hospital and talk to the urologist in the morning. WTF???

December 25th: Merry effing Christmas. I'm in the hospital on Christmas morning, my wife is sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed knitting (surprise!), and we're waiting for the urologist. I, of course, continue to imagine all the most horrible scenarios I can possibly imagine, including the "C" word. The one positive I keep coming back to? At least it's my kidney, because I have two of them, and I'm pretty sure a human only needs one kidney live.

Eventually, the urologist shows up and pulls up my MRI films on his computer. He shows us the mass that has decided to call my right kidney its home. Luckily, it's small (2.0 x 1.8 cm). And it's right on the edge of the kidney, too. (Kind of like a pimple on the end of your nose.) The doctor says it's likely a tumor, not a cyst, and tells us we can either have a biopsy done and go from there, or just have the thing removed, because it should be pretty simple. His suggestion is the latter, and we think that seems like the best way to go.

After the consult, I finally get to go home and open gifts with my family. My favorite Christmas present? A purple paring knife from my wife. My least favorite Christmas present? This goddamn tumor on my kidney! 😢

A few days later, my wife and I follow up with the urologist at his office. We finalize the decision to have the tumor surgically removed, and the next day we're informed that the surgery is scheduled for February 26th. Unfortunately, that's just a couple days before a concert we already have tickets for (Phoebe Bridgers), so we call to see if we can possibly get an earlier date. The surgery scheduler tells us that if we change hospitals, the procedure can be done on February 2nd. Great! Sounds like a plan!

But a week before the 2nd, I get a phone call from the urologist's office. They have to cancel my surgery and reschedule it because my doctor had a meeting come up that he has to attend. Seriously?!? All I can think is that this meeting had better be the most important damn meeting of this doctor's life.

The next day, the doctor's office calls to tell me my new surgery date is February 6th. And after I hang up, I start to freak out a bit.

It took me a little while to put two and two together, but when I finally did I realized this:

February 6th, 2018 = 5 years to the day that my father died...in the same hospital I'm supposed to have my surgery at.

Gulp.

I have to admit, this spooked me out for a few days. I mean, it spooked me out to the point where I was seriously considering calling and having them reschedule my surgery yet again.

The other day, though, I was driving my sister to work--she had fallen and hurt her arm, so she couldn't drive--and we had a conversation about this weird "coincidence." I confessed to her that I was more than a little uneasy about it. That's when she told me about another possibility: Maybe my surgery got moved to the day and hospital it did so my dad could watch over me. "Everything happens for a reason," she said to me, matter of factly. Hmmmmm, I thought to myself. Maybe instead of this being a creepy, scary thing, it's actually a good thing.

To be honest, that hadn't even crossed my mind before I talked to my sister. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt comforted by the notion that my dad might be there with me on Tuesday while my doctor and his robot perform a partial right nephrectomy on me. If you're gonna have someone watch over you in the operating room, it might as well be your dad, right?

So I decided not to change the date after all. Because everything happens for a reason. My neighbor's baby got me sick so I'd go to the hospital and they'd find a tumor I never would've known about otherwise. Then a concert and a meeting caused the date of my surgery to get changed to the anniversary date of my father's death; and the location to get changed to the same hospital that he died in. And my sister hurting her arm resulted in me driving her to work and talking about a fear that she turned into something incredibly comforting.

And suddenly, everything makes sense.

What my Christmas Eve looked like.

Mother's Day / Father's Day

(Note: This blog post also appears on The Huffington Post's blog site as "Why Father's Day Is So Difficult for Me.")


I didn't write a blog post this past Mother's Day. As I explained on my Facebook page, I started to write a blog post that Sunday morning; then I realized that the Mother's Day post I wrote in 2014 still applied. So I saved myself some keystrokes.

But after the day was over, I felt like I needed to document it in some way. I also started having some thoughts about Father's Day, which is right around the corner. And this is the result: A post-Mother's Day/pre-Father's Day post from my crazy mind.

Mother's Day was spectacular in every way. It started off with me making my amazing wife an omelette for breakfast, and ended with me cooking burgers and brisket for my amazing wife, two sons, all but one of my siblings, and my amazing mom. The day was perfect. To have all of those people who are so special to me at the dining room table at the same time just felt so good.

The happy face omelette I made my wife for breakfast on Mother's Day.

It really was the best Mother's Day celebration--as low key as it was--that I can remember. My wife and mom were both so happy. And they deserved to be happy, because they are both such loving, caring, unselfish people. Without a doubt, they are the two most incredible women I have ever known.

Me and my mom on Mother's Day.

A few days after Mother's Day passed, I started thinking a bit about Father's Day, which is coming up on June 21st. (The longest day of the year. Coincidence? I think not.)

Father's Day has always been an uncomfortable "holiday" for me. For most of my life, I struggled with it so much because my dad and I didn't have a very good relationship. In fact, for many years the only relationship we had was the standard biological one. Yes, he was my father. But I never felt the things that a kid should feel about his father: love, respect, gratitude, etc.

That's what happens when your dad's an alcoholic.

I remember countless Father's Days when I wouldn't even want to pick up the phone to call my dad, because saying "Happy Father's Day" to him was just me going through the motions. I got through those calls somehow, but it was not without a lot of anguish.

Then, in February of 2012, my dad passed away, just a few months after he and I reconciled.

As I wrote in my Father's Day post in 2013:

It's funny how things work out. I went 40+ years despising Father's Day because I didn't want to make that phony phone call or give the obligatory card and gift because I felt like I had to. Today, I wish I could make that phone call and give that card and gift...because I want to.

This Father's Day will no doubt be the same. I'll be missing my dad and wishing I had just one more Father's Day to spend with him so I could give him a hug and tell him I love him--and actually mean it.

Father's Day is also a stressor for me because I constantly struggle with a question I ask myself almost every single day:

Have I been a good father to my boys?

My younger son made this for me years ago.

Because of the relationship I had--or didn't have--with my dad while I was growing up, I would constantly tell myself that the one thing I was bound and determined to do in my lifetime, more than anything else, was to be a better father to my kids than my father was to me. Not just a better father, but a damn good father. Someone my kids would look up to and aspire to be like.

Given the fact that my father was an alcoholic/workaholic who put his whiskey and business ahead of everything else in his life, you'd think that meeting that goal I set for myself would be a slam dunk. I mean, how could I not be a better father? I should be able to do that blindfolded, with both hands tied behind my back. And how hard could it be to be a damn good father? Love your kids, say and do the right things, set good examples, teach your boys to be good men, etc. It all sounds so simple.

But you know what? It's not. And I'm not sure I've succeeded.

This really hit me hard over the last 36 hours or so. Yesterday, I had an email conversation with a younger friend--and by younger, I mean I'm old enough to be her father--and she said something that should have been very flattering to me. She said: "You are so awesome. Seriously. You're like the dad I always wanted!!!"

Wow. What a great compliment, right?

Except that the night before, something happened between me and my younger son that made me feel like I was anything but a good father, let alone the type of dad someone would actually want.

Over the years, my family has gone through some difficult situations, and we've all said and done things that we didn't really mean or ended up regretting. In life, when we're angry, we sometimes do some inexplicable things. But when I replay certain events in my mind, I feel like I've done way more than my fair share of these things. I've said things--hurtful things--to my boys in anger that I could never have imagined saying. Things that my dad, as shitty as he was for so many years, never said to me.

So I have to ask myself whether or not I am a good father.

Yes, my boys regularly tell me that they love me. And, over the years, both of them have also told me, on more than one occasion, that they hate me. (That's what teenagers do, right? RIGHT???!) But I often wonder how they really feel, deep down inside. I guess I think this way because I know that I put up a facade with my dad for all those years. I said one thing, but I felt another. It was just the easiest thing to do.

Nobody ever knows exactly how another person feels. That superpower does not exist. At least not on this planet. People tell us things and we have to take them at their word, because that's all we have to go by. If you spend your time second guessing what someone says, you'll drive yourself crazy; which is exactly what I've been doing to myself lately.

Someone I work with in my addiction/recovery advocacy work said something during a conference call a few months ago that I thought was brilliant. It was said in the context of parents dealing with an addicted child, but I think it applies to pretty much every aspect of life.

"You do the best that you can with what you know at the time. You learn as you go along, and you try to do better. And you can never go wrong with love."

That's some pretty great stuff, isn't it?

As parents, I think we're constantly learning. After all, parenting is one of the most challenging things in life. So I will continue to learn as I go along, and I will most definitely try to do better. Because no matter how good you are--or think you are--at something, there's always room for improvement.

Most importantly, though, I will continue to throw an abundance of love in my boys' direction. Because I love them more than life itself.

When Father's Day arrives in a few weeks, I will no doubt sit and ponder about all this stuff yet again. But until then, I'll try to clear my head and not be so hard on myself.

Damn. I like Mother's Day so much better.

"One of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage." --Anne Lamott

The awesome bookmark my older son gave my wife for Mother's Day.