I remember my dad telling me once, "Get an education and a good job that you love. I never had that and for 30 years I've had to work in a factory. I don't like my job, but I do it to support the family." So many things can be taken from that sentence- hope and dignity, sadness and regret. But what I take most from it is honor. In a world increasingly filled with Kardashians and Unreal Housewives, I feel honored that when I look into the deepest parts of me, at the building blocks of my core, I know that somewhere along the line I have become a man who knows the value of work, and of hard work, and of sacrifice. And that I've learned those lessons from my parents, who may not have a degree from college, but who have several doctorates from the University of Life. As I stand at the crossroads of my life (cue Bone Thugs...seriously, find it in your iTunes library and cue it), I realize I've been blessed with the best cartographers to chart the map that will guide me through rocks and shoals, and without them and their example, I would surely be lost at sea.
In a few months, merely a week after I turn 30, I will be married to a person that I love, someone who is the holy to my ghost, the sharpness to my notes, the Beebop to my Rocksteady. During this tidal wave of change, I have been on a crash course of life lessons that have caused me to look inside of me and see the parts that comprise the core of my being. Among the things I have uncovered with my late-twenties microscope is that that I will sacrifice anything for those who I love. I have realized that even if it means working a job that I don't like at the moment, it's at least a job, and it's at least making some money to pay down debts so that I can take better care of my family in the future. I have realized that cleaning up raw sewage in a basement of a restaurant while getting paid $3.60 an hour isn't very dignifying, but realizing that I have the power to learn from that job and work even harder at it- if only to be an example to my managers and those around me- is dignifying. And that having so many people around me who I love and love me back unconditionally is a luxury in life, and I will do anything to protect that and ensure that for many years to come.
These are lessons that I have learned, but that I realize I've always known. Because for 18 years of my life, they were in front of me every day. They were there when my dad would come home from work, and instead of being like his dad and drinking the night or weekend away, he changed his family tree by taking me to every baseball game or soccer game of my youth. And let's be honest- unless there's an America's Funniest Video bat-to-the-crotch type moment, those games are not exciting. I never had Teddy Ruxpin, Reebok Pumps, or Nintendo. I never got closer than in front of my grandparents' cable television to being on Nickelodeon's Global Guts. But I did have a mom who hauled me and my three to seven friends around in the back of a Chevy Caprice station wagon to wherever we wanted to skateboard, like every day of the summer. Or who sat in the car for two hours until about one in the morning waiting for me to leave a Joy Electric concert, rather than coming in and dragging me out of there, because that was my favorite band at the moment (it was a weird "finding my identity" phase). Looking back, I don't remember most of those other kids' parents picking us up even once.
Every week, my mom would clean our house. Every other day, my mom would clean other people's houses, a lot of them people who she knew. I know from experience that when you're in that type of a position, there's not too much dignity in that work, unless you're doing it to reach a goal. And every day, my mom would cook a meal for us. Not microwave dinners, or McDonald's, or frozen pizzas. Freaking home-cooked meals. She was the the most Real Housewife ever. And reason number 763 why kids are and always will be stupid- I would complain about things like lumpy mashed potatoes. Since then, in my mashed potatoes journeys, I realize that they're seriously the best mashed potatoes ever. And so that my mom could make "disgusting" mashed potatoes and hot chocolate with "not enough or too much" marshmallow and toast every morning for us, my dad worked like mad in a chocolate factory full of, well...factory workers (and they were not Oompa Loompas, although some were just as weird and scary). All of this so when we woke up and got home from school and went to bed, there was always a family.
We never went hungry cause we never went out to eat. We never were too cold cause my dad chopped a winter's worth of wood and would get up in the middle of the night to feed the stove. And we never were poor because we had everything that you can't buy at Toys "R" Us or the mall.
I am rich now because I was even more rich then. I see many people around me who have no idea how to act in life, who think that value is found in spending $100 at a bar and blacking out on a Monday night, or people protesting something they can't even define because they haven't found their way yet and surely that must be someone else's fault. I'm so lucky to have had parents that have shown me the value of work and how to make it work. And that in the end, enough really is enough, and the rest is just luxury.
I'm going to end this by showing why I don't deserve anything I've been given. One of the most heartbreaking moments of my life was a point when I was 13 or so, and my sister and I were being completely petulant about something stupid and I said something to my mom that clearly struck the most sensitive part of her. Something to the effect of her being a terrible mom. I remember the living room and the couch and the ceiling, but most of all I remember her face when her as a mom and her as a 33-year-old girl splintered in half and she just cried and said, "I do so much for you kids." In that moment, so much was said that wasn't said. I'm not sure what she thought when she was my age now, whether she held it together in those moments she was alone, the way she held it together in front of us for so many years until her first-born son broke her down with one ungrateful swoop of words. It's hard to feel much more awful after that kind of experience, and seventeen years later I'm still crying when I type this because it means more now to me than ever.
I can see so clearly the layered sacrifices that my parents shouldered day after day, to raise a family of four kids in a single floor three-bedroom ranch house, while having us feel that we never really wanted for much. I see how much was done and how the bar of life is set so high for me that I need a trampoline to get even within reaching distance. But I will try. I will set goals for me and for my family and I will run hard. Forever, I will hold fast to the way my parents gave me and my siblings the best childhood we could have with what they had been given, so that in the end, we would be given more.
To that extent, my cup overflows.
