Category: Relationships

I went to a party on Saturday night. It was a graduation party for a close friend. The place was full of people munching on queso and chips, red cups full of icy Dr. Pepper and Coke.  I grabbed a glass and filled it with ice and diet cherry chocolate Dr. Pepper, tasted it, and then immediately dumped it out.

I made small talk with a girl that I know pretty well. A few people came over and joined our conversation but I didn’t feel like talking. I didn’t feel like recapping my life. Telling people about where I worked or that I used to dance for the Mavericks. I didn’t want them to know that I had just bought a house or that I went to Stonebriar.  I didn’t want to talk about how big I was or that I used to work out. I didn’t want to say “No, I never played football in college.”  I wanted to go. I stayed for an hour and I watched people pose for photos. I watched their smiles, real, real, fake. I smelled insecurity and false confidence. I checked myself for arrogance, reminded myself to be humble.

In the past I would have made my way around the room. I would have made friends and small talk like a pro – it’s my special gift. I’ve never met a stranger. But not this night, nope, for some reason I wanted nothing more than to just get out of there. I didn’t want to get to know any of these people, I didn’t want to make any more friends.

I left. A nervous perspiration soaked the pits of my shirt and rivers of sweat were running down my spine.  I was tired of chatting and pretending like I was having a good time. I wasn’t.

When I left I glanced quickly around the room. Here, I was a nobody. When I left, there wouldn’t be a void, I wouldn’t be missed. No one would ask after me. In the past this would not have been the case. I would have been the life of the party and I would have stayed until most everyone else had left. If I was bored, I would make something happen. If I was lonely, I would make new friends.

Driving away I was happy that people weren’t pulling at me asking me to stay. No one pleaded with me, “Don’t leave!” And that felt pretty good. I guess I’ve grown up a little, I’ve matured a lot.

 The graduation party was for a friend, but that night I realized I’d graduated too.

I spent the afternoon with the Cribbies and enjoyed spending some time with their daughter Zoey. She is this warm bunble of dark hair and carmel toned skin and when she smiles, which is often, you can’t help but feel like you just saw a glimpse of heaven.

Jenni fixed us a delicious sausage casserole complete with gravy and biscuits. I washed it down with 2 Dr. Peppers and then plopped on the couch to recoup from an intense game of ultimate. The Cribbies home is peaceful and it is filled with love. It brings me joy to watch Cribby and Jenni talk to each other, it’s always sweet and kind and I have never seen either one of them be sharp with each other. It blesses me.

As I sat on the couch and soaked everything in, I thought about all my little nieces and nephews. Joe and Amber’s daughter Abigail is just a little older than Zoey. Then there is Jackson who is all the way up in Colorado who will be turning 3 in January. Nikki and Jeremy have two kids and I have yet to meet their newest daughter Afton. Sarah and Stowe have a couple of kiddos too and then I have my nephew Aiden who lives with me and it is just surprising to watch all these kids just grow up so fast. It doesn’t make me feel old, it makes me feel blessed. I get to see them when they are their most delightful. I get to watch them grow up and enjoy them without having to change their diapers. I get to be a cool Uncle Eddo while their parents have to worry about them having a MySpace account, a cell phone, texting, and predators.

But their parents aren’t the only ones that worry. I worry too.  I worry about what they are eating, if they are watching too much TV. Do their parents read to them at night? What will happen if one of them gets a serious illness?

In just the past few weeks I’ve gotten closer to Aiden. We can play for hours and if his mom leaves to run to the store, he will let me hold him close while he repeats over and over, in the sweetest voice you ever heard, “mama?” It’s quiet and questioning like he thinks she might not be coming back and I have to re-assure him over and over that she is. This is something that I wasn’t prepared for, this unbelievable desire to protect, not only Aiden, but his mom too. They are both so precious to me.

We go through life every day living like we are immortal. We often forget about the fragility of life. I plan to keep a close eye on all my nephews and nieces. I know they are in good hands, but it never hurts to have a few extra.

I miss and love you all.

Eddo

“He’s gone… he left… he’s really gone… I’m…. I’m… FREEEEE!!” Cristina Yang stammered and then shouted. Her face crinkled with a pained expression of both anguish and delight like a bird being released from a cage. The scene continued… “Get me out of this dress! Get me out of this dress!” She squirmed and writhed as Meredith Gray practically ripped her out of her wedding dress. Cristina’s face contorted, her breath was heavy, I couldn’t help but imagine a caterpillar escaping from a cocoon and bursting forth with wings of freedom.

I can so relate to this scene from Gray’s Anatomy. I find that in some ways I am like Cristina Yang, I want to be in a relationship, but when I am in one, I feel trapped. Limited. Controlled. I always felt like one day I would settle down, get married, have a few kids, but maybe I’m not the marrying kind? Maybe I’m only fooling myself into thinking that someday having a family and kids will be a reality for me – not because I want it, but because everyone else wants it for me. 

I hear it all the time, “You’ll be a great dad!” “You are so marriageable” “Why aren’t you married yet? Let me fix you up with someone!”. No thanks. In this area and like many areas of my life, I need to take care of this myself, when the time is right for me.

Maybe one day I will settle down, but right now I am just too selfish to share my life with someone else.  It’s not necessarily something I’m proud of or ashamed of, it’s just the truth and you know the truth will set you… Free.

 Imogen Heap – Download Speeding Cars and listen while reading this post…  

I haven’t been to therapy now for a little over 3 months. I miss it sometimes, but I realized toward the end that he wasn’t helping me that much any more. He gave me the tools that I needed to fix my problems and now the onus is on me to use those tools.

What have I learned in the last year, a year that has seen me move out of an apartment and in with my real dad and then in with friends and then into a new house? A year trhat included starting therapy and dancing with the Mavericks? A year that has been filled with some of the most wonderful surprises and biggest let downs?  Slow down.

For me my whole life has been a series of rushed plans. I always have a number of goals that are choreographed simultaneously with a plethora of jobs, duties, and a sprinkling of relationships.  With all of these plates balanced and spinning on sticks, eventually I over-do it and one of the plate falls and shatters in a million pieces and instead of stopping and pausing to learn from my mistake I just pick up another plate or two and start the spinning all over again.

I don’t know what type of disorder I have or if it is a disorder at all, I may just be human. What does happen to me is this – I agree to do 500 things and then I get exhausted and tired and instead of being upset at myself for saying “yes” 500 times, I direct my anger and frustration at the person that invited me to do whatever it was that I agreed to. I often feel pressured into planning events or going places that I don’t really have time to do and I hate to let people down and so I end up making commitments that I don’t really want to keep.

Right now I have 50 projects I want to do around my house. I want to design and make my own curtains, design pillows out of vintage fabrics for my couch and paint some intricate “modern country” paintings for my walls. I want to decorate and furnish all three bedrooms and remodel my bathrooms and kitchen. I want to landscape my yard and build a deck and put in new windows and paint the trim on my house. I need to paint the garage and inuslate my attic better.  I want a new TV, dining room table, coffee table, a new TV stand, and I want to put sand colored rock around my fireplace.

 With all these wants I have to remind myself to slow down.

I’m also making some great strides with my career and my plate at work is unbelievably full. I’m planning meetings and conferences, creating websites and training documents and all the while still supporting my customer base. I can’t let it get to me, I have to just slow down.

Now I’m in a relationship and with a great girl and things are going well. Last week we had a dinner party on Thursday night, a football game on Friday night and then dinner with my friends at Joe T. Garcia’s on Saturday night. We were supposed to go to church together on Sunday morning and then later that day I had a 2 o’clock barbecue planned with my family and I found myself getting a little overwhelmed. I had to tell Mary, “I’m going to have to pass on church.” Of all the things I should not have passed on, church was one of them, but I just knew it would kill me to drive to Irving and back and then drop Mary off at her place and then drive to Sanger and then back to Plano. Mary works with middle school children at 5 in the afternoon and so she couldn’t make the barbecue with me or else I probably would have tried to squeeze it all in, but in the end I think I made the right decision. I had to tell myself to slow down.

We get all wrapped up in this crazy life with our goals and dreams. There are outside pressures from society, people expect you to be in a relationship, well-meaning friends and family want you to be happy and to fall in love and then there are the pressures you put on yourself. There are a lot of things in this life that can come in and complicate things and if life were like the movies and people fell in love and lived happily ever after then I could worry less and hurry more – but the reality of it is, most marriages fail. Relationships are complicated, people are human. We don’t understand the importance of patience, waiting is not part of our American Culture.

So now I’m taking advice from Imogen Heap, her song Speeding Cars sums it up best. Don’t lose your head… it’s just textbook stuff…

Here’s the day you hoped would never come
Don’t feed me violence
just run with me through rows of speeding cars.
The papercuts the cheating lovers
The coffee’s never strong enough
i know you think it’s more than just bad luck

There there baby
it’s just text book stuff
it’s in the ABC of growing up
Now now darling
oh don’t lose your head
cause none of us were angels
and you know I love you yeah

This week Heather Armstrong, super-blogger, ex-Mormon, genius writer and SAHM, was published in the family version of Real Simple – Family magazine. This particular magazine focuses on the home and family and I was surprised at how much I liked the magazine when hey, look, I’m single and I have no kids so I’m not their target audience.

I picked up the magazine because I love Heather and all her sacrilige and I pray for her soul, but my word, like Harry Potter and Eva Longoria she is an evil that I can’t quit! So I flipped through the magazine and I read all of these letters that parents wrote to their children with the theme in mind – “Read this When…” and it prompted me to thinking about what I would write if I had children of my own… so here goes.

To my sweet Bliss Madison,

I had your name picked out 10 years before you were ever born. I dreamt of taking you to the playground in your yellow summer dress and pushing you in a swing before I was even married to your mother. I wanted you before I ever had you and unlike so many things in life – you exceeded my expectations.

 I wanted to bring you into this world not because I knew how to be an amazing parent, or because you would complete the requirements that our society so often demands of married couples. No. I wanted to bring you into this world so that you could share in the joys that this world has to offer. So that you could meet your grandmother and see how funny she is and how she would delight in you. I’d want you to meet your grandfather and to experience the gentleness of his heart and the depth of his love. I would want you to see that your mother and I had the rare opportunity to see this world from a different perspective. That this world even in it’s darkest of times is not always filled with hurt and fear, but instead can be filled with the most immeasurable amounts of love.

Many people Bliss will think that protecting you from this world is impossible, they will crush your dreams, they will try to steal your innocence, they will want to take from you everything that they do not possess, but they can never take away my love, or the love of your mother, or the love of God.

And if someday tragedy strikes and this cruel world delivers a crippling blow, I hope that you don’t let it break you, that you don’t let it ruin you, but instead you take it in stride and you allow it to make you stronger. And when you don’t feel like you can’t go on, when I’ve let you down, when your mother and I are gone, when grandma and grandpa cannot be reached –  remember that God, even if you think he has abandoned you, even when you think he is no longer listening to your prayers, know that is when he is most likely working at his best.  He is right there listening… he is always there.

I love you.

-Dad