Episode 021 - No One Gets Out of Childhood Unscathed

Wow, that was a long hiatus! Welcome to Season 3 of Caterpillar Goo. This season, let’s do a meditation on something that I think has great potential for changing the world: non-traditional understandings of masculinity. Our first episode of the season is an interview with Brad Clark, a member of the Austin Stay-at-Home Dads at the same time that I was a member. Brad is an amazing father, and I love following his continuing adventures on Facebook, especially in the summer when he and the kids engage in what he calls Camp Dad. Now that’s a summer camp!

Brad opens up about what it was like growing up a smart, creative, artistic kid in the middle of rural west Texas, the heart of high school football culture and cattle ranching, and how that childhood affects and informs his own parenting today. Thank you so much to Brad for sharing his time, and for being open and vulnerable in talking about some difficult topics.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Bully” by Tarantula at 8:21

“Wild Ones” by Jahzzar at 11:25

“Ice Where Your Parents’ Love Should Be” by Kyle Preston at 16:27

“Happy Clappy” by John Bartmann at 23:06

“Paralytic Insomnia” by David Hilowitz at 25:49

“All Who Are Weary” by Hyson at 29:27

“Caterpillar Brigade” by Podington Bear at 36:41

“Catharsis” by Anitek at 42:33

Special thanks to Flora Folgar for her time, her support, her encouragement, and her editing skills.

Here’s the transcript:

I always loved art, but I had no idea how to do it, but I just wanted to make things, invent things, be a scientist, and probably because of Batman and all the gadgets and Spider-Man getting powers but having to invent his own webslingers. For like a 5-year-old, that’s it. You’re going to make this stuff.

Because I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a ranch, there’s not a lot of time to think about doing other stuff. There’s always something going on. There’s activity and a chore to be done. There just is. So, I was pretty lucky that I could still just spend the day making cardboard weapons to match He-Man’s sword, or sit and draw characters and just run around and play.

And so when I got further along in school and realized that the kids around me weren’t reading the stuff I was reading, and the kids around me weren’t drawing and had almost a hatred for art. There were several times, even at like 1st grade or something, you know, “Look at the microscope and draw what you see.” And mine came out pretty well, or I’d be really excited to try to draw it well, and then for I don’t even know what reason, the negative reaction towards any of that was so strong from the kids in my class and from just general. It just felt like any kind of trying to be better for myself was met with, “Oh, you think you’re better than us.” So that was really difficult, because I always wanted to connect with people.

I think being an only child and having interests and expressing that, I had very little feedback besides the dogs and the cows and my parents that… how you interact with other people and express that can affect how they react to you. So in school, and growing up, I had no idea what… why… like, “I told you this fact! If you don’t believe me, why are you dumb?” I’m sure that that was the impression I was giving off, and I had no idea. Right? I just get super excited about it, and then, my parents’ willingness to protect me from having to do the chores and the work that other kids were probably having to do allowed me time that they didn’t have. And maybe that created jealousy..

I got good at running. The playgrounds were the buried tractor tires and scales. And I figured out really early on that I could fit in the smallest tire, so I could run faster than the kids chasing me, and I could get to the small tire and wedge myself up in it. And if I got there first, they couldn’t find me very fast, so I could hide in the tire. And then I could, if they left me alone, then I’d come out, and I’d run somewhere else.

But ignoring it, I just never knew how to do that. They were doing stuff to me. They took my stuff. What do I do? I ignore it, and then I never see that thing again? Or do I tell the teacher? Most of the time, I got in trouble equally or worse than whoever was picking on me. They did something; if I retaliated, I got it worse. If I didn’t retaliate, I was still involved, and I still got punished, and in west Texas, that meant the stupid… In elementary school, it meant the principal with a paddle with holes drilled in it, in a big wooden plank with tape wrapped around it that whistled when they swung it. And then you’d sit in the hall and hear the other kids screaming. And then it was your turn.

And then you’d be in trouble because they also now came out of that not learning a damn thing except that, “We both just got punished, and now I’m going to get you. When we’re out of here, I’m coming after you.” Right? And then you had to ride on the bus with them.

By the time 9th grade, yeah, I’m in high school, that question now just was like, “Oh no. What’s wrong with me? I’m broken. Something’s wrong.” I’m not the sports kid, and into weird things and just on top of being incredibly shy and not wanting to be in front of people, or talk in front of people, and I didn’t want to. If I got up from my desk, the things I cared about it at my desk were going to be stolen. The kids that didn’t like me or that were bullying me were going to do things to make it worse for me to be up in front of everybody. So every time I had to do something besides just sit at my desk and get through the day, it just meant that I was a target.

And so, again, I would look at that and go, “Why are you acting that way? That’s stupid.” And if you tell people that, that does not work. Guess what? It just makes them not like you. And I didn’t care for football either. I was like, “This doesn’t have swords or guns or adventure or bull whips like Indiana Jones. This is just people standing around, then they run into each other. This is dumb.” This is also a very unpopular thing to have as an opinion in a group where everybody plays football.

But so, that’s the pattern that’s been over and over again, everywhere I went. And it turns out, again, that that is not the best way to approach socializing with other kids. But I liked being around girls from birth. I don’t know. I remember just liking being around girls for whatever. I just, I like them. They’re not mean, usually. They would like to draw, or they would do other things. “OK, well, I’m sorry that you’re an idiot, and I don’t want to hang out with you, but your girlfriend is nice, and I like her. I’m going to hang out with her, and if you have a problem, too bad.”

Again, not great social skills. It sounds stupid, and it sounds like it’s a… like, “Oh, well, you know, you could’ve tried to be friends with people.” Yeah, but I didn’t want to be friends with people that were doing the things they were doing, and I didn’t know how to be friends with that and be OK being around it. Like, “Oh, they’re going out and drinking alcohol on the weekends. Well, that’s… I don’t want… That’s not what I’m doing. I’m underage, one. Two, do you know what that does to you?”

So I just went like, “Art. I can hide in art.” And I ended up hiding in the art room and theater and finding creative ways to just not be around the rest of the school. I loved animation. I loved special effects. I liked movie stuff. I liked building things. That’s what I still wanted to do. It was just hiding in the arts until I could get out of town. And as soon as it was done, that’s where I left. It’s like, “I’m going to go to school in Florida for film. That’s what I’m doing. I’m just going to go, just get out and start over.”

I went to school for film originally. And I was in the game industry. That was where I wanted to be, and I got hired. Yeah, animation was the direction I was going, and quickly I ended up in a bunch of other different positions, some technical, some animation, some programming, some just solving problems and figuring out solutions for things. And I loved it. I mean, I loved doing the work, and I liked the challenge of it, but I was stuck on a computer all day in an office. That was years of my life. Well that means you come in, and you leave at dark, and the weekends disappear, and there’s no sun, and you basically are on your computer for 14 hours a day. Carpal tunnel. My wrists and arms locked up.

That was my experience from going from working in a world where I was working all the time and handling stuff, and people were relying on me, and I could figure out anything, to realizing that this is not healthy. We’re going to have a kid. I’m going to try to stay home and be the parent for awhile, because that was, in our relationship, the better choice. She, my wife had a better job, more stable hours. I was flexible with work. I could pick up work easily. I could do freelance, or I could stay connected to the industry easier.

I’m just going to do this for like a year. It’s no big deal. But also, I’m sick of working, and I want to see this kid before…” I’ve watched other people around me go through divorces working overtime, through multiple kids that are, they don’t even know who they are. I’m not going to do that. And it’s expensive. Me working overtime to not see my kid to pay extra taxes and daycare? This is stupid. I’m not doing this. My wife is fine with me staying home. She wants to keep working. Let’s do this. And that was what the catalyst was.

So then, I’m now staying home with my baby, and I look around, and I’m like, “Yeah, I am a guy staying home with a baby. And this feels comfortable to me, but why is everyone else freaking the fuck out?” You know? Like, you go to a store, and everyone’s like, “What are you doing? Oh, look at you! How lucky! Are you taking the day off work?” And it’s like, “No. What’s wrong with you?” You know, it was like that same reaction of like, “Dad’s can be parents too. What kind of… What’s wrong with all of you?” You go to a playground, and it’s like, “Oh. What’s this guy doing here?”

So like that transition, coming from… It was the best thing I could have ever done was to quit full time, working in an industry that was toxic and overworking, and I was hiding myself in the work. Now I’m a parent. I’m a dad. I’m a stay-at-home dad, so that’s what that is. Because my reaction to that was, “I can figure this out,” it made for a great fit most of the time. “Oh, she’s crying. She’s upset. Go through the list. I can handle this stage.” 16:08

And you can’t fix shit. Nothing is solvable, because that little person that you’ve just introduced into your house is a separate human being that I could not connect with growing up. I was a… If it was an animal, fine. If it was a human, already I didn’t know what to do with you, really.

And it turns out that now you’re living with a bully worse than any of the kids that you’d grown up with who’s now got everything that is a flaw, they can trigger immediately. And really, it’s just everything that I was self-conscious about or worried about or scared of came forward, because you start imagining all these things and projecting things out, and it comes back on you like, “Oh, you’re responsible for that. You have to fix it. If you don’t, all these things are going to happen. Oh, it’s your fault. You’ve failed. You can’t do this.”

And I thought all of that was squared away. I thought I had handled all of it. Turns out, when you have children, anything that you thought you had handled by basically just shutting down, putting away, or walling off does not stay there. Surprise! No one tells you that part of parenting. Like, guess what? They are going to mirror back every insecurity and every worry and every stage of your life. As they grow, they are going to continue to shine lights on and break through and expose and wear away anything that you’ve put up in defensiveness and not dealt with.

I’d never dealt with it. I had masked it. I had pushed it back. I had let it just sit there simmering, and when I would get angry or upset, it was always me. This is my fault. I’ve had, at that point, 20-plus years of people giving me social feedback that something’s wrong with me, so at that point, I was just the ultimate self bully and self punisher.

2004ish, if you were a man with a baby, “You must need help. You can’t handle this. No man should be out with a baby.” And you’re like, “OK. I’m not just borrowing some friend’s baby to try to pick up women. I just want to go play at the park and have my kid see other children.” And the overwhelming reaction is, that is wrong. Also in here is, “You’re an idiot. You’re wrong. You’re lying to yourself. Everyone else has already told you you’re a failure. You’re a failure.”

How do you separate that? You push it away until the kid reflects back because she’s had a bad day, or she doesn’t understand how to walk or just learning to be a human, and then you suddenly feel like you have failed because you can’t understand what they’re going through, or you can’t fix it. And now you also can’t fix it for the person you’re living with and who you love. So now you feel like you’ve let everyone in the house down, including yourself.

And then we had our second kid, and I met more dads, and the economy crashed, and everyone was out with their kids everywhere. You’re finally around enough people that are good at what they’re doing, and you’ve made new friends. And you’ve got that experience, like, “I can handle a baby.” You’re changing them in the dark in the middle of the night blindfolded, half asleep, and the baby ends up back asleep. You know, it was not a big deal. Like this is easy.

I think when the economy shifted, and everyone suddenly was having to just survive, parents, men and women both, were like, “I don’t care who’s watching the kid. We can’t pay for daycare.” So you’d go to the park, and there’d be all kinds. It wasn’t just nannies in one end of Austin and moms in the other and then some random dads in the middle of Austin. It was just like everybody was out everywhere trying to just get by. I just feel like I watched that happen as we were having our second kid, and I was like, “This is now just the world. Everyone is just the village mentality. Everyone’s gotten this experience a little bit, and it’s not as weird.”

And I’m sure some of that is confidence, right? You’ve gotten more comfortable as a parent, but also, you just quit getting that reaction from people, like, “Oh, there’s a dad.” So I think for me, when I realized that I was a good parent was when we finally started music together and started going to classes, and the environment basically normalized adults laying on the floor playing with instruments and singing and goofing around, and also my kid made a best friend, and I connected with other parents, and I was like, “OK, this is good.”

And I was in a room full of new mothers, I was the experienced mom of the group. They were all having panics about all this, like being a new parent. And I ended up being the experienced parent, which was a weird feeling. There was just such a drastic shift that, on top of me being confident with my kid and it not being weird to just see a guy with a baby, having the experience of being the mother hen, the experienced mom in the group, was such a good feeling for awhile. And it took the self-confidence and kept it high, and also the worry about being out and someone bothering me about it went away.

And that was all great. That felt comfortable. And then it turns out you still didn’t deal with anything. I had done such a good job of lying to myself that I had taken care of it, that when stuff went wrong, and went wrong-slash-a child’s normal development, and they developed differently, as far as a strong-willed child who is ready to take on the world, and you included, that cycle of “Oh, I need to be prepared for 3 hours of just surviving my child.”

The next child didn’t have that fight. They would just stop. “I’m not going to talk.” Or they just would start to react, and in me, I reacted the way that I did for the first kid, which was, “This is a fight. I’m going to have to survive this for 4 hours, and then it’s going to be fine.” And instead of handling it, I would immediately jump to that place of “panicked, scared, bullied by my own kid” father, which is a terrible place to put yourself in when your kid is just upset because they didn’t get the right cereal spoon or something.

It was just anger, just grouchiness and being snippy. It wasn’t that I was just stomping around. No, it was just lots of little things that I would find and pick at and dig at. And we didn’t spank the kids, and we didn’t… It wasn’t a physical thing, and I wasn’t trying to be verbally abusive. And it wasn’t even that it was that intentional. I was super aware that I didn’t want that to be the message, but it didn’t matter because in my actions and in my words, that was coming across. I didn’t need to say, “Oh, you screwed up,” whatever, and berate them, but just in the interaction, you’d look at it from the outside, and you’d go, “Oh, that is not healthy.”

When I fail, if I get upset, if I yell or I get… if I storm off, or I just explode and take out angry words and just… what words are the most punishing, most manipulative, like just a societal model for what will cut someone down to nothing. Because I practiced on myself for years. I know exactly what words are going to hurt and do damage. It didn’t make me a good father or husband or a good person. It just was exhausting.

And I couldn’t stop it. I could just see it. I could just watch it, and I couldn’t do anything about it. And then every time that would happen, it would reinforce that I was a failure. The bully that was in me, I would attack myself twice as hard. And so it would just continue, and it would just stack on and on until I just couldn’t handle it. I just didn’t feel like I would ever be able to fix it.

You hit a point where you have to get help and you’re afraid to ask for help, because that means that you’re a failure. In my head, it was, “I don’t even know how to ask for help, because what are they going to do? There’s nothing they can do. I should be able to fix this.” I couldn’t be a good role model. This was not how they should be seeing human interaction.

But I finally, finally, reached out to one of the other dads, and I said, “I don’t know how to get help. I know that you have experience with mental stuff, and I just don’t even know what to do.”

He said, “Well, I have a therapist I go to see.” And it was, he was like, “I was freaking out all the time, and then they just said this one thing to me, and once that was it.” I was like, “Are you kidding? It was that simple?” I just basically went, “OK, it’s OK to get help. It’s OK to get help, and it’s OK for it not to work and me to try again. Why am I afraid to try? Why am I punishing myself for punishing myself? It doesn’t even make sense, so finally, I’m going to do it.

I went in, talked to her for a little bit, went “OK.” Came back. “Yeah, all right. I’m going to come back and talk some more.” It started off just, “Yeah, tell me what was your parents’ sacrifice,” whatever. “I was scared to upset them.” Just the history of my worldview. And then she said a couple things, and I just couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t talk. And when I did, it felt like I had taken, she said it was like shrapnel, but it felt like a cloak of 100-pound weights had just been dropped or something sharp that was keeping a wound, like a splinter that wouldn’t leave. It just came out. And the moment that happened, it was just like, “Really? Was that it? That can’t be it. I don’t trust it. It can’t be that easy to have asked for help, talked for a little while, and made it better. That’s bullshit. No way.”

I went home and talked to my wife, and weeks went by. I was trying to do some of the things that we had talked about, and it didn’t feel like it was working. It still just felt like I had masked it, and I’ve worked around it. Like cheating on a diet or something. It was just like, “This is not…” And so we talked some more, and there was another few sessions where it just was… I think one session was basically an hour of me barely able to breathe and crying, and another layer, and another piece of just glass being taken out, and over and over again, where it was like, “I don’t think there’s anything left. There’s nothing still in me that is hurting me. I’ve described it. I’ve talked about it. I’ve pulled it out. I trust that I’m enough, and I’m OK. I don’t have to punish myself for this stuff anymore. It’s OK to fail. It’s OK not to have everything under control. It’s OK to be broken.

Obviously, you can’t just flip a switch and be fixed permanently and perfectly, but I know what that process was. Once you go to the gym, and you see the weight machines and you’ve been shown how to use it, you don’t suddenly forget. Once you’ve learned it and learned the process, it’s familiar enough that you can come back to it, and it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, I’ll never be able to do this.” And that’s how I feel like with when I know that I haven’t slept enough, or when I know that things are just rough. I start to react badly or, “Well, I messed up.” And that’s where it ends most of the time. I may still react poorly. I still may watch myself explode a little bit or throw some fuel on the fire just to watch what happens, but the fallout after is not there.

I felt like I needed something for me, I started back in martial arts. I went, and I just wanted to do something again that was just for me, to get out of the house. I lost like 40 pounds, and I didn’t think that… I wasn’t trying to lose weight, it was like, “Oh, I feel good.” I don’t feel like I’m the fat kid anymore, which was also the other ridiculous part of growing up. It’s ridiculous that I was being picked on about it, but it’s ridiculous that I accepted that as the truth.

And I finally went, “OK, well why? What is that? Why am I accepting that negativity and holding on to that?” The embarrassment of just taking your shirt off at the pool or with the kids or whatever, you’re just like, “I can’t. I don’t… I’m ugly.”

And then I finally went, “Well, why? How stupid is that? What is that feeling keeping me from?” It’s keeping me from doing all kinds of stuff. “I should be better.” And what came out of therapy was, every time you feel like that… You should be? Says who? Why are you putting that pressure on yourself? You’re learning. Accept the learning process. Accept that you’re doing this, and that’s OK. That’s why you’re doing this.

And that was the biggest shift ever, because I finally was allowing myself to go through the process of learning, and it wasn’t embarrassing to not know how to do something, or it wasn’t embarrassing to fail. Because it was just a way to build. This is now something I get to work on, instead of punishing myself over and over, why didn’t I do it already. How stupid is that? “Oh, you should already know how to do this.”

You know, I watched my kids from birth fail over and over again to try to learn how to walk, to speak, to read. The only way they got through that is because they didn’t care. You don’t have a baby who’s embarrassed to try to speak because they can’t speak already. They just try to say the words over and over again until they figure it out. And you encourage that. “Yes! You said, ‘Da.’” You know? The encouragement level is so high for even an attempt. Why don’t I give myself the same permission?

And so every stage of my life, every point of contact, it just opened up so much more richness in my ability to try things and learn things and to not punish myself over it. It was incredible. You know, I’m going to go to the pool and learn to dive with my kids. And so, if you want to see something funny, it’s that for a summer camp with me and the kids was me on a diving board learning to high dive, without my shirt on and moms watching their 4-year-olds walk up the ladder that a 6-foot 40-something-year-old is on at the same time learning to do the same thing that they’re 4-year-old’s doing, and I was like, “I don’t care if I’m… I don’t have 6-pack abs; I just… I’m getting to learn how to dive with my kids, and I get to show up, and I get to be here.” And it was the most fun thing ever. I was the only adult, and what happened out of that was people were like, “Ah, I wish I could’ve done that. Oh, that’s so great you’re doing that.” Yeah, it is. Nothing’s stopping you from doing it either. And I would’ve missed all of that because I wouldn’t have given myself permission to do it.

Asking for help and then accepting the help, was the biggest thing that, besides meeting my wife, that was such a huge shift in my entire world that was… that I didn’t know I needed. There’s… It certainly is felt. It’s felt in my relationship with my wife. It’s felt in the relationship with the kids. It’s felt with being brave enough to just stand up in front of a group of people and learn to dive. And yeah, I’m going to fail bad, and I’m going to try again. And a few times, I smashed hard, and everyone felt it and heard it, and I was like, “Yes! That was awesome! I completely tried the best I could and failed, and I’m going to get it again.” And then I’d go up again. And I couldn’t have done that 3 years ago. I mean, I couldn’t have done it before going to therapy and just coming to terms with allowing myself to actually go through the process of being vulnerable and learning how to fail in a way that gives me growth as opposed to just punishment.

And I still don’t really understand how. I don’t know what therapy did. I don’t know how it worked. I don’t know why going in and talking to a stranger and just having reassurance that it wasn’t something broken in me from someone who I had no connection with, that allowed that to connect where I had blocked it off before. Clearly, everyone has their own stuff. Clearly, if you see one person that looks like they’re together, there’s a hole somewhere that they’re struggling with. No one gets out of childhood unscathed.

Episode 014 - Invisible Baseball

We're back for more! Our season 2 opener is a special story to me. My brother first told me a version of this story when we were on a more-or-less annual road trip across the state to watch some football. We live about 25 miles apart, but we don't get to see each other as often as we'd like. Busy work and family lives often get in the way of adult relationships. But when we find ourselves in the car together for hours at a time, we do a lot of talking and catching up. When he told me about invisible baseball, we both knew that it was a story that should be captured in some way. So over the next several months, I asked him now and then if he'd be willing to sit down and record it with me. We finally made that happen, and I really like the result. I think you'll like it, too.

Thank you so much to Rik Haden for sharing this story, for being so open and willing to share his memories, his emotions, and his perspective on the impact of aging on an entire family.

Music in this episode includes:

"Nasty" by David Szesztay

"Keep It In Your Heart" and "Saturday Afternoon" by Lobo Loco

"Sals Piano Solo" and "Sals Place" by Blue Dot Sessions

"Something (Bonus Track)" by Kai Engel

Baseball audio from August 16, 1958, New York Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox.

Transcript:

Meg’s father was living in Springfield, Missouri, and we as a family had gone to visit him there on his 80th birthday with the intent of talking with him for the first time about moving to Texas so that we could be closer to him. But the unfortunate thing that happened is, on that trip he became very ill and had a health emergency that landed him in the hospital there and was, proved to be life threatening at the time and ultimately resulted in emergency medical intervention and surgery. And so at the end of that summer then he moved to Austin, but he disembarked the plane on a stretcher and then was immediately transferred to a true nursing home. I think his first year living here was in 3 or 4 different rehab facilities just in dealing with certain things to get them back to that level of independence.

I think it was maybe in the fall of that year when Hayley was in 2nd grade and Gage was in kindergarten that then he recovered to the point where he could move to Beckett Meadows. I’d call it an assisted living facility, but it was most definitely not a nursing home. There’s a nursing home component to it, but… Feels a little bit like a hospital because it's full of sounds and smells and things that you might associate with a hospital. But on the whole, it felt more like apartments, but specifically designed to the purpose that they're supposed to serve. They took good care to make it a very livable place at this particular place. There was a central courtyard where all of those rooms that are along those corridors either had a window to the exterior of the property, looked out over the parking lot and grounds to the outside, or they looked back in on the central courtyard. And that interior courtyard was a really well-kept, beautiful place. There were always fresh flowers planted there in pots. There was a gazebo there where somebody could go and sit in a protected space to the interior building, but open to the sky and fresh air and all of that. 

We didn't always go as, entirely as, a family necessarily, but Meg would at least see Ed at least once a week. But it was more often than that most of the time, and surprisingly the kids wanted to go most of the time. And so there was an Activities Director there that would arrange a Valentine's Day concert and 4th of July concert. Those sort of things were happening in the evenings and we were regulars at, because the kids loved it so much and it also made, it was an interesting break in routine, or whatever.
 
I think they both were a very bright light in his life, in the last stages of his life where there wasn't a lot going on for him except for, for Meg and his daughters and his grandkids came to see him. But I think they also were very much so for a lot of people that we just got to know, got to meet there. It was, it got to the point where any time we brought our kids, there were a seeming dozen or more people who would all be clearly happy to see them, talk to them about what was going on with them at school and whatever. And then most to the point I guess, this community of older men that were living in this facility that would, that had a history in baseball that exactly dovetailed with Gage’s newly developing passion and love for baseball.

One of the big mysteries about Gage is where his just absolute devoted love and passion for that sport came from. We weren’t a baseball family by any means, and most players now that I encounter now, Gage has known thousands of baseball players at this point in his life or played against that many at least, there's always a dad that played baseball or uncle at a high level in college or double A ball or something, or at least it was father and son grew up going to games together. And there’s just none of that in our history or his history or even in his mother's family history to explain why as a 5 year old, he was already asking his Mom, “Can I play tee ball? When can I start playing tee ball?” It’s like it was something that he always knew was in his future and at the center of everything he did for the rest of his life. We had no idea at the time how central to our whole family's life baseball was going to become and how many weekends we were going to be driving all over the state of Texas and sometimes all over the country just to take this kid places to give him the opportunity to play the game for the thousandth time or two thousandth time.

When he started playing tee ball, we thought we were like any other family. We were just trying different things out with their kid. He was taking kung fu. He’d taken a few ballet classes. But through all of the things that he was kind of trying out at the time, he was like, “Baseball is my thing.” Or tee ball at the time at least. And when he started asking us about it, he was too young to play most places. Meg, always faced with a challenge like that, just finds an answer. And so she started checking around every little league in town that offered tee ball and found out what age they would take him, and finally she got in contact with somebody who was actually at the little league that was appropriate for our neighborhood, said, “Well, we don't take kids ‘til 6, but bring him in and let's see if he has the basic aptitude and just fundamental physical build and attention span to be able to participate with the older kids.” And so she went and did that, and he started playing tee ball at 5 with 6 year olds.

It's a silly enterprise to begin with, you know? It’s putting a bunch of kids out on a baseball field, mostly more for the entertainment of the parents than the actual kids, because half of them don’t want to be there, the second half want to be there, but they don't have the attention span last beyond the first general moments of the game and then it's all just after that about the coaches and the parents trying to corral and continue to make the game happen. And it so it becomes this sort of bizarre, scripted enterprise where it’s like, “OK, we can get from action to cut if we can just corral these kids and keep them focused long enough to...”

The thing is, at the time, I didn't recognize that Gage didn't fit that paradigm exactly. Every tee ball game that he played in, took him from beginning to end of the game. And he's kind of a math kid, because from the very beginning, the thing that for him that the game was all about was like that there's just a logic to it, and the beauty that he appreciates, and that it's a numbers game and it's a mental game and everything. And even from that age of 5, he was totally invested in the idea that it was one, two, three strikes, you're out, one, two, three outs the inning changes, and then the seven innings, and it's all this thing that builds up, and it's always what he’s been interested about.

And so that stage of his life, when I look back and remember it, was just, it was so electric and intense because there was just so much to learn. Just to be entering the game, and for me to be entering it too, because not coming from a baseball family, really, the way that the whole first years of him playing the sport, for me was learning everything that he was learning. There is so much more to it than I ever knew at the time. Like I had no idea at that time how much Gage and I both had out there ahead of us to learn together, just about this thing that was going to become the absolute central passion in his life.

He left little league very early. I'm just not sure exactly how it happened. We were totally conventional tee ball parents and little league parents and had no background whatsoever or any knowledge about select baseball and club baseball, which is apparently something that everybody in Texas or any baseball state knows about, but we didn't know about at the time. Somehow Gage found out about it, that there was this other stream for playing baseball that was much more serious and there were professional coaches and professional coaches who played at the collegiate or professional level teaching kids to play baseball in essentially academies. He found out about that, and he realized that they were approaching the game the way he wanted to approach the game. He didn't want to play with a bunch of kids who half cared about it. He wanted to play with a bunch of kids that were serious. And so somehow, I still to this day don't know where it came from, but he learned about tryouts for a club baseball program that wasn't even in our area. He found out about tryouts for an 8U coach pitch team and convinced his, convinced me pretty easily I guess, but then convinced his mother somehow, which is still astonishing to me how he pulled that off as a 7 year old to go to those tryouts. And we didn't understand at the time, even the age rankings. I didn’t have any idea at the time that when I took, I think he was like barely 7 when he went and participated in these tryouts, that I was bringing probably the youngest kid they’d ever seen to their tryouts. And so I just sent him out there and didn't realize, I had no idea that I was sending him out to actually try out with a bunch of 9 year olds. And so ultimately, Gage did, went through that tryout process, was selected to play on this competitive 8U team, convinced his mom with an earnestness that I think is beyond most 8 year olds I’ve ever known, that it was important to him and important enough for us to support him in it and at least consider it. 

And then for Gage, that was, absolutely he took to it right away, loved it, but it was being dropped out of the frying pan into the fire. So he went from that little league, to being coached by a coach who was a semi-pro baseball player in New Jersey. So it was like, New Jersey coach, serious, competitive baseball and Gage just dropped right into the middle of that. And just immediately committed to it and committed to doing the absolute best he can from the beginning.

And so then, suddenly in that period of life, like every minute with him was, “Can we practice? Can we throw? Dad, can we play catch? Dad, can we play catch?” And we spent like all this time, like if we went to the mall, he wouldn't want to go into the mall. He would try right away to convince me that Meg and Hayley should go in and take care of whatever business we had to take care of and that he and I should play catch in the parking lot. Because he's just learning to handle a glove and throw a ball and throw it well. Already at that age, they're telling him, “No, not rainbows. We want you to throw it on a rope.” And so here's this 7 year old trying to learn all that to fit in and be competitive with these other boys who had been doing exactly that since they were, probably the moment they were able to walk, their dads were teaching them how to throw a ball on a rope, you know? 

It's interesting because Meg, has, when Hayley was young, Meg started a practice of writing letters to the kids that she keeps in books. Her ability to see the future and see the value that certain things will have in the future and kind of anticipating that present is remarkable. And you know, she's a very much “stop and smell the roses” kind of person. I'm always like, “Let's keep moving. There's a schedule. There's a goal. Let's go.” And she's like, “Well let's stop for 2 seconds and look at this tree.” And so in that sort of wisdom that she has, she started writing letters to the kids from, I think, Hayley maybe at the age of four. So for Gage, that's an even younger age. And in Gage’s book, she has the first, his first mention of baseball sort of captured in a letter that she wrote to him and she even wrote at the time that she didn't really know where it was coming from and that it was just his, it’s just completely internal and from his own place.  Tied up into it is the two things that have, have seemingly always been present for Gage and are still totally present in his life now as a 17 year old are his just love and what he calls respect for the game of baseball. And then his, secondly, his love and respect and just comfort, like remarkable comfort level with senior citizens or the elderly, just older folks in general from the, from this same age.

We visited all of their grandparents, and so he had a relationship with all of his grandparents. And both of our kids have always had a very deep love for their grandparents. Gage has just always had a sort of unexplainable different connection with grandparents, though. But not just grandparents. Also the friends of grandparents. We would often go to spend a weekend with Meg’s mom and stepdad at the, we just always refer to it as the lake, and it’s a community where it was a lot of like-minded older people who were spending whatever time they could there, fishing, boating, that kind of thing. And there’d be a ton of kids and grandkids, cousins, you know, all of that. There would always be tons of children around to play with, and Gage was always, always, always more interested in being with the grandparents, the older people. Whether it was playing cards or frying fish or fishing itself, it was just, he was always more interested in being with the older folks than kids his own age.

And I think that that's, I mean that's just the way that he lives his life now. That's even more true now than it ever was. But it's always been there. And it’s just a comfort in conversation. It's funny, I remember times just looking back on him just sitting in a lawn chair next to Grandpa, or his Papa Ed, or his Papa Jack, and especially Papa Jack and one of his friends, sitting in a chair between them, and just looking at him and going, you know, he looks, it just looks the same. That looks like three old guys there, sitting there talking about their childhoods fishing where one of them is actually six years old. There's been many instances in my life where you could look at Gage sitting with a couple of old guys like that and just think that's an old man that got put in a young man's body.

So he had, I think that that may partly play a role in these relationships that he developed with seniors at these facilities is, it was a place that he could go where he got a lot of positive feedback for the stuff that he was interested in and wanted to talk about. And guys wanted to talk to him about stuff that he was interested in.

And he just had this group of guys who wanted to know how he was doing, and interested in what he was learning as he got past tee ball into the coach pitch and then eventually started playing club baseball, they’d want to know where he was playing and always had stories to tell him about Shoeless Joe and I mean, players that played so long ago that Gage really should have no interest in them. And most young players still like, you know, even the high school players that he plays with now, I would bet that half of them had no idea who Shoeless Joe Jackson was or you know, they might know the big names, but they wouldn't know what... But Gage can tell you Babe Ruth's shoe size. And the reason that he can tell you that is that when he was 6 years old, he had a conversation with one of his Papa Ed’s neighbors who told him, “Hey, you know the remarkable thing about Babe Ruth? He had tiny feet.” And that's something that Gage has remembered his entire life since and has become something that it's somehow part of who he’s become. And it’s something he can tell you right now. So he can tell you things about the game and the history of the game that he has no business really knowing. I think all of that goes back to that time in his life and those old guys that he used to sit and chat with at Beckett Meadows.

And I can, it's another one of just the beautiful memories I have of Beckett Meadows that there was one of those times where I think Meg had gone up to get her dad and prep him to bring him down. And I happened to look over at the end of the porte cochère, the entrance to this place where they always kept rows of rocking chairs on the other side where you’d see residents sitting sometimes. And I think it was new that year too, they’d also got a dog for the residents. So there was this yellow golden retriever, old, slow-moving dog that lived at the place But that dog was often sitting at the rocking chairs just looking for anybody to pet him for a minute. I mean, he just lived for that. It’s like going back to him with Papa Jack at the lake. I looked over and he's sitting in a middle rocking chair between two other old guys in rocking chairs on either side of him, just rocking with the same cadence and petting this old dog. And I walked over, and sure as shit, the 3 of them were sitting there in their rocking chairs just talking about baseball.

But you know, so Gage was an extremely active kid that required a ton of space, loved going to this place, was always energized when we went there. His sister, the same thing: always happy to go visit, liked the place, but the difference between the two of them is that she had a personality that allows her to sit down in a small space and carry on conversations. And she could do that. Gage, you had like maybe 10 minutes of that with him. And then he was just, as he always did most places, he was sprawled out on the floor and like flopping and kicking things over. He's just always been a boy that required a good amount of clear space to be in or something was going to get knocked over or broken. And as parents at the time for Meg and I, it was like almost always a constant stress in our lives. By the time we get to Beckett Meadows and he's starting to play baseball and all of all of that is kind of going on around it, that's just a little bit more of a window into what it was like to try to manage him at the time.

And so the way that that segues into Beckett Meadows and Ed was that the place to be able to do that was in that courtyard that I described, this sort of carefully landscaped, delicate, full of beautiful flowers and flower pots and elderly people sitting, watching in the gazebo. And Gage unable to sit beyond the first 15 minutes in Ed’s room while Meg took care of just like regular business. And so it was just always, “Hey, can we go throw? Can we go throw? Can we go throw?” And so that became a part of the routine there was, visit Papa Ed, throw a little, visit a little more, throw a little, visit a little bit more. But the only place that we had to really go, because the parking lot  wasn't conducive. And so we just, we needed a way to be close but for him to blow off some steam and then go back to the sitting and visiting and then go exercise, and then go back to sitting and visiting.

And so what I tried for, I don't know, 3 weeks or a month or whatever, was to go into that courtyard and throw with him. And in the beginning when he wasn't, when he couldn't throw that hard, it was like, even if a ball was a little bit errant, it wasn't going to cause too much damage. But then even in the course of the first few weeks, he was learning and developing so fast it, right way, “OK, now this kid’s throwing harder, and if he does go wild or something, it's going through a window, or it’s breaking a flower pot or something.” And it became such a stressful thing for me because, and because  it’s also a very quiet environment too. So you don't want to be, like I’m trying to contain this kid but also allow him to spend time with his grandpa, but also not be disturbing to residents who might be sleeping or whatever. It just, it became a very stressful thing for me to play catch with him in this courtyard to the point where it was just like, what started out as fun wasn't fun anymore because I would just spend the whole time every time he threw the ball going, “Man, there’s, what are we going to break, or is anybody upset?” You know, like every minute waiting for somebody in administration to say, “Hey, you can't freaking do that here. It’s a confined space.”

And so somewhere along the way, and honestly I have no idea of where the, what put this thought in my head other than on top of all the rest of it, Gage has always been very imaginative kid. He’d play a lot of, especially when he was a toddler, he’d play a lot of imagination games, having to imagine whatever. And so I knew he was perfectly capable of role-playing and imagination games, and I think that I had read something where it was like athletes talking about the power of visualization in the sports that they play. And it's always fascinated me because there's certain athletes that will, who write a lot about that like mental practice is almost effective as actual physical practice. Which is like a fascinating idea, right? And I think that I may have read something about that at the time, and I thought, you know, well if we could just like visualize this, if we could imaginary practice playing catch, maybe he's still getting something out of it and then I don't have to worry about the damn ball and all of then stress, and then we'll go to the park later, and we'll throw a real ball, but at least maybe while we're here at Beckett Meadows, we could just imagine playing catch. And thinking that there was no way he was going to buy it, a kid that's like so interested in throwing a real ball, I figured he'd just blow me off. But I suggested it one time, explained to him why, you know I was concerned about breaking a window or something, and he totally bought it. It was just like, “Oh, sure.” And so we started. I just put the ball off to the side, and we started playing catch with an imaginary ball. And I mean, it sounds so silly, but it actually works. It makes me think now more about the idea of the visualization to train in sports, because once you stop, and if you take it seriously and you stop, and you imagine like a real timing and a real, you're going through the real motion and you’re not just, it's just, it's not that much different I guess because your brain can make it up.

Real glove. Everything but the ball. He had a coach that said, “If you set,” I mean said this, even to 7 year olds that, “You're not going to set a foot on my ballfield unless you're wearing a ballcap. You're not a ballplayer if you're not wearing a baseball cap,” was one of the many tenets that his first coach had, and man, Gage took that serious as a heart attack. Still does. I don't think you will ever see him throwing a baseball without a baseball cap on. And so, both of us in baseball caps, gloves. Sometimes, if he'd had a practice or a game or something, he’d be in his full-blown uniform out there playing catch with no ball. But it was surprising to me how convincing an experience it was even for me because even like when you're playing imaginary catch, you'd even snap your glove closed on the ball when you imagine that it came into, because you don't want the imaginary ball to fall out of your real glove, so you've got to close on it.

And so that is like sort of, that's the innocent beginning of it was just me trying to manage my young son in this field, not have something disastrous happen, not cause something embarrassing for my wife, not get ourselves banned from this facility. You know, all this stuff in my mind, we just started playing imaginary catch. And then that's where for me, the, you know I may get choked up going forward from here, because that's, following this point in the story is when this grows into what for me is still one of the most beautiful experiences, beautiful memories, of my entire adult life, I think that maybe this is a story that's more transformative for me than Gage, because I think it was just such a natural part of his whole life. But I do think what happens after this, with imaginary catch, changed me maybe in a way that I don’t even have an understanding of now. Like I can’t say how it changed me, but it’s such a present memory in my mind that I know that it had as much affect on me as any of the other major events in my life.

So, we got in the habit of playing imaginary catch, and I think that there were, probably happened 1 or 2 weekends where there happened to be some residents sitting in the courtyard just enjoying some sunshine while we're playing it. And there’s 2 men that I, I can’t name them. I dont’ think we knew them. But there was a couple of guys that took an interest, enough so that I started to notice that when we started to play imaginary catch, they would turn up. And so then, it was never anything that we thought of. There was no plan to it. There was just particular sunny Saturday where we were out there doing that, and these guys came out where they could look on while we were playing imaginary catch, and then Gage made a pretend throw to me, and this was the first time it happened. One of the old guys just out of the blue all of a sudden said, “Whoa! Boy, he really hummed that one in there!” And so suddenly somebody else was seeing the invisible ball, somebody had seen it. So then he responded to that and started imaginary throwing the ball harder. And so then I imaginary started catching the ball as if it were thrown harder. So now I'm like, “Oh whoa, jeez, that one stung!” That kind of thing. Which of course feeds it even more with a 7 year old. And so then it just started growing from there and was just amazing. Other people would begin to participate, and it went from being a game of catch to a full-blown game. I'm not sure how it happened, but it was like we set up in a catcher and a pitcher position, and Gage would then be pitching to an invisible batter, and the residents would be the one that determined what happened with a particular pitch. I’d set up to catch for Gage, he’d get up there and he’d fake pitch, and it'd be like, “Oh, that was just outside!” And we would take those cues, and different of the residents would say different things. Like it just, it was just this amazing, unplanned, organic thing. And then, of course, it caught Hayley's interest. She wanted to participate. So she would come out and join us, and then we'd have a batter too. And then once you have like a real batter, not imaginary batter. It got so wild. It was so fun, and so… And so pure and beautiful.

And it just, that is what now what I'm talking about when I say, “Yeah, well, when Gage was little, he used to play invisible baseball.” My 7 year old son pitching an invisible ball to my 9 year old daughter, and these old guys who had loved the game and understood it well enough that they would call out in sort of an old fashioned play-by-play like you were listening to an old game on the radio. “Oh, she hit that one deep!”  And Hayley would run the bases, and as she was running the bases, rounding second, somebody would call out, “Oh! Held up on a triple!” And then she would know to stop at third base. And then, we put in an imaginary runner for her at third, and she'd go back and hit again, and her brother would pitch.

And that, I don't know how long that lasted. I think the end of it was just sort of as organic as its beginning. I don't know if a couple of the key spectators just got to a point in that stage of their life where they just couldn’t come out anymore, and that took some of the magic out of it, or if it just got routine enough for everybody that that took some out of magic out of it. There was no definitive end to it. There was no day where it was like, “OK, no more invisible baseball.” It just sort of, like most things in life, just sort of petered out without a real moment of closure. But it’s absolutely something that obviously affected me in an emotional way. Still does. That just is absolutely one of the most magical things that I’ve experienced.

I don't share this story often, and I’ve never, I don't think I've ever shared it in this much depth, but from time to time, where, when I talk about it just anecdotally, usually it’s to make the argument against accepting the perception that these are just depressing, stress-filled, dark places. Usually if I'm bringing this story out for any reason it’s to convince somebody that even though when you walk into an assisted living facility like that or even a rehab facility, although it's is a little more difficult to find the beauty in those places, it’s still there. That's what I came to know from that experience is that you got to get over the hump. You got to get over your discomfort. You got to get over your perception that what you're seeing is, because of the filter you're running through it, that it's automatically depressing. Look past all that. Because it would've been very easy, a very easy mistake for us to make based on the first days of those visits to say, “This is going to be hard on our kids.” Right? And I think that probably a lot of parents do that. It’s a very natural parenting instinct to say, “I need to protect my kids from seeing older folks in pain, seeing some of the indignities that happen in those kind of places.” It would be a very natural thing to say, “I need to shield my kids from this.” But that was one where we did sit down and have a conversation with one another about, “Should we or should we not involve our kids in this experience that we know that we are going to have to go through? Do we involve them or not?”  And we decided, “Yes, we do.” And that's probably the best parenting decision we’ve ever made, because there is vibrant, real life still going on there that can be participated in. I've had this conversation a number of times with Mom and Dad too, because now that they've moved here, they're often saying, “We just don't want to be a burden.” But because of that experience and because of invisible baseball and so many other wonderful things that happened to us in that stage of our kids’ lives, I know, and I tell her all the time, that it's, you’re not a burden at all. You're having a difficult time appreciating how much value you still bring to all of our lives. And you know, it’s understandable. I understand her point of view because I think that I would feel the same way in her shoes. But the thing that I know is that all of these people that we've met and kind of struggled through that last stage of human life along with have brought so much more value to our lives and to our kids’ lives than any effort it took to participate in the last stages of their lives, that I hope that our own parents can begin to be convinced of that. I believe that Mom and Dad are starting to hear it, but I also hope that anybody who's proudly made it beyond the age of 70 in our lives or in anybody's lives know that it's just the beginning, and every day they wake up and spend time with their grandkids is valuable and appreciated. I've got 2 kids that feel it 10 times beyond even what I feel it. So there it is. “Invisible Baseball.”
 

Episode 009 - Mom Porn

Rod Haden

This week I performed in my third live storytelling event. It was for Testify, one of several different Austin area storytelling groups. This was the first time I had to pitch a story and work with producers. Kate Caldwell and Angela Maldonado gave me really useful feedback and helped me make the story better. The other storytellers were kind and friendly, and the stories had a wide emotional range. I highly recommend having a hobby that makes complete strangers approach you and tell you how much they loved what you did! And one freelance writer even came up to me after and apologized on behalf of the entire profession. I told her I hold no grudges. All in all, it was a fun experience, and I can't wait to do it again!

EPISODE 008 - DEEP THOUGHTS: PARENTING

Flora Folgar

I've been thinking about something universal to parenting in relative safety and comfort: that an easy life might not be the way that kids grow into strong, resilient, and creative people. And of course there's always the universal parenting fear that we're failing, even when we know we're not.

Episode 004 - The Quiet Man

Rod Haden

I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season! I certainly am. Time is flying and my days are packed. This week we have a conversation with my father, Rudy Haden, a man who has fascinated me ever since I was a wee lad. He's that special kind of quiet that invites others to project onto him whatever they want him to be. Getting him to open up about his past, present, and future, and what he thinks and feels about all 3 was a very special treat for me. I've known the man for 45 years and heard some stories when we talked that I have never heard before. He is my role model for what it means to be a man, a father, and husband, and though we are very different from each other, I couldn't have asked for a better teacher. Thanks, Dad!

Transcript:

I don’t move around very good. I’m in pain quite a bit. It comes and goes. It comes and goes. Some days it’s worse; some days it’s not. It doesn’t seem to depend on how much exercise I get. Some days it’s painful to exercise; sometimes it’s not.

I sit and try to meditate, and it does nothing for me, but when I’m really quiet, or when I’m just totally listening to music, it’s like somebody plants knowledge into my head. I know and I understand things, which I had no idea before. So my meditation is basically checking out and listening to music.

Early on in our marriage, I was in an apprenticeship program, tool and die maker. I had to really concentrate at work. And it’s not easy for me to relate to other people, but I really worked on the journeymen. I would constantly hang around them, and ask them questions, and ask them the best way to do stuff, and I got in as I guess a favorite pupil with about 3 or 4 of them.

So that when I’d come home, I was exhausted, and I would lay down on the floor and play a Beethoven record or something with earphones on, and Robbie would get so pissed off at me because she was making dinner and taking care of the kids, and I was checked out. She didn’t understand that that’s the way I did my meditation.

I’ve been in and out of a lot of churches. My parents were married in a… I can’t think of the religion right now. Reverend Grace. I remember the name of the preacher that married them, and that was there. The guy wore a collar, but he wasn’t a Catholic. But he was deaf. He ministered to the deaf people. He was deaf himself.

He was in the deaf community, and in the basement of his church is where they held all the deaf fraternity meetings.It was based on the Masons. Only it was all deaf men. It was called the Frat. That was what my mom and dad called it. The Frat. We’re going to the Frat. When they went to Frat, the women all sat outside in the waiting room. The kids played on the floor. And when the big meeting was over, they’d throw the doors open, and everybody would go in and have a big social event.

And then my mother’s side of the family was deep into the Reform Christian Church, and I went to a lot of Bible schools and Sunday schools and stuff in that until I was about 3rd or 4th grade. And then I felt like I needed to get hooked up with different churches, so I went to a Methodist church, I went to a holy roller church with a friend, and I went to a couple of Catholic services. As a teen. None of that stuff stuck with me. 

Just because there was so much religion on my mother’s side of the family, I don’t know, I just felt like I was supposed to do it. In order to be accepted by them, I should have a church, but I never could find one. And I came away from it having no respect for organized religion because the main thing they wanted, no matter what it was, they wanted money up front. Seemed like everything was driven by the collection plate. If you were a big donor, you got a lot of attention. If you weren’t, you didn’t get much. And that’s what really turned me off. 

My dad was born on the farm in Kansas, and he was sent to the Kansas State Home for the Deaf and Blind. My dad was born deaf, they think because in the early days when they had the traveling doctors going around the frontier and the farms and stuff, my grandmother evidently had a lot of morning sickness, and the doctor prescribed quinine. Well, later on they found that quinine did stuff to the unborn child. 

My mom came over on the boat from Holland witH her mother. And my mother, we don’t know if she was born that way, or it was some kind of sickness or something that she got in Holland or on the boat or what, but ever since she was a baby, she was deaf. Then my mother was, because she was deaf mute, she was sent off to the school in Colorado Springs.

The strange thing is that the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind insisted that deaf people learn to lip read and speak, and so my mother was pretty good at lip reading and speaking. And they were discouraged from using sign language, so if you compare the deaf people now that use sign language to the old people that use sign language, now it’s all really broad and all over the place, and the older people, their signs are all close in and secretive about it, where now they’re just flamboyant about it. Their signs are all over the place. 

And my dad, the Kansas School for the Deaf and Blind weren’t that way. They were teaching them to do stuff and sign language and be able to be self-sufficient. 

See, in my dad’s side of the family, all the people learned sign language, the hearing and the non-hearing. So I had no idea whether they were hearing, any memory of whether they were hearing or not. On my mom’s side of the family, I had one uncle that learned the deaf sign language, learned the deaf alphabet, and he could do that. He was the only one that made any effort to sign to my mother. All her other brothers and sisters didn’t because she had been sent to school, and they were told that she was to learn to lip read, and so they would talk to her. But the thing of it is, it’s really easy to ignore somebody like that, because all you do is turn away. Turn around, they can’t see your signs. They can’t read your lips. So, whenever there was an argument or something, it was easy just to walk away from that.

My dad’s family had a big get-together once every summer. They came from all over the place. They were Kansas, Nebraska, western Colorado, and they’d have these big, long picnics on the weekend, and there were aunts and uncles and cousins. I didn’t even know all the cousins I had. But I never just seemed to fit in.

He worked in a factory. He started out in a printing shop, a paper cutter. Cutting stuff for the print shop. Then ended up in Shwayder Bros./Samsonite, cutting stuff for the suitcases and plastic tops of card tables and chairs. And my mom worked there on the assembly line putting stuff together. And my Uncle Jim and Aunt Julia also worked in the same factory. Shwayder Bros. hired a lot of, I guess what they called the handicapped people. 

Clarence, he was a rancher. He raised horses, and at one time he had a riding stable up on Lookout Mountain just above Denver. And they had 2 boys, and the youngest one, John, he had a pinto pony named Ruben. And they taught me how to ride. And I could put the bridle on Ruben, lead him over to the fence, they had a rail fence, and I’d climb up the rail fence and get on him. And I was, what, 5 years old.

John would go off hunting. He’d go out, he had a rifle, and he’d go out shooting magpies. I had no idea what magpies were. I was determined I was going to follow him one day and see where he was going, and I’d see these cow patties in various places, you know. So I thought cow patties were magpies, and cousin John shot them. I couldn’t have been 4 or 5 years old. And then he, one time he put his rifle in, we had a, there was a kind of a mud room entrance to the farmhouse, and he left his rifle leaned up against the thing, and he had a thing in the chamber, and I went up there and was messing with it, and I inadvertently pulled the trigger. And it shot a hole in the roof. My Uncle Clarence was really pissed off at John for doing that.

My bed was in this big room where the radio was. There was no TV in those days. It was during the war. World War II. I remember there was a big old tree in the backyard. When I wanted to get away, I’d just climb up in that tree and sit up there all by myself. Could see the whole neighborhood. 

I don’t remember when I realized that there was a hearing world and a deaf world. You never knew. I mean, you could talk to some people, and you had to sign to some people, and some people were talking and signing, and you know, there was no distinguishment. And a lot of the deaf people could read lips. I don’t know when I realized that. I suppose it happened to me some time in high school when, you know how high school gets. How clannish and cliquish it is, and some kids are favored by the teachers, and some aren’t. I realized I was different. During high school, I was really aware of it because people would kind of shy away from me. If I tried to be friendly with somebody, they wouldn’t necessarily because I was a child of dummies. That’s what deaf people were called in those days. They were deaf and dumb. The deaf and dumb part came from deaf and dumb, couldn’t speak. But the dummy part carried on as not being intelligent.

And then in high school, I don’t ever, in junior high or any of those, I don’t ever remember having a parent-teacher conversation. Nobody ever, none of my teachers ever contacted my parents, even when I wouldn’t do my homework or my grades were down. There was nothing. They just passed me along. And in high school, I signed up to take a Spanish class, and I was discouraged. I should take English. I was going to sign up to take some math classes, and I was discouraged. I was to take a general math class where the big thing was to learn how to write a check and keep a bank account and pay your taxes. There was none of that geometry stuff. I didn’t get hooked on that stuff until my senior year in high school. I finally got into an algebra class. 

And I hated high school. I just didn’t fit. Didn’t know how to talk to girls. I had no experience with girls. When friends come over, it was really awkward. If somebody came home with me, it was really, really awkward because of my parents. My parents would try to be friendly with them, but they didn’t know how to deal with it. And so they just dealt with me away from my house.

I really got big into leatherwork because I had an Industrial Arts teacher, Mr. Landon was… he taught Print Shop, Leather Shop, and Woodworking. And I took all those courses. Originally I thought I was going to be an Industrial Arts teacher, then I thought about getting a degree to be able to become a forest ranger, but there was no way. I couldn’t figure out how in the hell I was going to go to college to do that. Although it was a lot easier to go to college in those days than it is now. The costs weren’t so damn much. 

 And I was really into skiing, through the Boy Scouts. Some of us in the neighborhood learned to ski. It was scary in the beginning until I learned to parallel ski. Once I got out of the snowplow thing. I got fairly good at parallel. I never was Olympic quality, but I could do alright. I just loved the freedom. Just felt free. Riding up to the top of the mountain and letting go. And then after I got out of the Navy, I really went into it for a couple of years. In fact, that’s how I met Ruth, my first wife. We met through a friend, and she was really impressed with my skiing. I took her skiing every weekend. She was really into that. And then somehow we ended up getting married.

I really got into skiing, and it was a really good friend that we skied with a lot. And he said he was going to join the Navy. At that time when you turned 18, you were eligible for the draft, so I turned 18 in 1955, and that was right between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, that period. His argument was, “If we join the Navy before we turn 18, we get out on our 21st birthday. Plus the Navy will send us to school.” He laid it out, you know, that we were going to end up getting drafted for 2 years anyway, and there was this opportunity, and I felt, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” It wasn’t all that analytical, it was it felt right. And so I did it. So we joined the Navy. We took tests and everything, and both of us qualified as machinists.

Yeah, I was out in ‘58. I rejoined in ‘61. I was out for 3 years.

I remember going and applying for this one job, and the guy interviewed me and said, “No, you’re too young. You couldn’t do all that.” And then that was the end of the interview. He didn’t believe me. And at the same time, I was going to night school, it was late ‘50s and early ‘60s recession. And you’d work for 3 months, and you’d get laid off. And you’d work for 3 months and get laid off. 

And then when I had such a hard time with all the on again, off again jobs, and I don’t know how I found out the Navy came up with a need for my particular skill. When I got out the first time, I was a second class petty officer, and they… I found out that I could go back in as a second class petty officer, got assigned to a ship in San Diego. We started, originally it was all those old diesel boats, and we worked on those all the time. And then the nuclear subs started to come in. Some of us were cleared to work on the nuclear subs.

So then I was going to make a career out of it. And I just remember getting a call, the piping over the com. And I just remember, “Petty Officer First Class Haden, report to the quarterdeck!” And I thought, “Oh crap! What have I done now?” I go up there, and a guy hands me, you know, he served me with separation papers, and I opened them up and looked at them, and it was, you know, legal language about… I showed the officer, and I said, “I don’t know what to do about this.” And he said, “Well, the first thing you ought to do is get a hold of the chaplain.” 

I knew things weren’t really good with us, but I didn’t think they were that bad. It was a real slap in the face getting served. I was just dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to do now? What?” I had to ask some officer who was probably a lieutenant junior grade or something and was probably 23 years old or something, you know, “What do I do now?”

So I made an appointment with the chaplain and talked to him, and then he got her and me into counseling. And it broke down and went to divorce. It was really traumatic. I had no idea what to do. I was at a loss. And that chaplain gave me options what to do. “Well, you can just not contest it and let her have the kids and stay in the Navy.” And I thought, “Crap, I’ve seen too many of those guys. I ain’t going to be one of them. I want a relationship with my children.” He just gave me all these different options to think about. If it’s something physical, like a computer or a computer program or a piece of machinery or a car or building or something like that, I’m very analytical. But when it comes to feelings and interactions with people, I’m more intuitive. One of my big things that I’ve known over the years is that when a door opens, you look to see whether you want to go through that door or not, whether it feels right or not, and that’s pretty much the way I’ve gone. From being a piecemeal machinist to a maintenance machinist to a tool and die maker to a numerical control programmer to a software developer, and that’s where I was until I retired. But all of those were, a door opened and I went through. There was no analytical thing about it. Did it feel right? Yeah, that felt like it was a good thing to do. 

And then when the divorce happened, I had already... You know, I was committed for another 4 years. And the padre, the chaplain, said, “You know, you could file for custody. If you get custody, you could get an honorable discharge for hardship.” And I just felt like, “Am I good enough to be a father to those kids?” And I just had the feeling, “Yeah, you can do this, but it ain’t going to happen anyway, but what the hell. Go for it.” And I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen. And I thought, “Oh crap. Now what do I do?” At that time, Harold had just gotten a divorce, and he was a single father with 2 kids. He had this big house. And he said, “You could come live with me, and we’ll help each other out.” And so we did. 

And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But at the time, more than resistant to it, I was confused by it, scared of it. What am I going to do now? What am I going to do with the kids that I love so much? I had heard so many terrible things about split families, you know, kids bouncing back and forth and back and forth, loyalties, mothers saying bad things about the father and the father saying bad things about the mother, that at one point I thought that if I ever have to get divorced, then I’ll just let go of the kids, not be in their life. Well that was dumb-headed. I realize that now. Just so many things happened there that I had no clue. I had no idea what I was doing. Just taking it a day at a time.

And then when I got out of the Navy the second time, because I worked on nuclear submarines, I had a top, not a Top Secret, but a Secret clearance, so when I came out, I went to Rocky Flats, which was the big nuclear plant. They made triggers for the atomic bomb. And I applied there, and they said, “Well, it’s probably going to take about 6 months to get your clearance through the FBI.” 3 weeks later, I got a call says, “You’re hired.” 

I was a maintenance machinist. We just went around fixing pumps and stuff, generators. And they opened up an apprenticeship, and I was close to 40 years old. The cutoff date was 40. And I took the test, I went into the interviews and took all the tests and everything they gave us, and there were 2 of us that were picked for the apprenticeship, and I went into that. So I went into the tool and die shop, and that’s where they made all the tooling and everything for the equipment, the nuclear stuff. It was all classified stuff.

Well, when I got… finished my apprenticeship, I became a journeyman, and I worked nights. But during that time, they brought in a milling machine that was numerically controlled, and all those old journeymen, they had no clue about that thing, so I really jumped on that, and I learned all about how to manually program it. And so whenever they wanted to put something on there, why, I was assigned to do it. They had other numerically controlled machines all through the plant. Well, there was an opening there for a programmer, and I applied for it and got it. And in the meantime, during that time I had taken some nighttime college courses on FORTRAN and drafting programs through The University of Colorado.

You know, you get out of marriage and everything, and all you’ve got is work and little kids, and you just figure you need something else. That dating thing was not analytical. That was totally gut. I kept seeing it in the paper and throwing it away, seeing it in the paper and throwing it away. And I read it and thought, “Aw, what the hell. I’ll try it.” And I was ready to give up on that because I had 2 or 3 bad dates. I remember going and walking down the steps into her garden level apartment. And opening that door, and thought, “OK, this is a good one.” And we went out, and the rest is history.

It was such a whirlwind. We were going to get married at 6 months or something. I didn’t think it was right to get married right away. The divorce wouldn’t even be final until March. So then we thought, “OK, in the summer. No, let’s get married in June. How about Spring Break?” And I thought, “My God, this is soon!” But I’ve been following her lead for years. I just know that it sure as hell worked out. Here we are, almost 50 years later. 

When Mom and I met, she was determined that she had found me and that I was the guy, and she was going to marry me, and I had just 2 years ago gotten out of a marriage. I didn’t even know who the hell I was. I had 2 little kids, was living with my brother in his basement, and your Mom was determined we were going to get married, and she was going to have 2 kids. And then we got married, and she was determined she was going to have her own kid. And then she had her own kid, and then she determined that she wanted another one. In those days, it was all the hippie thing, you know. You replenish yourself. So I’d already, I was the husband and a wife, and we had a boy and a girl, so when I got married again, I said, “OK. One more, for Robbie.” But then she was Empty Arm Syndrome or something, and she was determined she was going to have you. And so we had you. Best thing in the world.

After I worked at Rocky Flats for 7 years, I got laid off because they were cutting back, cutting back on nuclear bombs and everything. So they had to cut back on the staff, and they ended up closing Rocky Flats because it was so contaminated. For a long time, I had to go in and be monitored by medical once a year because I was exposed to americium and some other chemicals I don’t remember. I’d go in, and they’d take blood. I was exposed, but I was never contaminated, so I was alright. 

I knew that if I was just a piecemeal machinist, I’d be doing that 3 months on, 3 months off thing for the rest of my life and never getting out of debt. And so I just followed the path. I knew that I had, because the layoff from Rocky Flats, the Bomb Factory, I was back in that mode of working in small shops for short periods of time. And I knew that I was going to get into numerical control. I wanted to. But my goal was the eastern boundary of Colorado, anything west, and the southern boundary of Colorado, anything north. And all I kept getting was this crap in Texas! And they kept offering to bring us down here for a weekend, for a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and put us up. And I thought, “Well, what the hell. It’s an opportunity to get out and spend the weekend on somebody else’s dime.” And I came down here, and I was interested. They were interested in me.

Because I worked so hard at it. I spent a lot of time self-educating. The computer has been the best damn thing in my life. Although I got a lot of enjoyment out of my kids. Just enjoying watching you do things and try things and being assistant coach for your soccer team and watching Rik at swim meets. I was a timer and a stroke judge, and I also shot the gun. Starter. It was either sit in that stupid tent, or else go out and participate. Mom just really enjoyed sitting there, and I enjoyed watching how the thing worked and keeping track of Rik’s times.

Yeah. I got involved in Scouts because of you. They fill out those papers, and I’d very carefully fill them out so that I didn’t raise any flags to where they’d want me to do something, and then when you guys went into Webelos, I said, “OK, I can do it for a year,” and the next thing I knew, I was a Scoutmaster. I seemed to get all the misfits. We had some strange kids in our troop. 

One of my favorite memories is that Ford Escort you had, when I taught you how to put new brakes on it. We went through one wheel together, and then I showed you how to do it, and then I said, “OK, you’re on your own now.” And then watched you do it on your own. It was big. 

Ruth was a very outgoing person. Early on, her dad was a senior forest ranger, and it entailed being lots of parties and groups and cocktail parties. And it’s pretty much the same with Mom now, Robbie. I’m just also-ran. I just tag along. We go into groups, and she’s willing to talk to anybody, and I have a hard, hard time. Especially with people I don’t know. I can open up like to you. I can have a conversation with you, or I can have a conversation with Rik. You get into a group of people like Rik’s New Years or Christmas when he has people over, I have a hard time talking to those people. Some of them I can talk to because I know them, but I can’t talk very long. I don’t know what to say. My brain just does not work that way. I’m very very shy. I had a hard time in my jobs too. I just never really fit into those kind of groups.

But the thing of it is, my brother Harold went through the same experience, and he didn’t have any trouble. My cousin Jimmy and my cousin Elaine. Man, Elaine was really into it. I mean, she could talk sign language with the fastest of them. And I couldn’t. I could tell that people automatically slowed down when they talked to me, and I would say, “What?” a lot, and they would spell it out, and then I would understand what the sign was. But deaf people don’t like to spell things out. And so, it was easy for me to check out because if you’re not looking at somebody and reading their signs, you’re not conversing with them. So you’re looking over here. They’re signing, and you’re not paying attention. And it’s a cop out, and I realize it now, 70 years later.

If I had nothing in common with, I’m at a loss. Walk up, you know, Robbie can talk to store clerks and have conversations, and I don’t know what the hell to say other than, “Have a good day.” I don’t know how to deal with those kinds of situations.

My mom was good at it. And my dad too, just talking to people. My dad carried a little pad of paper and a pencil in his shirt pocket, and he had no qualms at whipping that sucker out and writing, talking to people. And my mom would talk to them and try to read their lips. Biggest problem she had was that once people learned that she was reading their lips, they would exaggerate everything, and she couldn’t understand it.

Best thing I ever did was get hooked up with your mom. She’s given me so much love and stability. We still have our rough edges. Mostly it’s me not talking to her enough. That’s because she’s lost all her friends in Dallas. It’s become more important to her to be more interactive with me. I have to cope with it. One of the things is, this iPhone here, I couldn’t live without it. See that? 10:30? This one here. 10:30. It’s my alarm clock. It means “Get up and talk.” When I get up out of bed, it’s time to get up out of bed, because I slept in as long as she will tolerate, and I have to talk. Sometimes I just go on down the hall, saying, “I’m walking, and I’m talking. I’m walking, and I’m talking.” And then we’ll get in a conversation, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. This one here says, “Get up for PT” which is physical therapy, “and talk, and have a happy face.” Because she’s convinced that those girls will work harder with me if I have a happy face with them. The therapists. So that’s how I’m learning to cope with that stuff.

Big thing that we have is that she’s the balloon, and I hold onto her string. I keep her grounded. But every now and then, I have to kind of float with her. To keep me in the world. Not let me crawl in a hole. To give me love.  And it works. It works for us.

In Richardson after the stroke, I was pretty much isolated, just me and Robbie and my therapists, and the therapy ran out. Robbie over the years before that had been talking about someday we need to move to Austin to be with our kids and grandkids, you know. And then when I was in in-house rehab, I just realized that maybe that’s what we ought to do. And then it was a whirlwind.

I had nothing more there. She had all her friends and her contacts and her woo woo stuff was all up in that whole area up there. When we came down here, she had a, she’s still having a rough time, but she had a really rough time in the beginning, mostly with the driving thing. Over the years, I’ve had to map things out for her. And I still do that. I map out where she wants to go. I’m really proud of her, because she’s got to where she’s really moving around a lot.

Big events in my week are physical therapy, and now that’s about to stop and I have to do it on my own. I have to force myself to do it. It’s too easy to blow off. Mom will say, “Let’s go to lunch,” and I blow the rest of the afternoon off, which means I don’t do the exercises I should. I’ve got to do it, got to get myself on a regimen. You know the old saying, “Use it or lose it?” With me it’s really true. If I don’t do it, I’ll lose it. My walking is worse than it was 6 months ago. Although I try. I just don’t seem to be able to get the rhythm good enough, fast enough. And Robbie’s really patient with me. She just walks along at a slow crawl, either behind me or by my side.

She does a lot for me. She’s walking a narrow line about doing stuff for me and not doing stuff for me. She has to decide what I really need her to do and what I can do on my own. I try to do my own laundry, but she’s pretty much grabbed a hold of that. When she hears me kicking the bucket down the hall, she runs out and grabs it and does it, but she leaves the shirts and pants for me to hang up, which I can do. I can fold the other stuff, too, but she has a need to do something. So it’s a fine line on what she wants to do and what she wants me to do.

I’ve had a couple of times since I stroked. I thought my family would be better off without me, but then I realized that’s not true. Robbie would not be better off without me, even though she has to do so much of the physical part of it. I still keep track of the finances and when things need to be paid, the mortgage and utilities, and I give her moral support. I keep reminding her that she needs friends, and she needs to make them. She’s found a couple of lady friends that she really likes that she has coffee with on Wednesdays but I really wish she could find a clan. I just have to keep reminding her that she needs to look and not give up on it. So I can’t give up. I still got to hold that string.

The biggest thing is that she got all her talking and communication with all those people she had up north, and now she depends on me to do it, and it’s difficult for me. I try hard to do it, but it doesn’t satisfy her needs. People project onto me that I’m stuck up and antisocial. It’s not true. I just don’t know how to be social. It sounds like a cop out, you don’t know how. Of course you should know how. I read all kinds of books on how to do it. I can’t do it.

I don’t know if I can pinpoint things. It’s just a path. Some of it’s rocky and some of it’s grassy and easy going, and some of it’s a struggle to climb up, but I’m just on this path. Hadens are resilient. I don’t know whether it’s in genes or whatever the hell it is. It’s there. My next goal is make it to 85. Try to talk to my wife whenever I can. Enjoy my kids and grandchildren. I’m satisfied with my life.

 I don’t know how you’ll make sense out of any of that.