Catastrophic Success

In a forum I frequent, I was tagged as part of a Truth or Dare game. I volunteered for a Truth and when the question was presented, I struggled a long time for the answer. This is about 4 months overdue. Names have been changed to protect the indecent innocent.
My Truth:
This is another question I’ve used before, and I’d like to hear your take on it. There are moments in time that, without thinking, we are the people we always want to be. When we act and it’s the right thing to do. When you look back in hindsight and you’re proud of yourself for your reaction. Tell us about one of those times.
The simple answer is that the times I am most proud of myself upon reflection are those moment that I share with my daughters playing, rough-housing and being a responsible father by appropriately disciplining them so that they understand that actions and choices have consequences, both good and bad. When my daughters spontaneously and appropriately use please and thank you, display their feelings for each other and use their brains and ample intelligence to solve problems, I know I have done something right. However, as I tell everyone else when they compliment me on my beautiful, intelligent and well-behaved children, I blame Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name) for that. She is the biggest influence on their lives, psyche and development because we are blessed enough that Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name) can be a stay-at-home mother.
The other simple answer is that I am proud of those moments that I am a good husband, when I do the things that a good husband ought to do. When I help around the house instead of sitting on my keister blogging. When I do the dishes before Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name) comes home from work. Every day that I choose to come home from work instead of going out for drinks, or fooling around, or doing anything that would jeopardize my marriage. Those are moments I’m proud of.
One illustration of one of my more recent better moments: Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name)’s grandmother has begun to drastically deteriorate into dementia after breaking her hip in August. She has gone from a very independent woman to a near-child who can’t remember if she has gone to the bathroom, can’t tell if she has to go soon and doesn’t know when she’s finished. Just prior to her breaking her hip, she was all set to move into a Senior Citizen apartment complex. Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name), her parents and I moved all of her stuff into this apartment while she recuperated. Because of the problems with and slowness of her recovery, Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name)’s dad decided to move her to Illinois from Michigan and that she will live with him after she leaves the rehab center. They needed to move all of her things again and on short notice. Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name) had to work that day and they asked me to help. Without hesitation, I agreed to wake up at 4:30 a.m. (no small feat for me), drive 45 minutes to pick them up, then drive two hours to Michigan to pick up a moving van, load it and two hours back, unload it and then drive home. They paid me for gas (and a little more), but I would have done it for free, and offered to many times. This is not heroic, but it is significant. They are family and that’s what you do for family. They insisted on paying me and I feel bad about it.
But those don’t count. Not at all. They are true answers, but simple. Being a good father, a good husband, a good son, and a good son-in-law is very important to me. It’s just part of who I am. I can’t feel proud of doing what I expect myself to do. The fact that I feel proud of doing the dishes or picking up the house is a source of shame for me because it should be so commonplace (it’s not) that there should be no sense of accomplishment. Being a good father is a standard I hold myself to, any deviation from which is another source of shame for its occurrence. Helping out my in-laws when they are in need is no great feat. If I didn’t, I would be ashamed and would be hard-pressed to show my face around them.
Since receiving this question, I have been trying to figure out how to respond to this. I have racked my brain looking for a single moment to highlight here. I still haven’t come up with one. I can think of countless moments that I am not proud of. Many times I have been still when I should have acted, acted when I should have been still, spoken when I should have held my tongue, or hid my tongue behind my teeth when I should have issued forth. I believe most people feel this way.
Since receiving this question, I have been trying to live my life in such a way that I could give an answer. That defeats the spirit of the question since it inherently seeks unthinking virtue, but it has given me an outlook I can be comfortable using to lead my life. Since receiving this question, I began to realize that a lot of my inactivity, exhaustion and irritability is partially due to my job. It is demanding and exacting and I constantly feel as if I am swimming upstream. I pride myself on being able to leave work at work and be home when I am home. In the last year, work has followed me home more often than staying at work. I have job-related moments I am proud of.
One more digression with that thought: I work in the Voice Operations of a major personal insurance corporation. After Katrina hit and devastated the Gulf Coast, much of the area’s voice infrastructure was negatively impacted. This greatly affected our ability to help our insureds in the area. Within 48 hours, we had nearly 100% service from any phone in the area to our call centers to allow our customers to begin the claim process and get their payments to allow them to begin rebuilding their lives, sometimes even before they knew the extent of what they had lost. I had a hand in that and I am tremendously proud of the effort I and my teammates put in, 1000 miles away, to get people back on their feet, faster, I might add than our largest competitor. By a week.
However, I am constantly tired, less amenable than I used to be to being drawn out of my rut and that impacts my family life. 15 hour work days doesn’t leave much time for family or sleep. That’s not who I want to be. I don’t want to be that emotionally-absent father. I began looking outside my company for a new job (same field) that would allow me to work consistent hours and not need to bring work home with me. The first two didn’t pan out, but just when I was about to give up, a position opened up in a support capacity in my company and I jumped at it. Almost immediately. Delay would have cost me, and I made a decision and acted on it. Nothing is guaranteed until I start, but a tentative transition date is December 1. It may fall through, but I evaluated a situation that was impacting myself and my family and took decisive action to correct it as soon as I possibly could. That’s something I’m proud of. I asked myself, “How would I react or act if I wanted to use this to answer [name-deleted]‘s question?” This was the answer I came up with.
I wish I could satisfactorily answer [name-deleted]‘s question. Instead I want to thank her for giving me a valuable life tool, a unique perspective and a new life-path.

As of yesterday, Jessica Tucker is home again for the first time in over four months. She’s not out of the woods by any measure, but she is doing very well.

BIG Post coming. You’re gonna need a meal or two just to get through it. But not yet. Soon my pets. Soon.

In other news, after a convoluted conversation with my grandmother, I found out very late that my cousin (who is very young) was diagnosed with a very rare disease. Niemann Picks is a very rare genetic disorder that causes severe organ enlargement and malfunctions and eventually death by age three. After finding their web site, and reading the blog (under “status”) I wanted to say how much my heart goes out to them. My uncle and I had a large falling out after the death of my grandfather last year, but I know what it is like to think you are going to lose your baby daughter. They told us that Madelyn probably had bone cancer before they diagnosed the Aneurysmal Bone Cyst. It was a very difficult time for Mrs. Bixby (Not Her Real Name) and me. I can’t imagine going through that for eight months as they have.

Jessica is one of three children in the world who have undergone a new and dangerous procedure to treat this disease. The first little girl who had the procedure died, but Jessica and Anna (the third girl) seem to be responding to it. It is given at the University of Minnesota and Jessica has been up there since February. The procedure sounds similar to one that a schoolmate of mine had to treat MS. The patient is given two full rounds of chemo (in Jessica’s case, I imagine my adult friend had a larger regimen of chemo) to kill the immune system and other diseased cells and is then injected with stem cells (from their own bone marrow, bone marrow transplant or umbilical cord blood) to restart the immune system and/or replace the diseased cells. Jessica had the transplant in early March and seems to be recovering very well – an MRI from the other day showed that her brain displayed normal myelination, a marked improvement. I am very glad that she is doing so well.

However, the procedure is very expensive and Tommy and Julie could use all the help they can get. Please visit http://www.babyjessica.net and consider Buying a Bracelet or donating to the The Jessica Tucker Medical Expense Fund. All donations would be appreciated and religious as they are, prayers you could send their way (if you are religiously inclined) would also be appreciated.