Volume IV: Man of the House

My father didn’t just leave.

There was a divorce.

And during that divorce, he told the judge he didn’t want visitation.

He didn’t want custody.

He didn’t want a relationship with us.

There were three of us.

My sister was the oldest.

I was the middle child.

My brother was the youngest.

And our father made it clear that he was done being our father.

There are probably more complicated ways to describe that.

There are legal words.

There are explanations adults could give.

But I wasn’t an adult.

I was a kid.

And from where I stood, my father disowned his children.

That was the reality I understood.

The person who was supposed to protect us had already taught me that protection wasn’t guaranteed.

Then he taught me something else.

People can leave.

And sometimes they don’t come back.

Nobody Told Me I Was the Man of the House

I want to be careful about something.

Nobody sat me down and said:

“You’re the man of the house now.”

My mom didn’t put that on me.

Nobody handed me some list of responsibilities and told me childhood was over.

I did that myself.

Somewhere inside me, I looked at what was happening around us and came to a conclusion.

There wasn’t another man coming.

There wasn’t someone waiting just outside the picture who was going to step in and make everything okay.

It was us.

My mom.

My sister.

My brother.

Me.

And for reasons I probably couldn’t have explained at the time, I decided that meant I needed to become something I wasn’t old enough to be.

Useful.

Dependable.

Strong.

The one who could handle things.

The one who didn’t need much.

The one who worked.

I didn’t think of it as sacrificing my childhood.

I didn’t think of it as trauma.

I didn’t think of it as anything.

I just thought:

This is what needs to be done.

So I did it.

Lodi Academy

We went to Lodi Academy, a private Seventh-day Adventist school in California.

Private school costs money.

We didn’t have much of it.

So I worked.

Every morning.

Every evening.

Summers.

While other kids had summer vacation, I worked.

While other kids had breaks, I worked.

And the money wasn’t just helping pay for my education.

I was working to help pay for my sister’s education too.

Looking back now, there’s something strange about that sentence.

I was a kid working to pay school tuition for another kid.

But at the time, it didn’t seem strange.

It was just what had to happen.

That became a theme in my life.

If something needed to be done, I didn’t spend much time asking whether it should be my responsibility.

I asked how I was going to get it done.

There is a difference.

I just wouldn’t understand that difference for a very long time.

Six Dollars an Hour

The summer after my sophomore year of high school, going into my junior year, I was still working at the school.

I think I was making somewhere around six dollars an hour.

One of my classmates, Jolene, connected me with her dad, Glenn Emory.

Glenn owned a tile and marble company.

I didn’t know anything about tile.

Nothing about marble.

Nothing about thinset, grout, setting tile, or any of the hundred little things you learn working in a trade.

I knew how to work.

That was about it.

So that first day, I did what someone who knows nothing does.

I carried things.

I fetched things.

I mixed things.

If Glenn needed concrete, thinset, grout, or a tool, I went and got it.

If something heavy needed moved, I moved it.

I watched.

I listened.

I tried not to be useless.

Toward the end of the day, Glenn told me to put something away in the truck.

I don’t remember exactly what it was anymore.

I remember what happened next.

I put it away.

Then I came back.

Glenn was gone.

No instructions.

No next task.

Nothing.

I could have sat down.

I could have waited.

Technically, I had done exactly what he asked me to do.

But I looked around at everything still sitting out and thought:

Well, if he wanted that put away, he probably wants all of this put away.

So I started cleaning up.

Loading tools.

Putting things back in the truck.

Getting the jobsite ready to leave.

I kept going.

About thirty minutes later, Glenn came back.

He looked around.

Then he smiled.

“Good job. Let’s go.”

I didn’t know it yet, but I had apparently been taking a test.

The Test

On the drive back, Glenn told me what he had done.

He had intentionally left.

He wanted to see what I would do when nobody was standing there telling me what to do.

Would I complete the one task and then stop?

Would I sit around waiting for him?

Or would I look around, recognize what still needed to be done, and do it?

His lesson was simple.

A hard worker does what he is asked.

A really good worker notices what else needs to be done.

That stuck with me.

Deeply.

Maybe too deeply.

Because it fit perfectly into the way I was already beginning to understand the world.

Don’t wait for someone else.

Don’t need to be told twice.

Handle it.

If you see a problem, fix it.

If there is work to do, work.

If something is falling apart, start putting it back together.

Nobody is coming to do it for you.

I carried that lesson into nearly everything that came afterward.

Work.

Leadership.

Relationships.

Family.

Life.

I learned to be the person who kept moving after everyone else stopped.

For a long time, I considered that one of my greatest strengths.

I still do, in many ways.

But strengths can become dangerous when you don’t know when to put them down.

The Grocery Money

There was another moment during high school that I remember differently.

There wasn’t a jobsite.

There wasn’t some lesson hidden inside it.

There was just my mom.

And we were struggling financially.

Really struggling.

One day, my mom came to me.

She was emotional.

Tearful.

And she asked whether I would be okay giving her some of the money I had earned so she could buy food.

I don’t remember every word of that conversation.

I remember what it did to me.

Something clicked.

This wasn’t just “money is tight.”

This wasn’t adults talking about bills in another room.

We needed food.

My mom needed help buying it.

And she was asking her teenage son.

That was the moment, more than almost any other, when I understood something that would shape me for decades:

Nobody was coming to save us.

We were on our own.

I don’t mean that bitterly.

There were people in our lives.

There were people who cared.

There were undoubtedly people who helped us in different ways.

But inside me, that conclusion had already formed.

If this family was going to make it, we had to make it.

And if there was something I could do to help, then I was going to do it.

So whatever part of childhood I had still been holding onto got pushed a little farther down the list.

Work

I worked.

And worked.

There wasn’t a big rebellion.

There wasn’t some dramatic moment where I announced that I was sacrificing everything for my family.

There was just work.

Morning.

School.

Work.

Evening.

Work.

Summer.

Work.

Spring break.

Work.

I don’t remember vacations.

I don’t remember summers where I got to disappear with friends and be irresponsible.

I don’t remember much time spent wondering what I wanted.

My wants weren’t particularly relevant.

There were things that needed to happen.

So I worked.

And there is a part of that I am proud of.

I learned responsibility.

I learned discipline.

I learned how to show up when I didn’t feel like showing up.

I learned how to work beside grown men and earn their respect.

I learned that if I didn’t know how to do something, I could watch, learn, and figure it out.

Those lessons helped build my career.

They helped me survive situations that might have broken me otherwise.

They helped make me into a leader.

But there was another lesson hiding underneath all of them.

Keep moving.

Because if you keep moving, you don’t have to stop.

And if you don’t stop, maybe you don’t have to feel everything waiting for you when you do.

I Didn’t Deal With It

People sometimes ask how someone can go through severe things as a child and then just keep functioning.

I think the answer is simpler than people expect.

Sometimes you don’t deal with it.

You get busy.

You find something productive enough that nobody notices you’re running.

For me, work became one of those things.

Nobody worries about the kid who works too hard.

Adults praise him.

Teachers call him responsible.

Employers love him.

People tell him he has a great work ethic.

And they aren’t wrong.

But nobody necessarily asks what happens when he stops.

I didn’t sit around analyzing what my father had done.

I didn’t spend evenings trying to understand the psychological consequences of abuse.

I didn’t work through abandonment.

I didn’t examine what all of it had done to my understanding of God, love, trust, or family.

I had shit to do.

That became its own survival mechanism.

Work gave me somewhere to put my attention.

It gave me value.

It gave me praise.

It gave me a problem I understood.

Do the job.

Do it well.

Then find the next job.

Trauma was complicated.

Work made sense.

Being Needed

Looking backward, I think something else happened during those years.

Being needed started to feel a lot like being valuable.

If someone needed me, I mattered.

If there was a problem I could solve, I had a purpose.

If somebody was struggling and I could carry some of the weight, then maybe I was doing what I was supposed to do.

That can make you an incredibly dependable person.

It can also create a life where you have absolutely no idea how to exist when nobody needs something from you.

You become the fixer.

The provider.

The guy who stays late.

The guy who takes the call.

The guy who says, “I’ll handle it.”

The guy who walks into chaos and starts making a list.

And because everyone appreciates that guy, it can take a very long time to realize he might be exhausted.

Or scared.

Or lonely.

Or carrying things that were never actually his to carry.

I wouldn’t understand any of that then.

At the time, I thought I was just becoming a man.

What I Thought Being a Man Meant

I didn’t have a healthy father teaching me what being a man looked like.

So I built my own definition.

A man works.

A man provides.

A man protects.

A man doesn’t complain.

A man figures it out.

A man takes care of the people around him.

A man does what needs to be done whether he feels like doing it or not.

There is truth in a lot of that.

I still believe responsibility matters.

I still believe a man should be dependable.

I still believe in working hard, protecting the people you love, and doing difficult things when they need to be done.

What I didn’t understand was that responsibility without boundaries becomes self-destruction.

That protecting everyone else while never allowing yourself to need protection isn’t strength.

That providing for people doesn’t mean your own needs stop existing.

And that being a man does not require pretending there isn’t still a wounded kid somewhere inside you.

I wouldn’t learn those lessons for years.

Some of them I’m still learning.

The Boy Who Never Clocked Out

When I look backward now, I can see that kid pretty clearly.

He wasn’t trying to become impressive.

He wasn’t building a résumé.

He wasn’t thinking about leadership.

He was looking at his family and thinking:

Someone has to do something.

So he did.

Then he kept doing it.

Year after year.

Problem after problem.

Job after job.

Relationship after relationship.

Rock bottom after rock bottom.

Keep working.

Keep fixing.

Keep carrying.

Keep moving.

It took me decades to recognize that part of me never really clocked out.

Even when there was no tuition left to pay.

Even when there was no grocery money to hand my mom.

Even when I wasn’t that kid anymore.

Some part of me was still standing on that jobsite waiting for someone to tell me what came next.

And when nobody did, I looked around for something else to carry.

Because Glenn had taught me something valuable that day.

Do what is asked of you.

Then look around and figure out what else needs to be done.

It was one of the best lessons anyone ever taught me about work.

The part I had to learn much later was this:

Not everything that needs fixing is yours to fix.

Not everything that can be carried needs to be carried by you.

And sometimes there is no prize for being the last man standing underneath the weight of everyone else’s problems.

I spent much of my life thinking strength meant carrying more.

More responsibility.

More pressure.

More work.

More people.