These Are the Good Old Days

I recently happened upon this magnificent post by Michele Weldon, my one-time college journalism professor, two-time work colleague and all-time fellow cancer survivor.

The piece is remarkable in its poignancy and enviable in its prose. I read through it a few times–and even though Michele and I are not that close in age–her words really resonated, shocking me into a renewed sense of gratitude for my current moment in life that has lingered long after I closed the tab on her essay.

One image Michele offered hit me particularly hard in the taking-my-life-for-granted department:

I am the old lady in the lap lane … I swim in the same pool where I took my three children when they were young and never seemed to get tired; now I wonder how many laps I have left in me.

While I don’t swim, I immediately applied this haunting passage to my own life and the things I do with my kids. I could suddenly see myself walking the two blocks to the beautiful park by our house on a sunny summer Saturday, pulling my two beautiful kids behind me in the second-hand Little Tikes wagon our neighbor gifted to us. I could see myself idly checking my phone as I pushed my kids in the swings, preoccupied with thoughts about a work project and impatiently wondering when it would be nap time so I could take them back home and finally get some time to myself.

I didn’t hear the question my three-year-old daughter was trying to ask me until she raised her voice in frustration to ask it a third time. I didn’t notice that my one-year-old son was smiling up at me as he laughed with each thrilling sway of the swing. This outing had become a time-killing necessity, not a joyful bonding moment. I was embodying the kind of father I swore I’d never become–unengaged, unaware and ungrateful.

I didn’t notice the elderly man sitting on the park bench, wistfully taking in the Rockwellian scene of a father spending quality time with his two children. In this revery, I’m that guy, too. I’m the old man in the lap lane–walking ever more slowly the two blocks to the park where I spent so much time with my kids. There were times when I didn’t appreciate it enough in the moment, but there were even more times when I did. All of those times are enough to bring a tear to the old man’s eye, and to this younger man’s eye as I think about that scenario.

I am grateful for Michele’s essay as a pause button in the midst of my seemingly chaotic life to force me to realize anew that these are the good old days. This chaos is what I was created for and what I have craved.

When Theresa and I were dating, one of us said that we would look back on that time of our relationship as “a real Golden Age.” We meant this in all seriousness at the time, but we have since frequently laughed at the remark, as time has proven its arrogance and inaccuracy. Despite the temptation to view those unencumbered, carefree, dopamine-fueled days as the summit of our association, the reality is that there have been countless better times since we got married. And these are the times that I want to fully invest myself in so that when I really do become that old man on the park bench, the single tear on my cheek is full of joy and not regret.

I don’t fear the reaper of the lap lane–I know I’ll be there eventually. My greatest fear is the sin of preoccupied apathy–robbing myself of truly experiencing special moments, memories and interactions because I’m simply not present enough or too wrapped up in my work, my stress and myself to even notice the specialness anymore.

There is no denying the seasonality of life. It’s what we unknowingly signed up for. You don’t get the thrill of the rollercoaster’s drop without first taking the arduous journey up the long hill of the track. But it’s as important as it is difficult to try to admire the view as you rise, to enjoy the excitement of the descent and to bask in the afterglow when the rollercoaster is back in the station. There’s value in all of those stages, and we miss the point of the ride when we fail to recognize that.

The Mundanity of Marital Bliss

Today marks three years of marriage for me, and since this blog’s niche seems to be mostly about the passage of time and marking milestones, I can’t afford not to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

First of all, I know that three years sounds like a fairly insignificant amount of time about which to wax poetic, but it certainly feels a lot more monumental to me. I think that’s because each year of my marriage has been defined by a huge life experience.

To review:

Year 1: Cancer!
Year 2: Pregnancy!
Year 3: Baby!

I sometimes think about how we might have reacted if at our wedding reception we had magically been shown a movie trailer providing a tantalizing glimpse of what the next three years would hold. Would we have run screaming out of the ballroom? Would we have been a little more reflective whilst doing The Wobble on the dance floor? Would we have wondered where the Candid Camera was hidden?

Regardless of our imagined reactions to a hypothetical scenario, we still would have been forced to do exactly what we did—live through it all and rely on each other every day.

Marriage is not a movie trailer. It is not defined by the big moments and the dramatic reveals. A more realistic trailer would show how mundane married life really is, even when you’re dealing with an admittedly outsized number of intense life events over a short period of time.

The true-to-life trailer would have Oscar-worthy scenes of me texting Theresa about what time the train will get me home from work and Theresa replying to ask about my dinner preferences. It would feature suspenseful scenes of Theresa finding out that we somehow owe money on our income taxes and me desperately trying to finish mowing the last few rows of my lawn before the bag fills up. Will he make it?!

My point is that marriage—even a quote-un-quote exciting marriage like mine—is far less action-packed than it seems like it will be. It’s mostly about just going through your daily life, but with the added complexity of going through it with a partner.

That complexity is the key to the whole thing. If you’ve found the kind of partner with whom you would happily watch paint dry, the day-to-day “drudgery” can be pretty darn fun. Big stuff like getting through cancer, going through pregnancy and raising a baby will be similarly enjoyable (OK, maybe some more enjoyable than others) because you have entered into a partnership that enhances your life and makes the mundane moments manageable and the important moments magical.

I’m filing jointly now—in taxes and everything else.

But marriage is a process, not a proclamation, and there’s no guarantee that we’re always making things manageable or magical for each other. These three years have taught me two main lessons about how to be the loving, selfless husband that I want to be: how far I’ve come from who I was when I was single and how far I still have to go.

Sometimes it’s the day-to-day disagreements that stack up to the point where you’re tripping over each other as you try to walk around them. Other times it’s a seemingly fundamental fight that in the moment makes you wonder how you’ll ever come back together on the issue.

Thankfully, the balms of heartfelt apology, authentic forgiveness and eventual laughter have soothed wounds both big and small. We agree that the partnership is the best thing we have going—and that our partner’s influence is helping us to become the people we are meant to be.

As parenthood became the focus in Year 3, the centrality of our partnership became more complex and crucial than it had been during disease or pregnancy. We brought a new life into the world together—and introduced a host of new joys, sorrows, worries and wonders with which to grapple. With a third member added to our party, we found more magical moments to enjoy together and more opportunities for the marital rubber to hit the road. Our beautiful daughter required us to individually push ourselves to our limits of time, energy, and enthusiasm, while also requiring us to support each other and protect our partnership more than ever.

Even with our diverse experiences in the first two years of marriage, it was still hard. It remains hard. But as Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own, it’s supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great. And the last three years of my life have been a whole lot better than great.

I try not to let a day pass without being grateful that Theresa and I found each other and for the innumerable blessings that have flowed into my life by hitching my wagon to her star. To have lived through and learned so much by her side in just three short years of marriage makes me wonder what mundane and momentous experiences await when three years becomes 30 and 30 becomes 50. Is there a movie trailer for that?

I love you, Theresa. Happy(est) three years.

The Ramblings of a Joyful Cubs Fan

How do you start writing the blog post you always daydreamed about writing? The same way you live through that one experience you always daydreamed about experiencing. You just do it.

There’s no preparing for long-awaited moments of profound joy. The long wait actually seems to make you less likely to be prepared for them. It gives you more time to rehearse the moment in your mind and think about how you might react—or how you think you should react. But no regimen of mental gymnastics will ever prepare you for the actual experience of that moment’s arrival.

I should know. I’ve experienced two moments of profound joy in the last three months. Actually, within /exactly/ the last three months. On August 2, my daughter Madeline was born into this world after a nine-month wait. On November 2, the Chicago Cubs became the World Series champions after a 108-year wait.

I’m not equating the birth of my daughter to something as trivial as a sports title, I’m simply suggesting that maybe this Cubs championship isn’t as trivial as other athletic feats tend to be. There’s no denying the pool of profound joy into which the Second City has been willfully and unapologetically drowning itself since Bryzzo recorded the final out last night. We are witnesses to history—banishing our disbelief and blinking back tears.

But about those tears.

I knew I was going to cry when my daughter was born. As I age, my tear ducts have evidently weakened to such a point that I will weep openly at the dumbest, overly sentimental things. Throughout the pregnancy, I would become overwhelmed just thinking about the moment of her birth and the waterworks would begin. That was me tearing up in the back of the pregnancy class when they showed the birth videos.

Similarly, I assumed that my years of suffering at the hands of the Boys in Blue—and the thought of being alive to see them win it all when so many Cubs fans had lived and died empty-handed—would result in some sentiment pouring out of my eyes.

But in both cases, I was wrong. The excitement of these moments made any emotions beyond unbridled joy and relief almost impossible to express. When my daughter was born, I was just marveling at her as my wife held her to her chest. I didn’t even think to take photos…and I never forget to take photos. In the waning moments of last night’s Cubs game, I turned my phone’s video camera on before history unfolded so that it could be preserved and relived by the next branches of my Cubs fan family tree.

But again there were no tears. The rollercoaster of Game 7—heck, the entire series—had destroyed my mental image of how this moment would look and feel. When the game was horrifically tied up again, visions of Bartman and aborted countdowns to glory were running through my mind. So this is how it ends. The Cubs always find a way.

Maybe it’s because it was All Soul’s Day or maybe it was just a near death experience, but the great Cubs fans of the past were suddenly very present to me in my growing dread. Among others, my deceased maternal grandfather, a diehard fan who often referred to the team as the Flubs when things went south, scoffed angrily at the TV with me. My deceased neighbor, another diehard who frequently had choice words for any Cubs player who stood in the way of flying the W, was sitting next to me shaking his head in disgust. On the radio, the sound of Ron Coomer gave way to the only Ron I ever want to hear calling a Cubs game—and he let out a wail that rivaled the infamous Brant Brown affair.

The rain delay—God’s tears?—came in the nick of time and turned the Cubs fortunes around again. The poor souls in the room were free to go and enjoy the rest of the game elsewhere as the all-too-harrowing bottom of the tenth inning gave way to that monumental moment of surreality. Pat Hughes’ booming voice filled my ears as my eyes beheld a TV graphic previously reserved for jokes and movies. We are the champions.

With tears streaming down his face in a euphoric postgame interview before the champagne had even started flowing, Anthony Rizzo said a line that has been reverberating in my head ever since: “We are world champions for the rest of our lives.”

My tears didn’t arrive at the exact moment of childbirth or World Series berth. But they came eventually—when the excitement died down and the new reality set in. A change had been made. A page had been turned. And there is no going back.

I am a father. The Cubs are the champs.

I tear up now when my daughter smiles and coos and stares into the depths of my soul with her unconscionably big blue eyes. I tear up when I see something that reminds me that she won’t always be—and already isn’t—the tiny newborn who shocked me into non-photographing submission three months ago. I tear up when I think of the woman she could become and the things she could do and the lives she could touch.

Today the social media frenzy of Cubs tributes, remembrances and videos completely preoccupied my work day—an IV drip co-mingling with my Cubbie blue blood to finally let the tears rush forth.

The first thing to open the flood gates? A Budweiser-produced video of Harry Caray magically calling the 2016 Cubs World Series win. I watched it at least three times today, and there have been more tears every time.

Next came the Cubs-produced video of fans reacting to the tune of Eddie Vedder’s “Someday We’ll Go All the Way.”

And then there was this article about dying Cubs fans who gave out mere days before having their last request come to fruition. It’s honestly heart-wrenching to read.

These are the things that make this Cubs victory worthy of tears. It’s about so much more than just a sports team being the best and winning a title. It’s about childhood memories, families and generations. It’s about tradition and love. It’s about hope and regret.

Far better writers than me have waxed poetic on this subject lately, but so much of the experience of being a Cubs fan is a metaphor for the struggle of life. True determination doesn’t always lead to success, no matter how badly you want it, but faith can make that OK. And sometimes success will sneak up on you and make you wonder how it could possibly look so easy.

Unlike the 108 preceding years, this Cubs season was an uncharacteristic cake walk to the playoffs. For a fan who has seen his share of abysmal baseball at Wrigley, the struggle of the playoffs was a refreshing return to form. The Cubs are not a team that should simply waltz into the history books. They have to fake a heart attack and ride in on a gurney—taking a final bow to prove that everything is alright and that you shouldn’t have been so scared in the first place.

Just as fatherhood is forcing me to redefine essential parts of myself, so too will this new, winning identity demand an examination of the Cubs fan psyche. We are losers no more. The cool kids wear Cubs clothes now. The newest members of the fold—like my daughter—will have their baseball consciousness awaken right around the end of what could be a Cubs dynasty. They’ll watch replays of what we all just lived through last night and marvel at how Cubs veterans Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant look so youthful and boyish. They’ll be astounded to realize that Cubs manager David Ross hit his last home run as a player in Game 7 in 2016.

Beyond the box scores, what will it mean to be a fan of a consistently winning Cubs team when you haven’t experienced any of the heartache and frustration? That’s a moral dilemma I’m thankfully in no position to answer. My Cubs will always be the Little Engine That Couldn’t Until They Finally Could and the World Turned Upside Down.

The next few days will continue to be an emotional time for all Cubs fans, especially as tomorrow I will see my team take over Grant Park—a special honor that any Chicago kid who grew up in the 90s thought was reserved exclusively for Jordan and company.

But we’re here now. It finally happened. And we can let the tears out, because the Cubs are world champions for the rest of our lives.

News Worth Sharing

Being busy with a pregnancy and finishing up another quarter of teaching and taking a vacation and concentrating most of my efforts on Dad Has A Blog, I have been a bit remiss in updating this one.

Incidentally, if you aren’t already subscribed to or otherwise following that blog, you should probably click here and fill out the subscription form to rectify that!

If you haven’t been following that blog or any of the other places where I shared the announcement, you might have missed the news that we found out our baby is going to be a girl! You can read more of my thoughts on that in this post, but also watch the video below to see how we revealed the gender to my family and some of Theresa’s family who were in town this past weekend.

Theresa and I also just returned from our babymoon to Arizona (full post on the subject coming soon to a dad blog near you!), where we had a delightful time taking in a Cubs spring training game, seeing the Grand Canyon, eating at a non-Illinois Portillo’s, hiking some scenic trails in Sedona, and just generally devouring the 75-degree weather and the ability to walk around in a t-shirt and eat meals outside. It was a fantastic way to relax and enjoy each other’s company, while also being able to talk a lot about the new person who will be joining our lives in less than five months. We even spent some time by the pool reading our respective father-and-mother-to-be books.

While in Arizona, I also had a weird health-related issue, as a lymph node in my neck swelled up right before we left for our trip. It was the same lymph node that always used to swell up whenever I got sick with a cold in my pre-Lumpy days, so I didn’t think much of it. A few days into our vacation however, a giant sore formed on my right cheek–which looked a lot like a really bad acne pimple without any kind of head–and the right side of my face swelled up to an alarming degree. I didn’t have a fever or any other symptoms, and I was just two weeks away from a completely clean CT scan, so I did my best to presume it was just something wacky and unrelated to Lumpy. The swelling started to go down after a few days and the sore scabbed over, so it just looked like a really ugly flesh wound. Very attractive.

I went to see my oncologist when we returned to Chicago on Friday, and he recommended I get yet another CT scan and put me on antibiotics. Last night I got the scan (only two attempts needed to insert the IV this time…they’re getting better!) and had a restless night of contemplating my mortality while I tried to sleep. I have to believe that some of this anxiety is caused by the presence of the baby resting comfortably in utero next to me. If I’m being honest, the specter of Lumpy is still much closer in the rearview mirror than I would like it to be, given this wonderful new development. I need to trust in God’s plan for my life and know that He won’t give me anything I can’t handle. I think I was just a little discouraged by having such a random and strange issue develop on my neck/face so soon after a supposedly clear scan. What gives?

Today I went to my oncologist to find out if anything was giving, and I am happy to report that nothing is. Yesterday’s scan was as clear as the previous scan, so the doc said this must have just been some freak infection that will continue to heal itself with the antibiotics, and said that the big reaction is probably just a sign that my immune system is still a bit compromised from the chemo–even though I’ve been done with chemo since last July.

I can’t express the relief I felt from this lack of a diagnosis, and I hope it will be enough to finally put my mind at ease for a while. I have two other people’s health to concentrate on for the next…well, forever…and I want to start fully focusing my energy on that and stop looking over my shoulder for cancer shadows. It would also be nice if random freak health-related occurrences didn’t pop up for a while…

All in all, I feel so blessed to have the clean bill of health that I do, and to be having this miracle baby with a wife I love with my whole heart. To quote the wise sage Keith Urban, “There ain’t no doubt that God’s been good to me.”

Did you follow my Dad blog yet?

And Then There Were Three

Dear readers,

I’ve been lying to you.

I recently wrote a post about the joys and sorrows, challenges and opportunities that came my way in 2015. But I left out the best part of the story–2015’s parting shot:

My wife is pregnant!

There was no angel in sight when we got the positive pregnancy test, but we still found ourselves asking “How can this be?” We discovered this joyous news almost one year after my oncologist had told us in no uncertain terms that there was a high likelihood that chemotherapy would render me sterile.

While we trusted in God’s plan for my cancer treatment and His guidance of the broader narrative of our lives, this was one of the more difficult cancer side effects to cope with. Theresa and I both felt called to be parents and had been excited about growing our family with a child (or two…or more) in the future. My oncologist (at a Catholic hospital no less!) told us that sperm banking would make it easier for our childbearing scenario to still occur after chemo, but we prayed about it and decided to follow the Church’s teachings and accept whatever outcome God had in store for us.

Now it appears that the outcome is a positive pregnancy test when we weren’t even trying! What a miracle!

After I finished chemo, we were instructed not to get pregnant for at least a year. As it turns out, that had more to do with the thought that we wouldn’t be able to get pregnant for at least a year and nothing to do with there being any sort of increased risk to our baby. Another miracle!

We’d like to thank Saint Peregrine, God and everyone who prayed for us over the last year. God clearly has more adventures in store for us, or maybe he just really likes reading my blog posts. Either way, you can follow my newly established Daddy blog–Dad Has A Blog–to read about what’s been happening since that fateful test. Here are a few pertinent details to whet your appetite: We are 11 weeks along and our baby is due August 5, we’ve already heard the heartbeat, Theresa has had terrible morning sickness (that is thankfully starting to get better), and it’s difficult to come up with a name that sounds good with my last name.

Since my 30s continue to be a wacky and wonderful decade, I will continue to post to this blog with updates related to Lumpy, random posts of my thoughts and musings, and anything else going on in my life, but the baby-related updates will all be at the new blog.

Please continue to pray for my wife and our baby! We are blessed beyond measure and excited out of our minds! All of the sudden, we are setting the stage for a new era of our lives. It’s crazy what can happen when your wife pees on a plastic stick.