mama3girls-phnig

I never really had a shot at being normal.

I grew up what I affectionately call country hood.

If you know East Central, you know exactly what I mean. If you don’t, let me explain. I grew up in the southern part of that school district around farmers, ranchers, and enough land to make self-sufficiency feel less like a virtue and more like a basic survival skill. But by middle school and high school, East Central pulled in a much wider world—lower socioeconomic neighborhoods, more urban grit, more complexity, more edges.

Country hood.

That’s the best phrase I have for the strange hybrid that raised me.

It meant I grew up around people who could fix engines, pull calves, wire houses, and survive heat that felt biblically punitive. It also meant I grew up around people who learned early how to read a room, spot danger, and smell bullshit.

That combination does something to a person.

It certainly did something to me.

We didn’t have air conditioning.

In Texas.

Let’s let that realization breathe for a moment.

I realize that sentence lands differently depending on where you’re from, so let me translate. In Texas, no air conditioning is not quirky. It is either poverty, principle, insanity, or some spiritually formative combination of all three.

My mother was an herbalist before that became trendy, which meant commercial cleaning products were viewed with suspicion and tea tree oil had a decent chance of being prescribed before Tylenol. My grandfather, Dad’s father, was a quirky physician who invented something called Melenyzer Rub, a cure-all potent enough that finding a twenty-five-year-old bottle at my aunt’s house recently made me emotional.

My father believed most household problems could be solved with wiring, wood, rope, and creative profanity.

Preferably all four.

That belief has not softened with age.

If anything, retirement has only given him more opportunities to prove himself right.

To understand my father, you need to understand his room. Calling it a bedroom feels inaccurate. It is part bunkhouse, part workshop, part museum, and part accidental theological training center. There are old radios, stacks of Zane Grey novels, cowboy portraits, Texas maps covering entire walls, longhorn skulls, signs about explosives, electrical diagrams scribbled on paper towels, and enough tools lying around to either build a house or lose a finger. There are live-edge slabs of wood used in the constrution of furniture that look like my father personally refused to let trees stop being trees.

Nothing in the room feels accidental.

Even the clutter feels ideological.

Everything says the same thing: build it yourself, fix it yourself, think for yourself.

And do not ask if you can take something home.

It’s his.

All of it.

The objects have mostly been relegated to “his space” now, which is fine by me. I like being surrounded by my father’s quirks. I do not like being surrounded by the spider webs attached to them, but that’s a different writing assignment.

And then there’s the soundtrack.

Squirrels—or raccoons, or possibly tiny cattle—run across the metal roof overhead with enough force to make you briefly wonder whether something has broken through. Their footsteps punctuate our conversations like strange percussion.

And I love it.

It feels like home.

That probably explains why I notice symbols the way I do. I read people through their objects, their spaces, and the stories embedded inside ordinary things. In my world, almost nothing is ever just a thing. Everything carries narrative. Everything hints at meaning. Everything potentially signifies more than it first appears.

This is both gift and burden.

It also explains what happens when I am around my father.

Charlie talks in structures.

I talk in symbols.

Charlie asks, “Does it work?”

I ask, “What does it mean?”

This is where signs and wonders begin.

The day this conversation unfolded, I was helping him replace a light switch, which is a generous description of my role. Mostly I hovered nearby asking increasingly anxious questions while he handled live electrical wiring with the calm confidence of a man who has made peace with electrocution.

I asked what felt like a perfectly reasonable question.

“Did you turn off the electricity?”

“Yes.”

Pause.

Then:

“Well…”

This is how Charlie answers questions when the answer is technically true but emotionally misleading.

Trying to reassure me, he said, “If something happens, baby, it’ll just wake me up.”

Wake him up.

As if electrocution is a healthy option.

I told him, “I’m a rule follower. You are not.”

He objected immediately. In Charlie’s worldview, he is not reckless.

He is experienced.

This distinction matters deeply to him.

To prove his point, he began telling stories, because in Charlie’s world stories are evidence.

There was the staple gun story. He had an old staple gun so old it had no safety mechanism. He fired it into a board, the staple ricocheted, and lodged in his thigh. Not skin deep. Bone deep. To make matters worse, the staples had glue on them, which cooled and effectively bonded the staple in place.

Most people would go to urgent care.

My father called for vice grips.

Then, because OSHA was apparently optional in our household, he recruited his daughter to assist with hardware extraction.

“One, two, three.”

Pull.

Out came the staple.

There was also the roofing story, which involved rope, shingles, gravity, and something called a butt bucket. If you do not know what a butt bucket is, congratulations on your life choices.

Dad was roofing the dome, tethered by rope, moving too fast, when the hook from the bucket caught him in the solar plexus and sent him over the edge. He fell roughly eight feet and landed on the eyebrow over my bedroom window.

Yes, my childhood bedroom had an eyebrow.

When asked whether that architectural feature had been intentionally designed as a safety mechanism, he said, “Yeah, sure.”

My mother never called him a liar. I’ll let that sentence breathe too…

I believed her.

Then came geometry.

Dad explained that the original dome kit was forty-nine feet and built around triangular vertices. As we know, triangles are the strongest structures.

Naturally, while he discussed structural engineering, my brain drifted toward theology.

Father.

Son.

Holy Spirit.

Triangle.

Sermon.

He tolerates this about me.

Mostly.

The thing about Charlie is that his math is terrifyingly exact. This is the same man who shrugs at live electrical wires, yet if you are measuring wood for a cross and suggest something is “good enough,” he becomes almost offended.

“No,” he told me. “It’s not good enough.”

We were building a cross for church.

Apparently that mattered.

He taught me how to measure a miter precisely down to the sixteenth—maybe even the three-sixteenth. The fraction itself is not the point. The point was the principle.

Some structures matter too much to fudge.

Later, after that same cross was knocked over and nearly fell on a baby, he had to repair it. I still suspect he left some version of a warning underneath it for the people responsible.

The spirit of the message was essentially:

Try not to do stupid shit.

Biblically sound, honestly.

Then came electricity—or perhaps theology disguised as electricity.

He pulled out a multimeter and began explaining a three-way switch. I asked what continuity meant. He asked if I knew what ohms were.

I did not. Well, I did, but only as it relates to grounding and therapeutic principles.

He touched the leads together.

“Zero resistance.”

No resistance.

When two things touch, there is no resistance.

That landed somewhere deeper than electricity.

He drew the circuit. Two switches. Two travelers. A light in the center. Power moved depending on which switch was flipped. I stared at the drawing on the paper towel and asked the question my brain had been quietly building toward.

“So the thing that benefits from this whole system is the light?”

“Yes.”

“And because of the light, we benefit?”

“Yes.”

There it was.

The sermon. The right and left edges to the cross he had constructed to teach me about Ohms.

Power does not exist merely to prove itself powerful. Structure does not exist merely to prove itself strong. The whole system exists so light becomes useful.

Or not.

At one point I argued that perhaps the light should stay on if someone is scared. My father, full of compassion and generational toughness, replied, “There’s nothing to be scared of. Toughen up, baby.”

I thanked him for his compassion.

He answered with what may be the purest summary of Charlie theology I have ever heard.

“There’s nothing wrong with being compassionate and loving and telling people to toughen up.”

Then we moved to politics, because apparently we were not done courting danger.

I asked him what he thought of Donald Trump.

“I wish him the best funeral ever.”

That felt clear.

I asked what he thought about people who love Trump.

“They’re idiots.”

That felt like a poor time to confess that I had once voted for Trump.

So naturally, I confessed.

I explained that I wasn’t following politics closely. I was overwhelmed by the world and had latched onto one issue that mattered deeply to me: children, labor, manufacturing, exploitation. I heard promises about bringing manufacturing back to America and wanted to believe someone cared.

Dad was unimpressed.

He challenged my assumptions. He challenged my sources. He challenged my claims.

Then we began fact-checking.

And the internet died.

Of course it did.

Nothing says modern truth-seeking like a father-daughter political argument interrupted by a dead Wi-Fi router.

Red light.

No connection.

Unplug.

Replug.

Troubleshoot.

It was perfect.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized something important about Charlie.

He does not mind being challenged.

In fact, he expects it.

But he demands rigor.

If you are going to make a claim, source it. (Which honestly…my dad’s “sources” are somewhat challenging—but that’s for a different writing assignment.)

If you are going to build something, measure it. If you are going to wire something, understand the circuit. If you are going to preach something, make sure the structure holds.

This is the strange gift of my father.

He taught me to look deeper while simultaneously enjoying how deep I go. But it could also be that he isn’t always listening to my depth. He has wonderful ADHD. This also makes me feel sad and insecure sometimes. He promises he loves my depth. Even when he can’t quote me back to me. SIGH.

He even falls asleep when I practice preaching…

He taught me to notice structure. He taught me to question stories. He taught me that some things are stronger as triangles, some things need grounding, and some things require exact measurements.

He also taught me, despite my best efforts, that not every pattern is a sign from God.

Which brings us to the boat barn.

There is a code to get into the family boat barn. My brain, being my brain, noticed a pattern. The numbers felt familiar. Historically familiar (like the handmade “Liberty” cross stitch pillow sitting on the Texas themed bed).

Symbolically familiar. Potentially spiritually loaded.

So I finally asked him, completely seriously, “Dad, are you telling me the code to get into the family boat barn is the year of independence for this country? Do you see any signs?”

He looked at me with the accumulated patience of a man who has spent decades raising a daughter capable of turning electrical wiring, roofing accidents, historical dates, and garage keypads into theology.

Then he said, “Baby, just go take a cold shower.”

He paused.

“I’m not sure the heater has warmed up the water in that shower yet. Hit that light switch: up for ‘hot.’”

It was flipped down at the time to “not”—written in Sharpie on the outside of the faceplate.

Thanks, Dad.

OHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM