mama3girls-phnig

My father and I were sitting in his room—the one that somehow feels part bunkhouse, part workshop, part philosophy department. It is full of old radios, stacks of books, electrical diagrams scribbled onto paper towels, cowboy art, half-finished projects in various stages of genius or abandonment, and enough tools lying around to either build a house or lose a finger.

In other words: Charlie.

But Charlie is not just Charlie. Charlie is Texas. Not performative Texas. Not boutique rustic décor from Magnolia or whatever curated version of Texas suburban people like to purchase on purpose. I mean old-school, independent, mildly feral Texas—the kind where self-sufficiency is not admirable so much as assumed, and you get excited if it’s raining on auction day.

The kind where you fix what breaks, build what you need, educate people who talk too much without knowing anything practical, and only call a professional when the blood loss becomes inconvenient.

He is also the typology of a man who loves calligraphy, built a geodesic dome house, taught middle school art, and raised grandchildren who write college entrance essays about his eccentric brilliance.

Take Maddie, my Sun, who graduated with honors in civil engineering from OU. She echoes her grandfather’s passion for environmental sustainability, ethics in water management, and creative solutions to very large problems. She isn’t legalistic or mean about it. She just gently regulates the world around her with calm reassurance.

“Mom, we are in a water crisis. But that does not mean there aren’t solutions. It’s going to be okay. I’m working on the projects. You can trust me. Please turn off the water while brushing your teeth. That’s all.”

Small ask. Big systems.

Then there is Tatum—my Moon—who may somehow be even more enamored with him than I am. She bucked the Aggie system and graduated with honors in sociology from his alma mater, not mine. She is also currently looking for an affordable, outdoorsy place to get married casually and quietly.

So very Austin.

Which is strange because she was also a cheer captain at a 6A high school.

Please tell me someone is following this.

All of my children bucked the Aggie network, which is funny because they grew up taking pictures with Reveille and our household should probably qualify as a football-adjacent conflict zone.

Cheerleaders. Former football coach turned husband. Medical device rep. OU. UT. A&M. Texas State.

Y’all.

It’s loud.

I grew up in a strange little pocket of mythology where statements like this were normal:

“We didn’t have air conditioning.”

In Texas.

Fact.

My mother was an herbalist before that became trendy, which meant commercial cleaning products were viewed with suspicion, and tea tree oil, echinacea, probiotics, and questionable liquid extracts had a decent chance of being prescribed before Tylenol.

Antibiotics?

Please.

Only if she decided we were actually dying.

Otherwise, let the immune system heal with nature.

Have I mentioned my parents were hippies who loved Jesus? Maybe not explicitly, but if you have read my blog posts, some things should be clicking into place by now.

Think philosophy of life with even more nuance.

4:20.

Also Maddie’s birthday. My Sun. The super chill one. She loves this fact about herself. I had real questions when it became a thing in high school, but clearly she’s doing fine. She’s saving the planet, y’all. Let’s cut her some slack.

Also, she doesn’t smoke because Vrod would still be pissed.

Anywho—back to the dome. Or the lake house. Or wherever this story thinks it is going.

Do not attempt to take thyme liquid extract and expect a pleasant experience. Yes, it helps with a cough. Also, consider a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

My grandfather—my dad’s father—was a quirky physician. He had something called Melenyzer Rub, a common cure-all strong enough to still make me miss him when I found a twenty-five-year-old bottle at my aunt’s house the other day.

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

“You bitch!”

That was my father’s preferred curse—never directed at people, only at situations. Usually electrical wiring that was not being easy to get along with.

Do not get me started on plumbing.

Nothing in my father’s space feels accidental. Mostly because it isn’t. Even the clutter feels ideological, almost spiritually significant to him. Everything says the same thing:

Build it yourself. Fix it yourself. Think for yourself.

And do not ask if you can take it home with you.

Even if you are his daughter.

These things are his. Also, these things have been relegated to “his space,” which is fine by me.

I think anytime a man hears the word “fine,” he should start asking more questions of himself. But that’s just a woman’s lament.

Fine.

Anywho.

I like being surrounded by my dad’s fine quirks. I do not like being surrounded by the spiderwebs attached to them, but that is for a different writing assignment.

My dad is intentional with his art. Some people I know would call the concept of “intentionality” annoying. My dad would say, “horseshit,” and “dumbass,” and then move immediately past that philosophy.

And yes, you got me. Maybe he did cuss on other occasions.

It is amazing to think he could have made it through a day as a middle school art teacher without dropping any profanity. Part of me thinks he did and just got away with it, as per usual, because my dad is above all charming and honest. Also, he allowed students to put their own grades in his grade book.

Highly important perk if you are committed to not telling on a certain teacher due to the personal flair of your grade.

Baby. Art is art. You’re the one failing yourself. Your classmates, whose art has not been honed by their father, have graded themselves way better than you. Try not to be upset by your choices, would ya?

I suspect my dad had a long day dealing with highly unperfectionistic children.

Apparently that is a thing. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never known a time I wasn’t “perfectionistic.”

As if perfection is something I call myself. That would be my dad’s frame, not mine.

But basically, my dad is the opposite of Vrod. Where Vrod encouraged growing in skill, my dad believed skill was just skill. Either you wanted to do it or you didn’t. He wasn’t going to force you to perform.

“Not everyone is an artist. It wouldn’t be fair for me to expect them to perform to your ability.”

And then he would say, “Has anyone told you they loved you today? I do.”

Ugh.

This is how I loop.

Vrod and my dad have completely opposite teaching frameworks. And because teaching is the hardest profession on the planet—in which you fall in love with your students and do not get paid the amount of dollars that dignifies the profession—let me state plainly: I am not faulting either one.

I am Switzerland.

They are both among the most informative and beautiful teachers God may have ever made.

And I don’t think that’s just me. If you were one of my dad’s or Vrod’s students, feel free to bless up in the comment section. We would love to hear from you.

Another time my dad uses cuss words? Oh my gosh. I think I’m realizing I’ve given my dad a very large pass by saying he never cusses.

When people make bad choices, especially as it relates to politics, you will hear cuss words from my dad. You may even see them posted on Facebook. I tried to tell my father this is a very bad witness. My father says, “Well, somebody has to witness.”

I suspect Vrod might actually like my dad if she were friends with him on Facebook, considering their shared political affiliation.

My dad is intentionally practical. Direct. Honest. Things that are distressingly hard to come by these days.

But he is also funny. Very, very funny. The kind of funny that saves him from a lot of hot water. And he is smart. Like, as a whip.

As in these parenting and teaching words he offered me when I had misunderstood the rules:

“Do you want a whipping with my best robe belt?”

“No, sir.”

“How about timeout instead?”

“Yes, sir. May I read upstairs?”

Father side-eyes me.

I think he caught on at about age nine or ten. Flowers in the Attic was really, really good.

So I was not surprised when a simple story from his childhood turned into a dissertation on philosophy.

It started with my grandfather. Dad told me this story at our Father’s Day lunch—the one where I took him to his favorite Italian lunch spot in Canyon Lake.

This year, my mom was sidelined due to an inconvenient complication involving toilets.

I said, “Tell me about my grandfather. I don’t know the stories.”

Dad said, “Which story?”

I said, “One my aunts haven’t already told me. That’s where all my grandfather stories originate. You lived under the same father, correct?”

He thought for a second and eventually responded, “When I was twelve, your granddad woke me up at four in the morning and asked me, ‘What’s your philosophy of life?’”

I stopped him.

“Wait. At four in the morning?”

He said, “Yes.”

I stared at him and said, “Okay, that explains… a lot.”

Not every family passes down heirlooms. Some families pass down land. Some pass down trauma. My family appears to pass down existential interrogation at unreasonable hours.

Dad kept talking.

“And then it took me twenty or thirty minutes to explain why I didn’t deserve detention for whatever made-up bullshit Mr. McCarty had on me.”

I stopped him again.

“Hold on. I’ll be the decider of whether or not it was bullshit.”

He seemed skeptical and maybe slightly wounded. Don’t feel too sorry for him. He was eating lobster ravioli.

This is our rhythm. Dad tells stories with built-in conclusions. I interrupt conclusions. He supplies certainty. I request evidence.

He continued, “It was bullshit.”

I said, “According to you.”

He said, “No. According to reality.”

I said, “Those are not always the same thing, Dad.”

That is another thing you should know about us. I love my father. I also cross-examine him frequently. I had to cut out some attunement wording on my part to make this post not turn into a novel, and I am already failing.

My dad knows he is very, very, very loved by me. So I get away with it—not because I’m cute, though let’s not rule that out entirely—but because he values the mind of a smart woman who loves him.

I don’t believe he experiences me as someone who wants to put him in timeout. I believe he experiences me as someone who trusts that his intentions are good while still refusing lazy conclusions.

It’s almost like reverse psychology. I have to be the bad cop so he can allow himself to be the good student.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense to me either.

My dad needs to be given time for the story of his childhood to breathe. Breath work invites peace and truth into the body, which benefits closer relationship.

Closer.

And that’s a father story that will never be told.

Like ever.

My dad needs the kind of timeout that allows us to slow it down and work through it.

It may sound new age, but this is new age backed up by research. Unlike the dismal research findings on primal scream and its efficacy as it relates to depression and anxiety.

Not that anyone ever thinks about doing that.

The story, as best I could understand, involved school, detention, Mr. McCarty, and a girl. It also involved the auditorium—or gymnasium, because in these stories the rooms matter but the labels sometimes shift.

Dad remembered the date as November 18, 1963, which is such a specific date that of course I had to stop him again.

“Wait. You remember the date?”

He did.

I still have questions about that date because I also have Google. The point is not whether he was off by a few days. The point is that he embodied this experience in a way that still upset him in his golden years.

We have a long way to go before we start worrying about anything. Trust me here.

Apparently, there had been some reason they were all supposed to come to the auditorium, or gym, or wherever schools gathered children in 1963 when something official was happening. But what I wanted to know was not merely where they were. I wanted to know what Mr. McCarty had allegedly done that earned the title “bullshit.”

I think Dad may have even tried to distract me with a presidential assassination.

A big one.

But my dad is sneaky.

“Yeah, that seemed like a sad day. I’m sorry you had to experience that,” I said.

Pause.

“So what made it bullshit?”

Again.

“What did he say about you? Are you sure we weren’t dealing with a student struggling with insubordination?”

Dad tried to move quickly past the details, which is always how I know the details are important. Something about this teacher deciding a boy and a girl should be a couple.

I said, “How old were you?”

He said he was twelve.

I said, “Okay, and were you attracted to her?”

He immediately resisted the framing.

“That wasn’t the question.”

I said, “It is now. I’ll be the decider.”

Dad explained that Mr. McCarty would do things like make a boy and girl hold hands if he thought they should like each other.

I stopped him again because the transcript of my childhood is apparently me interrupting grown men who think they are making sense. Also, said grown men are not used to seeing my mouth completely open with no words coming out.

“He would make hands with a girl?”

Dad clarified that he meant the teacher would make them hold hands, force the situation, or push the story that two children belonged together because an adult thought it was funny or cute or socially useful.

That is where the story changed for me.

It was no longer just a funny childhood complaint about detention. It was a story about an adult using power to assign meaning to a child’s life. It was a story about a boy who knew, even then, that someone else did not get to decide the truth of his interior world.

Dad may have wrapped it in “Mr. McCarty’s bullshit,” but under the profanity was a principle.

He did not want to be handled.

Which is funny, because this is the same man who had the back of my former employer who used intentionality sideways.

“Honey. You can’t blame him. Look at you. I wouldn’t stop complimenting you either.”

“Dad. He was married. I can absolutely blame him. It’s disrespectful to me. And his wife. And my husband. Remember him?”

“Yes, dear. I do. Please stop yelling at me. It’s making my hearing aids scream. Thank you.”

Also: “I’m trying to enjoy this beautiful lunch you paid for.”

That last sentence I had to add on my own.

Wonder where I got the gifted storytelling abilities.

I often have to help my dad bridge attunement to me. It’s annoying. But I get over it.

Clearly.

At that point, my dad was probably glad my mom was sidelined on a toilet. My dad can tolerate danger—just not from his wife. Or sometimes from a very passionate daughter.

Other things he can tolerate: discomfort, pain, hot wiring, roofing a dome, shooting a staple into his own thigh, and just keepin’ on.

But he cannot tolerate being manipulated. He cannot tolerate an authority figure deciding what reality is and expecting everyone else to play along.

Unless that authority figure is his wife.

And sometimes his daughter.

In those cases, he doesn’t really have a lot of choice because we feed him.

I, however, try to respect him. Mostly because I do. My dad is my favorite person, with a couple of obvious exceptions.

I think one of the deepest organizing principles of my father’s life is not freedom in the abstract, but freedom from coercion. Freedom from being managed. Freedom from being assigned a role by someone who has not earned the right to speak into your life. Freedom from somebody else deciding what your story means.

And because inheritance is rarely tidy, I got that from him.

Deeply.

It explains why authority impresses me less than integrity. It explains why charisma without accountability makes my skin crawl. It explains why I ask too many questions. It explains why I struggle when someone tells me what I’m feeling instead of asking. It explains why coercion—emotional, spiritual, relational, institutional—registers in my body almost like a physical threat.

Maybe that is why the four o’clock in the morning question matters.

“What’s your philosophy of life?” is not really a question about opinions. It is a question about structure.

What holds when pressure comes? What tells you when an authority figure is wrong? What governs you when the room agrees with the wrong person? What lets you stand there, twelve years old, in a school auditorium or gymnasium, and know that something being repeated by an adult is still not true?

Apparently, in this family, philosophy is not academic.

It is survival.

The answer my father gave for his philosophy of life was to fudge what he could remember about my grandfather’s philosophy of life. It’s an interesting and highly useful skill set to turn a questioner into the answerer of said question.

I imagine this as highly creative problem-solving and stubborn resistance. I imagine it as a kid who knew how to fall asleep with his eyes open.

Genius level.

But no, my dad retained zero memory of what my grandfather’s philosophy on life was in 1963, nor did my dad have one of his own back then.

What I do know is that my grandfather thought a twelve-year-old boy should be able to answer the question.

Can you think? Can you reason? Can you defend your conclusions? Can you withstand pressure without surrendering your mind?

That is a dangerous thing to teach a child.

It is also a dangerous thing not to teach a child.

Maybe that is the philosophy, if I’m honest: ask questions because your answers matter.

Not performative questions. Not weaponized questions. Real ones. Questions that cost something. Questions that may rearrange you. Questions that force you to confront the distance between comfort and truth. Questions where the answerer may simply not care to adapt their argument or change their behavior, even if it costs relationship.

Grief.

The most complex and hardest of all emotions.

What remains when the questions don’t have the answers we want.

My grandfather asked a twelve-year-old boy for his philosophy of life at four in the morning. That same boy creatively echoed his father and offered his own philosophy in the form of a question.

As his daughter, I was impressed by how much he unconsciously knew about divine worth—the kind found in honoring how we were created, versus what we hide to appease others and their ideas about how we should be.

Why am I thinking of Shakespeare?

My dad offered his father a highly sophisticated and nuanced philosophy of God and mental health when he thought he didn’t know anything about philosophy.

You know, Dad.

We have spent four days talking about your philosophy of life. But let me ask you a real question after all of that.

Are you happy?

Because to me, I don’t think so. And I think happiness is as important as all of the stuff you are trying to get me to learn.

Decades later, I think I finally understand why my dad pushed back so hard.

Sooner or later, life asks every one of us the same question, and eventually we have to answer.

Is it possible to merge my dad’s philosophy with his father’s?

I believe it’s possible. I truly do.

I’m just waiting patiently for the answer.

Actually, not all that patiently.

But they’re used to it.

Friends, you may have all the knowledge of heaven and earth, but if you are not happy, can you ever know what we preach when we preach the message of Jesus Christ?

You can absolutely make the claim that a Christian is a Christian on a cognitive level, and I would agree with you. It doesn’t take more than that. But I’m talking about preaching the message from the heart.

I think we were all created to preach this message from the heart.

I don’t think you need a seminary degree or an advanced understanding of Greek and Hebrew to see what is directly in front of us: the grace that Jesus Christ affords to all the people He loves.

In that vein, I would like to piggyback off my father and ask this question:

How is that working for you?

When you allow yourself to receive grace and understand that feeling forced to be something you are not is not working for you, can you give yourself the grace to search your heart?

Can you believe in a God who has a plan, and that His plan involves your decision regarding what you plan to do about living your best life?

These are big life questions. I understand that they take time to sort out.

But there is some expediency in the fact that life goes by quickly. If your days feel long and your life feels hard, here’s another question:

What kind of life is that?

What kind of joy were you made to receive in this life?

I would also like to offer another question: What examples in your life show the disconnect between who you are, who you were created to be, and how you present yourself to those around you?

If it is not honest, might it be unintentionally hurting the people around you?

The people who love you may know you are not trying to hurt them, but the fact remains that intent and impact do not cancel each other out. In the scenarios where intent and impact are disconnected, it may be because the human being wrestling with intent is disconnected inside themselves.

There are many good reasons for this. But multiple things can be true.

Do those reasons matter? Yes.

Do those reasons matter more than the harm being caused, especially when that harm reaches the people who love you most?

That is the harder question.

If those people are your family—if they have ever said, “Mom, I’m hurting for you, and with you, and in my own self”—then considering being authentic about what is happening inside will only serve you and God.

And your daughters.

This is just what I believe.

We are at the beginning of a story backed up by storied research and spiritual history: authenticity between self and projected self leads to happiness in life, fulfillment of purpose, and plan.

From that perspective, everyone wins.

Will there be loss? Yes.

That loss exists because being honest with other people about who we are is deeply vulnerable. It puts us in the position where we may fear rejection of self and identity.

What we know from research trending today is that masking up to be something for someone else so we can keep them doesn’t ultimately work in the long run. It leads to depression. In some cases, if not interrupted, it can lead to the kind of clinical depression that ends in harming yourself.

So yes, taken from that perspective, there is a little bit of expediency.

No one loves rejection.

What I have found is that the more honest I am with those around me, rejection becomes data. If people do not like me for who I am, and I am unintentionally hurting them by trying to be what they need me to be for them, then allowing their exit from my life is good for both me and them.

Thank you, Mel Robbins and the Let Them Theory.

While rejection may be a very real hurt, allowing somebody to say hateful words and leave still leaves room for them to later decide they didn’t mean what they said—and for you to decide whether or not you want them to walk back in.

Allow for space, but don’t be a doormat to protect somebody else’s desire for you to be someone you are not.

I’ve heard it said that a person lives three different lives inside one lifetime. I think I’ve already lived two of mine.

I’m ready to live a third life, and it looks a lot different from my second life.

I feel for Jimmy because when I started my second life, I looked very, very different from the woman I am now—the woman who wants to start her third life.

I have been told by multiple therapists, and my husband has been told by multiple therapists, that we have to support each other in what that third life looks like.

When we work through the differences that arise in another person and leave space when we don’t understand their third-life choices, it allows for an open door. We choose whether or not we want to walk through that door.

I want to walk through any door where somebody loves me for me, supports me, and heck, even occasionally compliments me.

As my dad pointed out with Mr. McCarty, forced connection doesn’t work for anyone.

When two people hold hands, it has to be consensual to experience safe relationship.

This, dear friends, is how you take a very looping blog post and bring it full circle.

Thank you, Dad, for the revelation.

My dad thinks he’s not a “good Christian.”

Well, I think there is no such thing as a good Christian, so in that light, he’s one of the best, actually.

Did I mention he was a middle school art teacher? If not, I think it’s important for everybody to take a moment and comment about why middle school art teachers are absolutely the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.

My dad could use some encouragement occasionally.

He has me for a daughter.

Will we get through it, Dad?

“Yes, dear.”

Great. Are you going to start drinking your water so you are here to see it?

“Baby, I have been carrying around a water bottle every day since that event happened. It’s tea, but I don’t like water, and just for the record, tea is mostly water.”

Fine.

We have a God who supersedes any known framework our current level of cognition is committed to understanding. He will have His way.

But are the people we love worth the sacrifice of us not figuring it out this side of heaven? Are we created to live in misery? Or are we created to live in joy—which, yes, does involve seasons of temporary misery?

Is life to be spent in abject misery for the length of time we are here? Or are there scriptures that point to what we call congruency in the clinical world of mental health?

Fact-check me. Look up peer-reviewed sources. Ask yourself:

Is my commitment to suffering by not being honest with myself and others that I am living with a mask on the purpose for which I was created?

I think we all know no one would worship a Big-G God like that.

I do not believe any of us deserve to believe in a God who wants us to stay broken. I don’t believe that God ever existed, and I will never believe that God came down to give His life so we could live in misery.

Let’s get real radical honesty.

Let’s do radical honesty for our happiness and His glory.

Some days it feels like I have to consciously choose to believe that we are more than conquerors. And when I make the choice to get up in the morning and believe that I am more than a conqueror, it doesn’t take long before I remember:

Oh yeah.

I am.

Thank you, God.

I choose to believe His death happened for a reason.

I believe in seasons. I believe in growth. But more than anything, I don’t just cognitively think of grace as an abstract concept anymore.

I finally get grace in the heart and in the body.

And for me, that is huge.

Listen, friends. Many of you who are reading these posts do not know me in real life. I would bet good money that if you asked the people in my life if I am a charitable person, they would answer with a resounding yes.

But here’s the deal: once words are spoken where someone is made to feel as if they are the problem, those words can never be unspoken. They can cause real damage in the body.

And while I am very charitable, there are relationships in my life that have received the charity of my presence when it was not deserved or safe. I am learning the language of how to let go.

The only thing holding me back is the pain it would cause the people who have damaged me.

Years of therapy have shown me that this is called self-erasure to protect abuse.

What my body is now telling me through nervous system shutdown is that my body is done without excuse.

So I have a choice: save my life, or save someone else’s decision to run my life while they recover at the pace they need to learn empathic attunement.

I am done, done, done with many of those relationships that need to be set down because the burden is too heavy to bear.

While I do not think Christ asks us to live a life where we never carry burden, I also do not think Christ is asking us to sacrifice ourselves on any cross.

He has already done that for us.

If any of this is resounding with you, listen. See. Hear. Taste. Touch the truth of those words in yourself. Can you allow His grace to help you move forward? Can you trust that people are good, but you still have to find the ones who feel good and safe to you?

Jesus will forgive us our humanity.

He already did that on a cross a long, long time ago.

If you are still staring at that cross today, and you, like me, know that God is outside of time and space, it’s going to be okay.

I promise you.

Borrow that from me if you need it.

I would love to hear from you in the comments, but even if I don’t, peace will only come this side of heaven when you honor the truth inside yourself about who you are and who God created you to be.

The question is: Can we be honest with those around us?

Can we allow ourselves the opportunity to disappoint them and save ourselves?

How do I know this?

Because I’ve had to do it before.

It was humiliating. I thought it was the end of the world. But sometimes we have to get to the end of the world—and the end of ourselves—before we can truly find real relationship, peace in the body, and even just a little more understanding of how beautiful, good, honorable, and worthy our God truly is.

Amen and amen.

P.S. If someone calls an audible and attempts to say my internal intuition and pattern tracking is incorrect—or even “bullshit”—in this family, they should be prepared for me to say:

“I’ll be the decider of that.”

Just meet me at the chapel and we will figure it out.

I say meet me at a chapel because these hard awarenesses are hard for any living human. As a budding children’s trauma therapist, I have a widening understanding of the spectrum of human behavior—one in which asserting yourself may end up being unsafe.

If that is the case, is there a friend you can talk to? Someone you know will hold your confidences and listen, work with you, and help you know you are not alone?

Chapels are the places those people should be cultivated and found.

But if that is not something that has been safely afforded or offered to you, and you are concerned for life and property, drive to a police station.

Please.

Reporting is made in private, held with the dignity it deserves, and community assistance is more readily available to establish your safety.

For the majority of us, I also want to give a shout-out to my friend’s chapel in Austin called Chapel Dulcinea. You can visit online.

I would like to end in a really beautiful spot.

If you are thinking that you are small and that being small is a bad thing, trust me: I understand you.

But I can promise you that what I know now is that all the intellect of MMIT-level professors and staff, as well as all the national security forces inside the United States government, have nothing on the supremacy of the power of God and how He is able to turn something very small into something very large according to His purposes.

Above all, remember that you are priceless and valuable and worthy of the respect that a daughter or son or child of the King deserves.

Respectfully,

Jenn