Junior and I put together a little video as an exercise for me to get some of the rust off my video gear. It’s rough, but it was fun making, and it’s fun watching Junior smile as he watches it. Enjoy.
You can read more about this video (and me finally getting off my read-end to do something) over at the photography blog.
A few weeks ago, I took my son to his first hockey game.
Hockey was a big part of my childhood. I was never on a team myself, but the fire department used to flood the softball fields in the park near our house and we used to play hockey there. I remember my father taking me to see Hartford Whaler games, which were some of my favorite memories of him. Actually, they are some of my only memories with him. But they’re not really memories of him. I know he was the one that took me, but when I close my eyes and remember those games, I see the crowd, and the players, and the food, and everyone cheering, but I don’t see him.
One of my greatest fears being a father myself is to repeat the mistakes that my father made. For those of us without perfect parents, we often enter parenthood with the mindset of doing the exact opposite of what our parents did. “I’ll never do that with my kids.” “When I’m a father, I’m going to do things differently.” But I think, more often than not, that we repeat what we know. It’s involuntary. Maybe environmental. Maybe genetic. But that way of life, those habits, they pull at us like we’re tethered to them with a rubber band. The further we pull away, the harder they tug us to bring us back to them
It’s scary. It’s scary to think that you’re going in with the right intentions, to do right by your son, and that you’re going to do things differently, but that you can’t escape the past, and that the rubber band is going to pull you right back in and you’re doomed to repeat all of those mistakes, anyway.
Two years in, I still have those fears. I wonder if, 30 years from now, my son will take his child to a hockey game, and if he’ll remember going to games with me as a kid, but that he won’t remember me as a part of those memories. I wonder what things I swore I’d never do that I’m doing subconsciously, and that he’ll someday swear to never repeat with his own kids.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a way to cut the tether. I wake up every day wanting to be the best father that I can be to my son, and I’m on a continuous journey to be a better human, husband to my wife, and role model for him. Instead of him making a list of things to not do with his own children, I want him to joyously tell them of all the things that we did together as he’s doing those things with them. I want the type of relationship that I’m trying to create with my wife the type that he will strive for. I want the relationship we have with him to be the model he follows with his children. I’m not perfect, and I’m not going to get everything right, but as he grows up, I want him to know that I love him, that I’m doing my best, and that I’m always trying to do better, and for those to be the things that he’s tethered to and that he repeats with his own children someday.
It’s fatherhood, not the Peace Corp, that is the toughest job you’ll ever love.
A colleague of mine, one that I respect very much, offered up some advice to me today.  I am participating in a mentoring program at work, and yesterday we did a session about personal branding, which started out with each of us giving a 30-second elevator speech that projects our brand. He was in the audience, and he told me that when I did my pitch, I owned the room. The audience was interested, laughing, and fully engaged. He said that I have a gift for drawing an audience in, and it’s one that I could leverage to get wherever I wanted to be in life. But, he said, later in the morning, I was off on a tangent when responding to a question, overly sarcastic, and he said he could hear everyone exhale and literally feel a disconnect actually happen. I lost the room. Instead of hanging on my every word, the audience was waiting for me to stop talking.
He wanted to tell me to shut up. In hindsight, I wish he had.
My sense of humor has always been one of my greatest assets. Well, that and my devilishly good looks. Oh, and my charm. Ok, I have many great assets. But being funny has always served me well throughout my life, whether it was to stop getting bullied in high school or to pick up the most wonderful woman on the planet and somehow convince her to marry me. But, just like in the meeting yesterday, it’s also gotten me in trouble, particularly when my filter doesn’t kick in and when I don’t know when to stop. I know it (read: I) has hurt a lot of folks and given people an impression of me that I don’t want. When I interact with someone regularly, I sometimes have enough opportunities to rectify the damage. But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I only see a person twice a year, and if during one of those times I’m an ass, then 50% of the information a person has about me points to me being an ass.
Relationships are everything, both in our personal lives and in our professional lives. Those relationships are built on trust, certainly, but also on the impressions we leave with those that we interact with, however frequently or infrequently. Looking back on the events of my training session, I’m left to wonder whether the other attendees remember me as the charming, funny guy from the beginning of the day, or the sarcastic train wreck from later in the day. Let’s hope it was the former, or that I have enough opportunities to present a better image to everyone the next time our paths cross. If not, then at least I will be more mindful going forward of the image of myself that I am projecting to those around me.
In the end, it was really nice to know that I’ve built up a nice enough reputation and trusting relationship with him that my coworker was comfortable enough to tell me what was hard to hear, even if I needed to.
