Born of a different generation

Wise people throughout millennia have advised against trying to raise our children based off our own experiences.

“Don’t force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different of your own.” ~Plato

Yet, as parents, its our experiences which have taught us and shaped our characters. I do not begrudge parents for shaping knowledge based off their life experiences, but I am trying to learn that wisdom can only come from extrapolating knowledge and honing it into a new environment.

Only by understanding where my parents began could I understand who they became as people. My mother was born 4th of 5 kids, an air force ‘brat’. Her father flew in the air force, an early legacy in the creation of the F-16 planes. A man of incredible grit, but also a raging alcoholic and womanizer who abused his family from early on. Only later, through the scientific breakthrough of Ancestry.com, did they realize he had spawned other half siblings during their various stents across the US (Ohio, South Carolina, Hawaii). Her mother, a smoker and German farm girl from Nebraska, had the true strength to leave her abusive husband and escape to Littleton, Colorado in order to raise her 5 children alone, on a banker teller’s salary. Although my mother tried to forgive her father for his horrible deeds, his selfish personality and the ingrained anger never fully subsided. Despite “Chucky Baby” living until I was in my 30s, I saw him only a handful of times throughout my life. He remained sober throughout my whole life, but succumbed to suicide due to pain and refusal for pain control with end stage prostate cancer. My grandmother died of a brain aneurysm in her early 60s, to my own mother’s horror. And her continued fear of sudden death and anxieties surrounding end-of-life continue to this day.

Despite living the American dream, and rising up into the upper-middle class, my mother’s impoverish childhood wove into her personality. Having been physically punished for stealing a slice of bread or not eating the food on her plate, she never embraced the abundance of food at home. I remember having to eat a plate of cold peas (having tried to destroy with ketchup and mustard) that she stored in the fridge overnight…worst breakfast of my life. She squirrels away jewelry and money as though they may be snatched away at moment’s notice, and has the air of “new money” always discussing the importance of an outfit or the cost of a piece of jewelry.

The stories of my father’s family are ones for the books, and forever kept my friends entertained on our long road trips in college. My great great grandfather suffered terrible lung damage from the mustard gases of World War I. Having no money and no prospects, but aching for a better life, he “rode the rails” of the trains to land in Denver, Colorado, where the cool, dry mountain air of Silver Creek may give him room to breath. His son, my grandfather, became a navy sailor in World War II. He would tell my father the stories of inaugurations from crossing the equator for your first time, and torpedoes falling on his back (which took his kidney and eventually led to his early demise from an abdominal aortic aneurysm). My grandmother was raised in an abusive home with an alcoholic father. At 16 yo she met my grandfather, her savior from her horrible home. They married young and she was swept away by her sailor hero. The local “Mountain White Trash” roots rode deep with my father. His uncle, Dynamite Jim, was a demolition man who also loved his whiskey. He could split a rock in 2 using dynamite without spilling a drop of water from the glass. Unfortunately, one day his love of whiskey meant that he accidentally blew up the wrong federal bridge. After his sister (my grandma) broke him out of jail, Dynamite Jim was a fugitive living in my dad’s basement. My father quickly became the head of the house when he moved out at 16 years old and used nighttime janitorial gigs to help pay the mortgage. His adolescence and early adulthood were littered with tragedy: Finding his fiance’s dead body from a hit and run by a rival gang member, holding his older brother’s body as he succumbed to leukemia at 37 yo from working on high power lines, his younger brother committing suicide. After graduating high school with a 1.2 GPA, he was truck driving and on the road to nowhere, when he had a vision from God, and converted to Christianity.

Both my parents met at Colorado State University. It was a time when you could put yourself through college by being a waitress and resident assistant. My mother used her intellect to learn neuroscience and train as an occupational therapist, while my father worked diligently in philosophy, hoping to work towards theology school to become a minister. Alas, my father’s gangster reputation followed him, and my mother’s brother drove up from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs to warn her not to marry him after their engagement. It can be a hard pill to swallow, the transformation of a “born again” man. But they got married, in a school gymnasium, with friends and family in attendance. My mother started her journey towards pastor’s wife and stay-at-home mother of three children, and my father worked his way from Princeton Theology studies to Fuller Seminary to get his master’s of divinity. At 26, he was starting his own church and buying new homes out in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, starting his slow and steady upward climb for stability and financial security, like the true American Dream.

Those poor mountain roots always stuck close-by. As children, we were required to learn the Colorado essentials for life and safety (light a fire, swim, ride a motorbike, and shoot a gun). Their back stories were humbling and awe-inspiring. But if I’m being honest, they always gave me a sense that I couldn’t do enough or be grateful enough for their sacrifice and journey.

It wasn’t until my own adult struggles took me down a different path, did I realize that my strength and grit was being forged by a different set of flames, one the Boomer Generation never had as teenager or young adults, one which would force earthquakes across the Millennials and form new mountains for the horizons.