Dreams die hard. This, I have learned in all these trips around the sun.
I’m not talking about the types of dreams that come at night, though, for me, some of those are so strong that they have yet to die. That’s a topic for another day.
The dreams I am talking about are the plans we make for our lives, the goals we set, the ideas we have about how life is going to go.
As a boy, I dreamed of pitching for the New York Yankees. It was a stupid-kid dream, one that never really had a chance of coming true, statistically speaking, and one that certainly wasn’t going to ever come true after one too many curveballs led to the lump of scar tissue I have in my right forearm to this day.
I knew the odds even before that, yet the dream still died hard. When the first baseball season rolled around after my injury and I realized I couldn’t throw without pain, I was lost.
From that sadness, another dream appeared. My father commuted to New York City for his job. On the train ride home, he would read that day’s papers. One day, he showed me an article in The New York Times about a kid in Pennsylvania who had started a baseball magazine that was gaining traction. Despite the fact that the cover was hand-drawn and hand-colored, it had some pretty famous subscribers, including Bob Costas and then-MLB commissioner Fay Vincent. At the end of the article was an address to write to subscribe.
“Why don’t you contact him and ask if you could write for him?” my father said.
I did, and my new dream was born. My last two years of high school were a balancing act among school, socialization and writing for KP Baseball Monthly. Through that dream, I was able to go to Yankee Stadium as a journalist and interview the players I had idolized growing up. It made for fantastic fodder to talk about as I toured colleges to decide where to continue my education.
The dream of being a sports journalist morphed through the years. For that kid from Pennsylvania, it did not. Tyler Kepner has become one of the preeminent sports journalist in America. At a certain point in my own journalism journey, I thought that would be me, too.
It didn’t happen.
I had a lot of early success in my journalism career. I switched from sports to news, then copy editing, before getting into management. I married young, and a reporter’s salary didn’t cover a family very well. The more I got paid, the less I liked what I did. And amidst all that hustle, the industry died. The internet came along and crushed newspapers. Eventually, I became one of its casualties.
I look back on that portion of my career and wonder what happened to the dream I had. Even more than a decade removed from the business, I still hurt over the death of that dream. As I said, dreams die hard.
But not all my dreams have been career-related.
Whether we know it or not, we all dream of having a safe, comfortable family growing up. As younglings unable to protect ourselves, we have an innate sense of who our mothers and fathers should be. Some of us get that.
Some of us don’t.
Waking up from this dream came slowly. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I started to have a sense that what I had written off as normal was far from it. Casual tellings of stories from my youth led to gasps from seasoned mental-health professionals and veterans of mental-health treatment.
“John,” one veteran said after hearing a story about a snapped flagpole and a slap in the face. “You do know that’s abuse, right?”
I didn’t. I thought I knew what abuse was. Not only had I read the horror stories — of kids chained to beds or burned with cigarettes or locked in basements or outright killed — I had written some of them myself as a journalist. What I experienced was nothing like that.
As I said, I was in my 40s before I woke up from the dream of the supposed normalcy of my family. It was a slow awakening, and it has been painful as hell. It wasn’t that I had any illusions about who my mother was and all her shortcomings. It was more that I refused to see my father’s complicity in it all, his weakness that came out through his blind allegiance to her.
I remember one particular incident in which my mother compared me to the drunk driver who killed a dear family friend as she walked across the street. My crime had been drinking a beer as a 16-year-old. “You’re just like the guy who killed Beth!” she said to me.
I had been told that if I ever laid a hand on my mother, I would be kicked out of the house. But in that instance, I forgot the warning. Either that, or I just didn’t care. My charge toward her was blocked by my father. He got in between us and then took me to lunch to get me out of the house.
There, in a now-defunct chicken chain, I sat crying. Sobbing. That’s probably a more accurate word.
“John, what do you want me to do?” my father asked, a hopeless tone in his voice.
“I want you to make her stop,” I cried. Because this wasn’t the first time she had said something wildly mean. It wasn’t the 50th time. When I grew too big to physically intimidate, her instability turned to words. Those hurt worse than the face slaps and wooden spoons she favored.
My father replied: “John, she’s my wife. I can’t make her do anything.”
And for years, I believed that.
The rest of my time as a high schooler was largely spent at my girlfriend’s house. I’ve written about the vital role her mother played in helping me finish my youthful development. And then I went to college 1,000 miles away from my New York home. The closest college I looked at was in Indiana. My parents never stopped to ask why.
As I said, it was in my 40s that I awoke from the dream of a stable, safe childhood. It was also when I awoke to the fact that my father’s line that day — “I can’t make her do anything” — was bullshit.
Perhaps he couldn’t, but there can be consequences. I see that now as a married man and a father. My wife, thankfully, has never said anything a millionth as hurtful to our kids as my mother uttered to me on the regular. But I know that if she had, there is a more important mission in life than staying married once you bring a child into this world.
And how stupid was I? When this same bullshit behavior repeated itself from my mother toward my own kids, I fought to keep the relationship we had as this one-big-happy-family thing going.
My older son was turning 8 on a particular weekend, and my parents were in town to celebrate. On a morning before work, I learned that my parents were going to be meeting up with my ex-girlfriend in Florida when they were down there at Disney World. This relationship my sister and they had with my ex was strange to begin with. My mother never cared for my high school girlfriend, and though she *my ex) and I were on good terms, I thought it disrespectful to my wife that my parents would be having a relationship like that with my ex. So I said something.
Then I went to work.
About two hours later, I received a call from my wife. In the background, my son sobbed. (Sound familiar?)
“Your parents are leaving,” my wife said.
“What?!?” I replied.
“They’re putting their suitcases in the car right now.”
I asked to speak to my father. At that point, I still considered him the rational one, the head of the household, the patriarch. My wife handed him the phone.
He hung up on me without a word.
By the time they answered the phone after my repeated calls, they were on the road headed back to North Carolina. God, how I wish I had just let them go. Instead, I told them that if they didn’t turn around and stop ruining my son’s birthday weekend, they would never talk with anyone in my family ever again.
“John,” my father said. “Where my wife goes, I go.”
For some stupid reason, I didn’t remember what had happened that day in the chicken restaurant and just let him drive home with that crazy bitch. Instead, I held on the line. Silent. Mother, always one for the dramatics, agreed to turn around. So they came back. I left work and came home. We argued for hours, then agreed to “just move forward.”
It didn’t feel right then. It never felt right after that. Moving forward without resolution is a recipe for future problems. And that’s exactly what happened.
Finally, my body did what my mind wouldn’t. On one of their visits, I felt physically awful. I was constantly nauseous, irritable, angry, and I just wanted to be anywhere but in the room with them. I listened as they dealt with my aging grandmother on the phone, my grandmother who was suffering from dementia. Mother of course put the focus on herself and how hard this was on her. She yelled at her mother, and it only got worse when she hung up the phone.
It was disgusting.
So in the wake of the visit, I broke off contact.
Now, as a little bit of a rewind, it’s probably not surprising that I have myself been in the mental health system to some degree since I was 18. But up until that last visit of theirs, any time a therapist asked me about my parents, I would reply, “I don’t want to talk about my mommy issues in therapy. That’s so cliche.”
But after that visit, I let a therapist in. And I started to share the stories. Through that, I realized that yes, my mother had issues, but my father was as much a part of the problem as she was. His weakness, his blind devotion to an unhealthy woman, his spinelessness at standing up for his son in the wake of her physical and verbal abuse … it was wrong.
And so I took him off the pedestal.
Since then, I’ve worked really hard to get over the anger. Unsuccessful, you might say, especially when reading this, and you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s eased, but it’s there. That said, I have a great understanding for how they each came to be who they are. I don’t blame them like I used to. If anything, I feel sorry for them.
When I got to a point where I had the anger under control, I reached back out to them. Told them I was sorry for ghosting them, that that wasn’t the right way to go about it, but that I had some stuff to work on and I had done just that and come out the other side of a deep, dark hole in a good place. I invited them up — to see their grandkids, their daughter-in-law, their son. They agreed.
Then, the next day, I heard of mother’s complaint. “I have some issues with going up there,” she had said.
This was a chance to do the new thing. Rather than say “We’ll just move forward,” I said, “Cool. Let’s talk about these issues.”
“No,” I was told.
“What do you mean, ‘No?’” I replied. “If there are issues, let’s talk about them so we can fix them and everyone can have a good, relaxed time when you’re here.”
“No. We have no interest in revisiting the past,” I was told.
“But you said you have issues, not that you had issues. Have is present-tense. These issues exist today, not in the past. So let’s talk about them.”
“No,” I was told. “And if you’re going to insist upon talking about the past, we aren’t coming.”
So they didn’t.
Of course, in the wake of their decision, the blame was put on me for shunning them. There’s a term for that.
At that point, my dream of having parents who understood what it meant to be parents was dead. But it wasn’t that way for those I care about. My children, my wife — they hadn’t been through what I’d been through as a kid, and truthfully, they knew very little of its depths. I never talked about it. I wouldn’t exactly say those memories were repressed. They just were stuffed really deep down. They had a lot of trouble understanding why I wasn’t talking with my parents. They hoped for resolution. They even made their own journeys down to see them.
I was more or less OK with that. I had seen the spell my mother had on people. It had been that way with my friends growing up. Truth would come out eventually, I realized.
And, of course, it did.
My older son got engaged. His wedding was approaching. My parents apparently expected to come. But as the date drew near, there were so many complications with what would be their first appearance in my life since they decided to ditch me rather than talk. Where would they sit at the reception? How would they act at the rehearsal? My older son at that point was starting to see my mother for who she truly is. And so he asked me to find a way to make sure they don’t come.
So I did.
I emailed them and told them that because they had chosen not to have a conversation about their issues and then chose not to try to fix that in the run-up to my son’s wedding, I expected them to graciously decline any invitation they might receive.
My father met that request by graciously forwarding my email to my son under the misguided belief that I was doing this for me and behind my son’s back. Yes, my father tried to sabotage the relationship I have with my son. That’s one of those things that always gets a gasp.
And so I pounded the final nail in the coffin of the dream I once had of having parents who understood what it meant to be parents. Many people realize that dream as reality. I didn’t. Yes, there were lots of good times back then. But in the words of Billy Joel, the good old days weren’t always good.
To continue with Mr. Joel’s words … tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.
I have struggled to find that tomorrow.
I give myself grace because that final nail in the coffin wasn’t pounded in until March or April of this year. It’s fresh. It’s raw. I’m newly awakened from a dream that was really a nightmare, and you know how it can be when you first wake up from one of those. You’re disoriented. You’re unsure whether it was real or not. You’re sweating. Out of sorts. Your heart is racing.
The unfortunate thing is that the death of that dream has come alongside the death of so many others.
I’ve written about my aunt’s death. I’ve written about turning 50 and feeling old and this constant neck pain and the persistent loneliness. So much of it has its roots in the years and years and years I didn’t deal with the stuff that existed from the start, because I repeated “just moved forward” without resolving anything.
And so I look back at my life and I am, right now, very, very sad. There has been so much loss … especially recently, and I know I’ve been knocked flat on the canvas because of it. It’s not the first time I’ve been here. Every other time, I have gotten back up.
This time, though? I’m finding it much harder. I’m finding myself questioning why I would want to, whether I have the strength or desire to do so. Yes, I know my motivations for getting back up, but this time? This time is proving to be extremely difficult. As I’ve written, I’m hanging on, and I have a deep understanding of how there are periods in life when that’s what it’s all about. I still do the things I need to do, still keep up my responsibilities as a husband, father, employee, coach, business owner, etc.
But I’m struggling.
I’m pretty sure I know what I want. I want someone to come into my life and take this as a playbook and just hold me, keep me safe, help me stand up again. That’s so hard to say because I’m a grown-ass man who has learned to be quite self-sufficient over the course of this life. But I reflect on the times when I did have those someones in my life who cared at that level, and the absence of those people today adds to the pain.
Dreams die hard. I have had many, many dreams throughout my life. A few came true. Many others died that hard, hard death.
Truthfully, I think I’m in search of another dream. I’m just not sure what it might be — or if it’s even there.
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