Happy Birthday Daisy! (A dad's thoughts on his daughter's birthday)

Nineteen years ago, today, at ten p.m. I became a dad.

My daughter was quiet at birth, not making the slightest sound the entire time and barely uttering a whimper when they pricked her heel for the PK test, a moment when most babies protest the loudest.

She has always been a quiet, introspective soul. That’s not to say she doesn’t get loud and animated with her friends, because she does, from time to time. But most her life has been spent in quiet, thoughtful softness. When she was four, we started attending a new church, and she enjoyed the group she was in. When she turned five, she was moved into the “five-year-olds” class and she was so upset by the noise level that they had to come find me in the sanctuary because she wanted to leave the room.

She doesn’t like to travel in a large pack, preferring instead to hold a few friends close and dear. I’ve wondered, in retrospect, if that isn’t simply a trust issue.

Life has disappointed her very early on. Her mom and I divorced when she was only eighteen months and it left scars that became roots that wound themselves deep into her heart. Her life was, and still is, defined by that divorce. Her mom remarried and moved on, and my daughter saw that as a form of abandonment. She lived with her mom, her mom had primary physical custody, but the fact that she had divorced me and married someone else, felt like she too was being divorced somehow.

I didn’t realize this was still an issue until she wrote the foreword to my most recent book; a book detailing the six years I spent homeless. I thought she’d write about my homelessness and my abiding love for her through the dark days. She did write about those things, but half of what she had to say, was about the divorce. How it hurt her and how all the sadness of the six years I lived in my car, could have been avoided had her mom not left.

I can’t fix that. I can’t undo it. And I don’t know how to help her heal right now.

She is a remarkable woman, this daughter of mine. She has one of the purest, most wonderful voices I have ever heard. She loves to sing and longs to make that her life. But her self-confidence was marred in the wreckage of a broken family and she doubts that she’ll get the same breaks she’s seen others get.

I try to tell her about making your own breaks, and working toward goals, but she’s seen my life and how hard that hard work part really is, and she wonders if she can cut it. So sometimes she gives up. I worry about her. I worry about a nineteen-year-old heart that has already seen so much disappointment and horror and has had much of its natural joy sucked out.

I wonder how I can inspire her to keep trying. To take her gifts more seriously, from the perspective of them being from God, and Him having a plan. A plan that cannot be thwarted. I wonder how to restore her faith in me, in other people, and in God. I wonder if her life is irreversibly damaged.

My grandmother had the same wonderful, sweet voice my daughter has. If this talent is inherited, that’s where it came from. My grandmother sang in “supper clubs” (popular in the day) in the 30’s and 40’s. Then she made some mistakes in life and stopped singing for anyone but herself. I lived with her until I was five, and that beautiful, lilting voice from the other room was one of my earliest memories. She only sang around the house by then. Only when my grandfather wasn’t around. Life, and a few bad decisions, stole her song and quieted her voice. She seldom spoke of her days singing, but when I could coax it out of her, she would get teary eyed and reminisce about how she loved to sing.

I fear that outcome for my daughter. I fear that life will steal the song from her heart and all her music will be locked behind some safe place in her soul, where nobody can damage it and the dream can remain perfect because she never failed, because she never tried.

I can’t believe nineteen years has come and gone already. I still feel like that nervous dad, holding her little form, wrapped tightly in a Winnie-the-Pooh receiving blanket, and telling her over and over –maybe 300 times in three hours that first night- that I love her and that I’m so happy to be her dad.

I can’t believe that at this age she has already endured divorce, the mental cruelty of her mother’s second husband, the homelessness of her dad, and the pain of leaving her life behind at 16. I can’t believe she’s an adult now and has a life that is entirely separate from mine.

Sometimes, I still hear her voice at age four, or six, or ten…asking me to push her on the swing for a few more minutes, or drawing out the plan for our garden, or laughing in a mountain of bubbles so big that I couldn’t even see her, because I’d put a scoop of “Mr. Bubble” in the Jacuzzi and turned the jets on “high.”

I know that God loves His children infinitely more than we love our own. But I have such a hard time grasping that, because I can’t imagine loving anyone or anything more than I love her. I can’t imagine there is anything in my grasp that I would choose over her, or withhold from her if she needed it. I can’t think of a dream she has that I wouldn’t sacrifice all my dreams for without hesitation. I would set my own dreams on fire to light the path for hers to come true. I would breathe my last breath into her lungs and do so with a smile and no regret.

Nothing about my life has been the same since that night, May 7, 1998, when she became a life and I became a dad. Every decision, every goal, the stubborn refusal to quit, and the drive to keep going, all came because I am her dad.

Happy Birthday Daisy. If the love of a dad is a guarantee of the success of your life, then you’ll win a Grammy someday. I love you more than words can say. The two best things God has ever done for me was sending His Son for my sins, and sending my daughter for my life.

I love you,

Dad

About Sean Hannity...

I try to avoid the usual games bloggers play to get readers. I don’t often label my posts with guaranteed keywords that will get hits. I don’t write about current events every day, hoping that I’ll garner fans. I could. I’ve become a darned good writer through the years and I think I could build a base that way if I wanted to. But I don’t, for the same reason that I haven’t thrown in the towel and written a cheap romance novel under an assumed name, to put some beans in my jar while my “real” books await discovery. I have a job; I have a life. All I have left after six years of homelessness is my integrity, and even though there is nothing about doing those things I mentioned that calls my integrity into question…it would do that in my heart. I want people to read my stuff because it’s good, not because they were Googling the most talked about topic of the hour and I worked the system to get hits.

But this morning I’m going to bend my rules a bit. I’m going to touch on a topic that’s trending on social media and in the news and I’m going to do so realizing it will garner readers, if only for the day.

I want to talk about Sean Hannity.

More directly, I want to defend the man. Not that he needs me. But I have a connection and I think I owe it to him to at least tell the story, because his character is being attacked and I’m not going to stand by while that happens.

For six years –from May 2008 until May 2014- I was homeless. I did not drink, or do drugs or gamble my mortgage payments away. I was a hard-working, successful man who made a good income. I wasn’t rich by any means. I barely broke into six figures, but I had what I valued, so that made me wealthy. I had been divorced for several years and was devoted to just being a dad to my daughter and trying to recover from my very broken heart.

I was a manager for a nationally known mortgage company. I had my own branch, had succeeded in the ten years I was in the business and was doing well. Then 2008 hit. The industry collapsed and I was out of a job. Before long, I was out of a home as well.

While this was happening, my daughter’s world was collapsing. Her mom had remarried and her husband began to show his true colors. After a few years of marriage, his drinking and drug use increased, as did his violent nature and emotional abusiveness. My daughter’s mom refused to leave him and my daughter suffered horribly. I can’t recount the events here, it would take too long, but because her life was in such jeopardy at only ten years old, I had to stay in Nashville where we lived. I was the only buffer between her and the monster her mom had married.

I could not find work enough to get a place to live. I could have moved to an area of the country where there was work but my daughter’s life would have been even worse. I stayed to protect her. I slept in my car and showered at the county rec center and did every menial task, and odd job I was offered.

This went on for years and nobody in the government was listening. I held on to the hope that my faith brought me and the love for my daughter. But there were times when I felt like breaking down. Times when my hope waned and I felt like giving up. It was in one of those times when I had my interaction with Sean Hannity and felt his compassion.

In May of 2013, the Obama summer vacation schedule had been announced. Weeks of golf and weeks of lounging on Martha’s Vineyard at the cost of $5 Million bucks. Meanwhile I was living in a Yukon, sleeping next to my carpentry tools and trying not to show my daughter how hard my life was. I was sitting in the parking lot of her high school (she was fourteen by this point) and waiting for her to get out so I could spend thirty minutes with her before taking her home. I was incensed that the President was STILL ignoring the plight of the nation and going on these expensive vacations. I felt alone and isolated and ignored. I felt like I was fading into nothingness. That’s how homelessness feels. You feel invisible. It’s the loneliest thing I’ve ever lived through.

I guess I just wanted to vent and be heard. Sean was discussing the expensive vacations that day so I called.

Lauren was the screener that day and I told her I wanted to discuss the topic at hand. She asked me what my take was and I told her matter-of-factly that I was homeless and trying to rebuild and here is the President laughing in my face. She stopped me right there and said “Wait…you’re homeless? Homeless right now?” I said yes and told her my story quickly.

Lauren put me through to Sean, who listened to my story and my rant about Obama. He listened. Nobody was listening then, but Sean did.

When I was done, he offered me $2000 to get my carpentry business started. He said “You need tools, you need business cards…I’m going to send you two grand to help you get started.” I refused but he insisted and then he told me to hold on and talk to Lauren again. I was on hold briefly and then Lauren picked up and said “Okay Craig, I just need your mailing address so Sean can send you a check…” I told her I was not going to give her the address. I told her I didn’t call to get money and I couldn’t accept it. I had all the tools I needed and business cards galore. I just wanted to vent that day. Lauren laughed and said “I knew you were going to say that,” and then she wished me well and told me they’d be praying for me and my daughter.

I can’t tell you what it meant to me for a guy like Hannity, who didn’t know me or have ANY reason to help, to offer it. It wasn’t the amount…it was the intent behind it. It had been a long time since I felt like someone cared, or since I felt like someone believed that I was trying as hard as I was.

A year later, almost to the day, my daughter and I limped out of Nashville in that same beat up Yukon and headed to Lynchburg, VA, where we now live. I have a great job with my alma mater and she is a sophomore in the music program. I am slowly rebuilding, and able to spend a lot of time with her. She’ll be nineteen this Sunday and I lost some valuable years while I was living in that truck. But we made it.

There is no way to express what Sean’s offer meant to me that day. The terrible invisibility I felt was gone, if only for a few moments. It might sound odd, but the opportunity to not take his money gave me hope. I was broke, homeless, hurting and a bit angry. But I still had my integrity and Sean gave me a chance to remind myself that even after all this loss I was still the man I desired to be at my core.

I don’t have his number on my speed dial and I don’t know any secret email address. I have no way of contacting him other than the same way everyone else does. Yet I think of him as a friend in that he wanted to help when help was rare. I can’t stand by while a guy who did something so literally life-saving for me, is attacked by hacks who are simply jealous of a guy who busted his butt for everything he has and hasn’t forgotten how hard other people struggle.

I hope this story reveals something of his character to those doubters, because to me he is a great man, and I can’t sit still while this goes on. If you dislike his politics, so be it. But you don’t try to ruin a life because you find it disagreeable.

Not while I’m watching anyway.

What now...

So now what?

Two weeks ago, I released my newest book; “Nowhere to lay my Head: The True Story of a Homeless Dad.”  I feel like I let out a giant breath. In a way, this book was a nine-year process. I spent six years living it, three years trying not to think about it much while I recovered from it, and six months reliving every painful moment as I wrote about it, formatted it, edited it, and finally published it.

There were times while I wrote about the painful situations I faced, that I cried harder in the remembrance than I did when it happened in the first place. Thinking about my daughter, and what she was enduring at the hand of her mother’s husband, was heart-rending. I’d forgotten that I’d been hired three times by companies that all eventually went out of business. I’d forgotten how it felt when my former pastor broke my heart by telling me I wasn’t handling my homelessness the way he thought I should have, and that I was betraying my faith by crying out in pain.

I’d forgotten how many nights it was cold beyond belief, and how I never quite got used to that. I’d forgotten how stifling hot it would get in the summers, when it would rain on those hot steamy nights and I couldn’t open the windows because the rain would get in, so I sweltered in my car. I’d forgotten how much trauma it caused to my daughter to have a homeless dad who wanted to help her, but couldn’t offer very much help.

I say I’d forgotten those things but I don’t think I did…I think I buried them. I denied their existence because it hurt too much, and I was too busy trying to survive it all. Then, when I finally found work and moved with my daughter, to Virginia and began the slow process of rebuilding; I just didn’t want to remember it for a while.

When it was finally time to write the book, it changed my behavior for a while. Each morning, as I rose at 4 a.m. to write before work and then each evening as I wrote before bed, I traveled back through shuttered rooms and behind locked doors in my heart. I had compartmentalized the entire six years and I only allowed myself to look at –and to feel- those parts that were “safe” to talk about.

I could feel myself turning darker as the months of writing passed. It was hard enough living through that for six years, now I was retracing every single, painful step and trying to recall, in exhausting detail, how it felt and how it affected me and what it did to my daughter. It overpowered me much of the time. My coworkers noticed. My daughter noticed. Eventually I noticed. Thankfully, the process ended right before everyone grew weary of me and friendships were damaged.

Everything about this book was hard. Everything. Even the title was a topic of debate and turmoil. I originally intended to call it: “A dad never quits” but a friend of mine reminded me that many dads do quit. A lot of dads would go through what I did for my family, but many would not, and the title seemed unfair to the families of the men who were quitters. I realized this and I explained to my friend that within the first few chapters, I defined what a real dad is, and that a real dad never quits, and if a man quits…he’s not a dad. But after we discussed it further, I realized she was right. Besides that, as I completed more and more of the book, I saw it morph from just a simple story of my homelessness, to an analogous tale of Christ’s homelessness. For a long time, I labored under the delusion that my faith was weak. That I had failed Jesus in my handling of this six-year walk through the desert of homelessness. I guess my former pastor’s harsh words had done more soul damage than I knew. I saw myself as something of a failure because I hadn’t smiled through my heartache and sung songs in my prison of homelessness, as Paul and Sylas did in jail. I thought I wasn’t much of a believer anymore because I hadn’t always handled my situation with an endless barrage of bible verses and modern worship songs.

I had cried. A lot. I had questioned God. I had tasted more failure in that six years than ever in my life and I hadn’t always liked the way it felt as it went down. I saw the damage done to my daughter and I was disillusioned by it all.

As I got deeper and deeper into the Faith aspect of the book, and as I wrote more and more about where my heart was in all this, I realized that I hadn’t done that badly after all. I didn’t smile sweetly while the whole world took a giant poo on me and then collapsed, but I didn’t quit either. I didn’t crawl inside a bottle, I didn’t turn to drugs, I didn’t rob a bank to survive.

I didn’t quit.

I didn’t stop trying. I didn’t stop believing. I didn’t get so exasperated that I just refused to take all the small, ignoble odd jobs I was working, in order to just put gas in my car.

I might not have had a faith that others wanted to emulate, but I hadn’t abandoned what faith I did have, either. It got stripped down to its core and burnished in the fires I was trapped in. But, by-God it was still standing.

Writing the book brought me face-to-face with the unsettled nature of my own soul. The “who am I and who does God want me to be?” questions that had already been nagging my heart long before I became a vagabond dad. Suddenly, “Nowhere to lay my Head” became the only possible title for this book. It made sense. It tied the ends together.

And so, two weeks ago this morning, I clicked a button and the baby was given life. So far I’ve given two interviews and people have responded positively. People are intrigued by the story. They are challenged and encouraged.

But now what?

What’s funny to me is that I still feel homeless. I have a home. Or at least a place to live. But I am a turbulent, brooding ocean inside. I have a job and a bed and a kitchen, something I did without for six years. In my heart, though, I am still walking those endless miles in Pinkerton Park in Franklin, TN…trying to find my way home.

More and more I feel that this story isn’t over yet. More and more I look to the horizon, wondering what is out there.

When I began this journey, my daughter was ten. Next week she’ll be nineteen.

I lost six very important years and I can never get them back. Those years were the most valuable thing I had and to be quite honest…I don’t feel that I’ve gotten a fair value in return for them. Not yet anyway.

Now what? What becomes of a man who turns 54 this fall and who’s heart still longs to dream, and battle, and accomplish, and conquer, but who has tasted far more defeat than he has victory, and whose hourglass has far more sand in the bottom than it does at the top?  Where is my home?

I’m restless again. Which means –in some ways- I’m homeless again. The title of my book comes from Luke 9:58: “Foxes have dens, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.” Jesus said that to a man who claimed he would follow Him anywhere he asked. Brennan Manning calls it “the loneliest verse in the bible.” It’s lonely because, in the original language, it reads this way: “The Son of man has no place to lay His head, and take His rest.” It wasn’t just about a bed and a place to sleep. It was about a home. Home base. A safe spot in the world. Your turf.

I don’t know where mine is anymore. I don’t know where I go from here. My compass spins erratically sometimes and I can’t seem to find True North.

What now? What do I do with a story like this? What do I get for six years of struggle?

I’m no hero…I just did something heroic.

The truth is that I still have a heart full of regret. I would give anything to go back and have those six years with my little girl again. Only this time, to still have my home and my career. I am not yet at a place where I say “Yes…it was for something better.”

I know God had a plan and there was a purpose, I just don’t see it yet.

I have a job, and a place to live. But my soul…is still homeless. When I was living in my car, I’d often look into the night sky and angrily ask “What do you want from me?”

I’m not angry anymore, but sometimes I still look into the night sky. But these days I ask “What now?”