My new book comes out next month.
It was the hardest thing I have
ever written and chronicles the six hardest years I have lived so far. I wrote
the book from late September until about New Year’s Day. I explored six years
of the loneliest, darkest, most broken, desert walk of my life in a four-month period.
That time frame made it even tougher. I didn’t have time to decompress from particularly
hard chapters, or emotional memories. I didn’t have a deadline on this book,
but once I “hit the vein”; I seldom paused for very long.
I don’t sleep a lot, as a rule,
so I was up early every morning, writing a few thousand words before work. I
would come home from work and write until I was exhausted at night. I don’t
mean to diminish childbirth, and what a woman endures, but I feel like I gave
birth to this book. I feel like the writing process was uncomfortable, long,
arduous, and demanding. It’s never been that way for me before. Every book I’ve
ever written has flowed freely and left me happy as I wrote it. This book left
me weary.
Six years was hard. Six years
without a bed, without a kitchen, or a shower of my own, or my garden. At the
start of those six years, I lost the two beautiful Springer Spaniels we had owned.
We lost our loving cat, Giacomo. I lost the refuge my daughter would come to
need as her world exploded at her mom’s house and she desperately needed to
escape the torment of her mother’s husband. While I was trapped in that car,
she was trapped in her own nightmare.
I cried myself to sleep more
times than I can recall, or care to. I dealt with anger, betrayal,
disappointment, shame, loneliness, isolation, fear, and doubt. I second-guessed
myself every day. “Was I doing the right thing by staying?” “Was I looking in
the right places for a job?” “Was anyone ever going to hire me?” “Was my
daughter going to be okay?” “Is she going to give up hope one day, run away,
turn to drugs or alcohol, or become so despondent that she ends her life?”
I asked God all of these
torturous questions every time they entered my heart. Sometimes I got immediate
answers, most times, I did not. Most of the time, I only felt His presence and
somehow managed to trust that it would be enough, and that He would work His
plan in all this. As a dad, that was barely good enough for me, but not for my
daughter. I am her daddy. I needed to give her something concrete and I needed
to be her protector. I could not be. Not as I wanted to be and certainly not as
she needed me to be. She needed me to get her out of that house, and I kept
having to take her back to it. On the nights when it got too unbearable, she
would call me in tears, begging me to come and get her. I always did. We would
spend a few hours together, but since I had no home, I always had to take her
back to that dread. I cannot tell you how that made me feel. Not with all the
words I know.
There were many times when I
thought it might be best for me to just leave. I could go to Texas, or to North
Dakota,…some of the very few places that had jobs back then. I could make
money. I could rebuild my life, and then I could come and get her out of there.
I would think of this and always
reject the idea out of hand. I know my daughter. No matter what I told her, she
would see this as a rejection and an abandonment. Her mother’s husband would
have seen it as the end of the protection that my presence in her life offered,
and his behavior would have doubtless grown even more violent and abominable. I
might have been broke, homeless, and without prospects, but I was still a big,
tough, old-school Italian guy from Philadelphia, who would not hesitate to
hospitalize this jerk if he went too far. He came close many times, and only
the grace of God that kept me from kicking his front door in and stomping him
right into a coma. But had I done that, I’d be in jail and she’d be at his
mercy.
I could not leave. I mean, I
could have, it was always possible. But leaving would have jeopardized my
daughter and I could never do that.
When I began writing this book, I
had the working title: “A Dad Never Quits”. My friend “K” called me one day, after I had sent her a rough draft. She had a real problem with the title. For her it was personal and I knew why. She
had been through a terrible divorce not long after I had endured mine. She has
two young daughters and her ex-husband did not live up to his fatherhood, after
the divorce. (I’m being kind here) She was serious –as she can be when it hits
a nerve with her- and she said, “Craig…not all dads stick it out. A lot of dads
quit.” In hindsight, she was taking the title of the book as a literal
statement. I explained to her that to me, if a man quits on his family he is
not a dad anyway. A real dad will do whatever it takes, regardless of the cost
to him. At first, I wasn’t going to change the title. I even released a short,
two-chapter galley version with that title. However, as I wrote more, and as
the emotions churned, I saw some of her wisdom on this, and I changed the
title. This made me sad. Sad because lots of dads do quit. Sad because my own dad quit, before I was even born. I’ve
met him once. He and my mother never married. He wants no relationship. I tried
to convince him otherwise for a few years but eventually I grew weary of
begging for something that no one should ever have to beg for, and I accepted
it for what it was. I was twenty-one before I even knew about him, so it’s not
like there was a hole. But there was.
A child is born with a dad-shaped
vacuum. It’s similar to the “God-shaped vacuum” found within Pascal’s writings.
A child needs to have his or her dad around. It’s not popular to say these
days. Feminists have emasculated society until men are viewed as unnecessary.
But don’t kid yourself. I work at a major University. I see the long-term effects
of this dad-vacuum. The lack of manliness among men of this generation is
disturbing. It’s not specific to this campus. It’s generational. We’ve had two
or three generations now where the dads have vanished, or at least where they’ve
been so neutered that they might as well have vanished. It’s bad enough that my
friend Rick Burgess had to write a book called “How to Be a Man.” It’s a great
book and it makes me wish I had a son so I could employ the things he teaches.
Rick is a real man. Real in the godly, biblical sense. He surveyed the
landscape and saw the terrible lack of real, manly, strong, unbending,
determined men. ( I recommend Rick’s
book whole-heartedly.)
I kicked all this around as I
thought about my friend’s words to me. I heard the pain in her voice as she
reminded me that not all dads refuse to quit. I’ve seen the after-effects in
her life. I’ve seen it in lots of kids lives. My daughter has so many friends
whose fathers have abandoned them. I don’t know if she ever told her friends
that her dad was homeless…I doubt she would volunteer that, but I do know that
her friends always seemed to like the fact that at least one of their friends
had a real dad, who was really involved in his daughter’s life.
It’s sad to think that men give
up on their families. Sad to think that a man would put himself above his own
children and go off chasing his own desires. I couldn’t I stayed.
I stayed and endured whatever
hell and mankind threw at me because I simply love my daughter. I couldn’t
even fathom doing something else.
There are many lessons in this
new book. There was a light in all
that darkness and I hope it shines bright enough as I tell the story. Hope did spring out of hopelessness. Faith did get me through. God was good in all that darkness. I didn’t
intend it to be a fatherhood book. This book was about my fatherhood, and how that kept me in a place that nobody would want
to be. But as it turns out, there is a fatherhood lesson. Sadly, there is a
subtle challenge within the pages. A challenge not to quit. A challenge to do
the hard thing because it’s the right thing.
If a man reads of my hardships
and decides that he has no excuse for quitting on his family, then my ordeal
was worth it, I guess. I didn’t write the book for that reason, but I’ll accept
that as a tertiary product of the six years I endured.
Let’s get back to the times when
it’s not a stretch to say “A dad never quits’”
