A Purpose

My mom, God bless her, pulled a Boomer trick this Christmas season. She carefully bought and wrapped presents, put them in a big box to ship, then filled the left over space in the box with items that she didn’t want cluttering her house anymore. This happens periodically. If there’s a benefit to being 2000 miles away from family it’s that they can’t afford to ship much. Pictures and a few small trinket mostly. It’s not a burden. In fact sometimes it’s a gift in and of itself. Last year I got cook books and recipes, some of which are written in print so I can actually read them. A few even include measurements for the ingredients.

This year it was a stack of my Memaw’s journals a stack of notebooks with entries dated from 1997 to 2004.

Most of the material was filler. Memaw was highly religious and her church was the center of her social world. Each entry is structured like something out of one of the countless daily praise books sold in megachurch gift shops. She opens by thanking God for the new day and in typical southern Memaw fashion, the rain that is always described as “badly needed” even in a state that frequently floods. Then she writes a bit about her day. She lists here worries, concerns, and her prayer request. Some days consist solely of church news that neither makes sense nor is interesting to me. Other days she wrote about the ailments and trials of a laundry list of distant cousins who I’ve probably met but will never remember and church members who I wouldn’t know from Adam.

But these journals cover a tumultuous time, in our nation, in our family, and in Memaw’s life. Buried among the prayer requests and ecclesiastic concerns are entries about Y2K, September 11, and the Iraq invasion. She wrote about the loss of her first husband, the day I was inured, my brothers deployment, my other grandfathers death, three cousins and my brothers wedding, and the birth of her first great grand baby. Hidden among all of this is a long running and genuinely sweet, love story written two or three cryptic sentences at a time. Memaw wrote openly about her loneliness after losing her husband and brother, and her growing relationship with a recently widowed family friend who would over the course of these journals become her second husband, Mister Billy.

Of course I immediately sought out the moments where I knew I would be mentioned and it wasn’t hard to find. October 4, 2001 starts with “Yesterday I got the phone call I did not want. Gary [My dad] called to say Jeremy’s unit has been moved. We do not know where to…” The entry ends with a prayer request, “Keep all of my children safe.” The next page is dated October 15, 2001 and begins “On October 10, at 5:30 am Gary called. Jeremy was critically inured…” Reading those words… It’d hard to explain but somehow reading other loved ones take on that day hurts me more than the accident ever did, even now. Knowing the pain and fear my family suffered… I feel compelled to read about it, to read these words so I have some understanding of my own story. As painful as it is, these entires help me know what was happening in that blank space when the lights were out and the world was dark. The next entry, dated October 16 starts “Praise the Lord! Jeremy came off the respirator…” which means I was in my medically induced coma for six days.

A theme emerges as the weeks and months pass. First Memaw writes with grave concern. Then there is praise at my recovery. By Christmas she describes me as “looking good” and having “better color than at Thanksgiving.” By March she discusses how I’m anxious to begin reconstructive surgery. When I was recalled to Fort Polk in 2004 she talks about how much better I seem “now that he’s back in a military environment.” Then when I became a civilian she writes about how “I’m not eating right”. It’s here when a new worry surfaces. It’s around this time, when the surgeries are done and I’m out of the Army that Memaw begins writing a prayer request for me, “Lord show him his purpose.”

Memaw was convinced that the Lord Jesus Christ saved me for a reason. She said it aloud. She wrote it out on more than a few occasions. She truly, firmly, believed that my survival was a miracle brought about through prayer. She swore that I survived because God had a purpose for me. I had a destiny.

She never understood how much that idea weighed on me. None of them did. I’d tried to do something. I’d joined the Army to serve my country and I deployed to fight our enemies and I died without hearing a shot fired. I was an abject failure and yet more was expected. Processing my own mortality before my brain was fully developed proved a heavy enough load to carry but knowing I had to carry it all toward some goal seemed at times to be too much to bear. I had to do something with this second chance? I’d already failed dramatically at my first attempt. Still, Memaw thought I had a purpose. She kept asking Jesus to show it to me.

He never did.

After the Army I went to college to be a High School history teacher because I liked the subject and teaching 15 year olds about world war two couldn’t be much different than teaching 17 year olds battle drill 1a. But I hated the crayons and construction paper in my core education classes and four observation hours drove me out of the classroom. Turns out an anxiety disorder and undiagnosed PTSD isn’t great for entering a class room environment. Maybe I could have made a difference in a school, but I couldn’t hack it. I dropped my education classes before the end of the first semester. I failed. Teaching wasn’t my purpose.

So I joined the Sheriff’s Department because what else does a 25 year old ex-Infantryman from Louisiana do? Besides, that kind of chaos, blood, and violence, was significantly more familiar and comfortable than the chaos of puberty. Maybe I did some good wearing a badge. I don’t know anymore. Looking back I’m certain that I hurt more people than I helped. I thought it was my purpose. I spent a decade trying. I burnt myself into a cinder. I ground myself into dust. I made every one of my problems worse. I hurt myself and other people trying to do something that mattered and live up to the idea of purpose and in the end I failed. Now I carry these horrible stories in my head that I can’t share because as bad as they were for me, they were worse for someone else. I can’t even talk about the routine and mundane aspects of the work publicly without some anonymous internet stranger telling me to kill myself. Some fucking purpose.

My Memaw prayed for God to show me my purpose and after twelve years of trying I ended up unemployed, sitting on the couch playing video games with a sleeping infant in my lap and making runs to the grocery store. I failed as a soldier. I failed as teacher. I failed as a cop. All I was good at was catching fish, drinking beer, and occasionally telling a good story. I was a bum.

Memaw was a quilter. For years she stitched together beautiful tops and the ladies at her church helped her finish them and then she would pass the finished quilts on to friends and loved ones. She gave my spouse and I a gorgeous, and comfortable handmade quilt that stayed on our old queen sized bed until the mattress gave out and we inevitably upgraded to a king. For quite a while we were ambivalent about children. We weren’t going to have any. But Memaw made quilts for all of her great grand babies so for Christmas 2014 she gifted us a small, hand made, quilt in primary colors, just in case we changed our minds. Neither of us said anything, but we were already starting to reconsider. It took a year, but it was a genuine pleasure, a high point of my life, when I got to call and tell Memaw that her quilt was going to find it’s purpose.

It’s a eight hour drive between Austin and New Orleans with no stops, Houston traffic depending. My wife and I made the trip easily before the baby came along but eight hours Houston traffic depending is a nightmare with a newborn in the back seat of a sub compact Ford. It was five hours from Austin to Memaw’s house in Grand Cane, Louisiana, four and a half at Texas speeds and we avoided Houston traffic. It’s not a bad drive even with a baby in the backseat. It’s another five hours from Grand Cane to New Orleans, Baton Rouge traffic depending. So in the spring of 2016 when we planned our move home from Austin, we split the trip up into two legs. We’d drive from Austin to Grand Cane and spend the night visiting with Memaw, then we’d go from Grand Cane to New Orleans. It made the trip easier on us and the baby, but more importantly it allowed Memaw to meet my kid.

And she did, quite often in those early days. It’s a fact that I am very proud of. My kid knew their great-grandmother, they knew Memaw and Mister Billy. She got to watch her great-grandchild grow from an Infant to an elementary schooler. They had a genuine relationship before she passed and I will be forever grateful for that. My kid was eight when she died, old enough that they’ll have memories of Memaw. They’d seen each other at a wedding only a few months earlier. Its a small mercy, as much for me as it was for them.

I haven’t worn real pants in a week.

I haven’t run errands in so long that the combination of bitter New England cold and sitting unused has killed the battery in my truck. It’s been a month since I’ve been to the gym, two weeks since I’ve been hunting. I can’t remember the last time I went anywhere but the grocery store, the VA, and Walmart for a Christmas present. I’ve barely left the living room couch, which wouldn’t be that big of a deal, it’s the holidays after all, but I also haven’t written anything worth reading. Barely 5k words in a month and none on the projects I’m supposed to be working on. I’ve scrubbed the fucking shitty electric stove top more than I’ve completed a written piece this month. My kid is little better. They’ve been wearing a hoodie blanket with sleeves and playing video games since Christmas morning.

It’s Monday, so I’m fixing red beans and rice for supper. It’s not a dish I love, in fact red beans are probably my least favorite traditional Louisiana meal, but they’re cheap and easy, I cook them well, and my kid will actually eat them. Earlier, I was staring at that stack of journals, knowing I needed to write something for the first of the year and wondering if I could find some inspiration in Memaw’s words. There’s a piece I’ve been trying to finish since her funeral but I can’t quite get the words on the page. I have an excellent title, “A Dirtbag’s Eulogy” but I just can’t get the sentences and paragraphs strung together properly. It doesn’t help that I cannibalized the few good lines I did have for “An Outlaw’s Prayer”. As I tried to think of something interesting to say I kept thinking about those words that Memaw wrote on more than one occasion. “Lord help Jeremy find his purpose.”

I’m forty-seven years old. It’s been twenty-five years since my accident and I here I am standing in front of a stove three days after Christmas wearing red flannel pajamas and a cheap hooded t-shirt, watching red beans just start to boil. I can’t help be be a little bit bitter. The stove I cleaned yesterday is a mess. The floor needs to be swept too. The fridge is empty. There’s laundry that needs to be washed and folded. The whole house is still a cluttered wreck. Outside it’s foggy and gray, freezing temperatures and ice have given way to cold rain. I’m 2000 miles away from home in a place I have tried and failed not to hate. I’m out of Diet Coke and it’s too early to drink a beer.

I looked at those boiling red beans and couldn’t help but think about how cruel it was that this, this fucking pot, in this fucking kitchen, in this fucking place was the end result of twenty-five years of searching for a purpose.

Then my kid sprinted into the room wearing nothing but briefs and a hooded blanket. “What’re we having for supper?”

I hate that question so much. No matter who asks it or how it leaves me feeling like a butler, like I’m supposed to formally announce “Red beans and rice will be served in the dining room at six sir.”

Instead my kid peered into the pot said “Yay! Red beans. I love you dad.” Then danced out of the kitchen, returning to the cluttered living room and their video games.

My kid’s a dumb ass. They do stupid shit. They’re loud and messy and smelly and they don’t like doing chores. Sometimes they treat me like a servant. But man they’re funny as shit. They have amazing taste in music. They love to dance. They humor me by going hunting and they genuinely seem to enjoy fishing.

They’re polite too. Maybe not to Memaw’s standards. Southern manners have fallen to the wayside here in New England. It proved impossible to teach “yes sir” and “no ma’am” in a world where pre-school teachers go by their first name. Still my kid doesn’t run around and make a nuisance of themselves in public. They say please and thank you, even to servers in restaurants. They genuinely care about people and try to treat everyone, even people they don’t like, well. They weren’t brought up in the bullshit I was brought up in. They have friends of all color and creed, black kids and Asians, immigrants with English as a second language, even Yankees.

They’re well behaved, rarely intentionally breaking the rules and never with the intention to harm someone else. They can’t tell a lie for shit. It eats them up when they intentionally do wrong and eventually they’ll confess, normally to my spouse. I don’t have to punish much. I just wait and they’ll do it to themselves and then we can sit down and talk about lessons learned. There are so many terrible things that can go wrong in a child’s life, things I can’t prevent, but right now my kid is a better person than I’ve ever been. I’d bet money they always will be.

For twenty-five years I’ve struggled with the one burden my Memaw put on me. I struggled with a purpose. I tried everything I could think of and I failed. At best I was and will forever be aggressively mediocre. But my kid… A friend once asked me, “How are you such a good dad?” I’m not sure I agree with the premise that I’m a good dad, but I told him as far as being a “good” dad I just try to be ten percent better than my old man was. After all I turned out mostly okay and it seemed like an achievable goal. Jury’s still out, but I think I’ve managed.

I think that’s probably my purpose.

It seems like a cop out, to surrender a higher calling, to give up public service and fighting evil to play video games with a fourth grader. But I was never good at being a hero. My military career was mediocre and my law enforcement career ground me into dust and I will forever fight the demons they both left behind. I’m pretty good at being dad. I get the kid out the door and on the bus every morning on time and I meet them in the driveway every afternoon. I tell them I love them. More importantly I tell them that I like them. They tell me I’m the best but what the fuck do they know?

It’s boring work, dull, and repetitive and yet…I’m pretty sure it’s my purpose. I’m dad. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done. And I think Memaw saw that toward the end. I think she recognized during those visits, when she saw me and my kid together.

I know she would understand, because there was one thing she included in almost every journal entry she wrote from 1997 to 2004, a prayer request for “my precious children and grand children. How thankful I am for them. Meet their every need and keep them safe.”

A friend who I cherish and respect asked me about the use of they/them pronouns for my child. They were concerned with what they thought was an grammatically incorrect use of pronouns. I had to tell them the truth. I don’t do it because of gender. I am open about who and what I am, but my kid hasn’t yet consented to being content. Until they do I feel an obligation to protect their anonymity, so I don’t use their name or gender in public. It’s more of an opsec thing than a “woke” thing, but it does let me practice using gender neutral language so it’s easier to do when I’m around folks who choose to use they/them pronouns. As soon as my kid gives permission I’ll start using the pronouns they choose, until then they will remain, publicly, gender neutral.