posted November 01, 2003 05:12 PM         

11 years later, I was making close to 6 figures, and funny how the bills just kept right on coming and, the food got more expensive and indulgent, but didn't really fill my belly any better than beans and potatoes always had. I found myself with an "easy" solution to not having time to spend with my family...I had MONEY to throw at them! Here's some money, go shopping, why don't you? Here's some money go catch a movie. Want some money? I'm in the middle of this project..see?

One day I came home and my wife was crying. It was the anguish of a woman who'd watched all of her wildest dreams come true, and had realized how empty her wildest dreams really were. It was the misery of a mother who didn't know why her children were always gone and why they didn't listen to her when they were around. It was the despair of a person to whom family is ALL, watching her STRONG, loving, nest beginning to atrophy and wither away, with only the cold, empty clacking of her husband at the keyboard to keep her company. Not his smile or his voice, just his presence, and that..was little more than a warm body, for his mind was always somewhere else.

I came home one night a complete stranger. Unknown to the woman that I had been married to for 12 years at the time, an intruder and an unwelcome authoritarian nuisance to my children. So well trained in their middle class, white, suburban schools. So poorly educated in their middle class, white, suburban neighborhood.

That day drove the final lesson home. I knew why I was miserable that day. I knew why my family was falling apart, and REGARDLESS of what my coworkers, with their well meaning advice and my neighbors with their prehensile noses kept telling me, I knew that there WAS something that could be done about it. There was a way that I could bring us back to the love and the closeness we'd once known. There WAS a way that I could take back the parental authority that this system has so insistently tried to convince me is no longer mine.

I quit my job. I sold our belongings. We packed up the car, and we MOVED. As we did, I let my children know that I would do this again and again and again if necessary, until they got serious about being a part of our family.

I warned them that friends were great to have, but that the day their friends became the focus of their lives over this family, was the day that their friends would become their pen pals.

I've resisted the urge to get that big, fat, cushy job that I worked so hard to earn a right to. I've resisted the urge to dive into the isolation and LUNACY of the consumer lifestyle. I know now what Olympic athletes feel after winning the gold. I know the emptiness they must feel inside. The let down. The feeling that comes with having been betrayed by ones own dreams..by ones own lies. The devastation that comes with reaching the goal of a lifetime only to find that it was the pursuit of the goal which you were after all along, not the goal itself.

If one day, you reach that highest of low points in your life, you too will realize that the chase is nothing and that since pursuit was the prize, one day your efforts too, will almost certainly amount to nothing if you do not choose those goals carefully and with purpose.

The kids are happy now. They have plenty of friends and there are boyfriends and YES there are moments of rebellion too. They are my children, not my robots, and they are teenagers, not seniors. The moments are brief, and they are few, for our authority as parents, and our RIGHTS as kin have been restored.

There is a smiling lady in our house today, with a joy in her heart so profound, so TANGIBLE, that you couldn't help but grin if you saw her. Where her heart had withered and bled so empty before, today it could practically skip around the world with the hopeful tune it whistles.

When a heart beats that strong, it ties its rythmn to the heart of a close-knit clan, bound together, through good times and bad..lifelong and beyond.

This is OUR clan and OUR family.

If we don't care for these people enough to cherish and nurture the bonds between us...who will?

daf

posted November 07, 2003 09:12 PM         

Each breath since the day I left the lie behind has left me with no doubt that what we did was the right thing to do.

Clan is what builds strong communities, strong nations, a strong humanity. Our survival depends not on money, not on big business or small. Strong clans that crank out individuals of strong character, are the basic building blocks of civilization.

There is no patriotism we need pledge our allegiance to before that of our own clan. There is God, then there is clan...in my heart anyway. I hope you find your path strewn with all of the riches that money can never buy, love.

posted November 28, 2003 12:03 PM         

Sincerely,
divinia