I Got What I Wanted. So Why Does It Hurt?

It hit me while I was driving through the mountains for work the other day. I was working a 14-hour day while getting phone calls, texts, emails and direct messages on Marketplace about all the different things I’ve been trying to take care of since my mom died. Attorneys, title people, home buyers, people interested in her car. Half the time I barely understood what I was doing, and I was getting overwhelmed trying to deal with all of it while still doing my actual job.

I’ve spent months wishing I could finally be done with this stuff. Then, somewhere in the middle of being frustrated by all of it, something dawned on me that I hadn’t really thought about before. I had just signed away one-third of the last obligations I had left for my mom. The other two were both going to be finished Friday.

For months, all of this had felt like chores for my mother. Stressful, confusing, pain-in-the-ass chores that I couldn’t wait to cross off the list. Now I was realizing that in a couple of days, I wasn’t going to have any chores for my mother anymore.

I don’t want that to sound like I’ve secretly enjoyed dealing with probate. I haven’t. About seven months after Mom died, Medicaid sent me a letter saying how much she owed, and it turned out everything she still had wouldn’t even be enough to cover it. Before I knew any of that, I had opened my big mouth and told my siblings we’d split whatever we got out of the little that was there. I didn’t care about the money, but I knew a couple of them could use some help, and I felt terrible because I thought I’d gotten their hopes up before I knew what the hell I was talking about.

I try to be the person with common sense in most situations, but when you’ve never gone through a death and had to take care of everything that comes afterward, you find out pretty quickly that there are things you don’t even know you’re supposed to think about. I’ve spent months trying to figure things out as they came at me, usually learning just enough to deal with one problem before the next one showed up.

I wanted every bit of it behind me.

What I didn’t realize until this week was that all of those responsibilities were also keeping Mom at the forefront of my life almost every day.

All of us kids helped her, especially during the last few years when she got really sick and we knew what was coming. When she was healthy, she probably helped all of our dumb asses more than we ever helped her. If there was one role I had that might have been a little different from my siblings, I was probably the person she’d call when she didn’t know what to do. I’ve held some version of that role for most of my life.

Somehow, even after she died, I still had things to do for her. All of those responsibilities, as exhausting and overwhelming as they could be, gave me something involving Mom that still existed in my present life. I didn’t recognize it while it was happening because I was too busy wanting to get the shit done.

Friday, somebody is going to drive away in her car. That car was my grandfather’s before it was hers, and giving it to Mom was the last gift he was able to give her when he couldn’t drive anymore before he passed. The house will be signed over too. Barring something I don’t know about yet, that should pretty much be it.

And that is one of the most bittersweet feelings I’ve ever had.

I know I have thousands of things to talk about when it comes to my mother, and I’ll have ways to hold her close until the day I’m not around anymore. But knowing that doesn’t change the fact that I’m kind of dreading having nothing left that I need to do for her.

Nobody has told my heart that it’s time to stop caring for her so much anymore.

If anything, it feels the distance and feels like it needs to do more to bring her back. They always say the heart wants what it can’t have.

Well, that probably goes for death too.

 

The Stages of Parenthood I Thought I’d Never Miss

I don’t have to look very far to find another time in my life when I’ve done this.

A lot of raising my boys drove me nuts when they were little. I grew up in a household without a lot of patience, and I carried some of that into becoming a parent. My wife worked midnights, so a lot of nights I was the one handling baths and bedtimes. I loved my boys more than anything and would have done every goddamn thing on this planet to protect and provide for them, but that didn’t mean I was naturally good at every part of taking care of a baby.

There were nights I’d sit there stressed because one of them wouldn’t go to sleep, or he’d be crying and somehow his eight-month-old ass couldn’t just tell me what was wrong from the beginning. I was a smoker back then too, so apparently this inconsiderate baby couldn’t understand that every extra 15 minutes he stayed awake was delaying me from going outside to destroy my lungs.

Most of those problems were mine, not theirs. My boys were actually good babies. I just wasn’t prepared for all of it in the beginning. I mean, I was only 34 years old when I had my first child. How do you expect someone to be ready by that age already?

I knew pretty early that some of it was a me problem, so I started working on myself. I learned about the things we carry from our own childhoods and tried to find better ways of handling mine because my boys deserved that from me. But even while I was trying to become a better father, there were plenty of nights when I wished they’d hurry up and get a little older. I wanted them to be able to do more for themselves. I wanted bedtime to get easier. I wanted a little more of my time back.

People told me how fast it would go. They told me to enjoy it while it lasted. I’m sure I nodded along while quietly thinking they didn’t remember what it was like trying to convince a tiny irrational human being that going to sleep was actually a pretty good idea.

Now I’d give a lot to have some of those ordinary nights back.

We used to read all kinds of books together. Fox in Socks, Green Eggs and Ham, Snug House, Bug House and more dinosaur books than I could ever remember. My firstborn could name and pronounce dinosaurs from three different books when he was only two or three years old. I’ve joked that he knew more dinosaurs than any adult I’d ever met, except it wasn’t really a joke. He did.

I still have a video of him when he was around two years old, sitting there basically telling me Green Eggs and Ham from memory as I flipped through the pages. He couldn’t read yet. We’d just read that book together so many times that he damn near knew it verbatim.

These days, my boys are more likely to climb next to me on the couch asking for V-Bucks or Robux than climb into my lap carrying a book.

Sometimes I’ll come upstairs after writing and find my 11-year-old asleep next to my wife because something scared him and he climbed into our bed. My first thought is usually, who is this motherfucker laying next to my wife?

Then I have to figure out how I’m supposed to carry an 11-year-old who’s in the 97th percentile for height back to his bedroom without dragging his feet across the floor and waking him up. I used to be able to move him into the middle of our bed and go to sleep. We only have a queen, though, and three grown-ass adults don’t cut it anymore, so now his ass has to go.

I spent plenty of those early years wishing my boys would become more self-sufficient. Now they’re doing exactly what I wanted them to do.

There are things I definitely don’t miss. I’m not sitting around wishing somebody would need me to give them a bath again. But I miss how little they were. I miss those squeaky voices telling me some ridiculous story or saying they loved me. I miss them climbing into my lap with a book.

If I could go back and give that exhausted younger version of myself some advice, I don’t think I’d tell him to cherish every moment. Some of those moments sucked, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t help him.

I’d probably just tell him to shut up and stop being a selfish prick.

They’ll go to bed soon enough.

You’ll have plenty of time to smoke your damn cigarettes.

 

What Will I Miss When I Finally Retire?

Parenthood isn’t the only part of my life I’ve spent wishing forward. I’ve been doing the same thing with work for most of my adult life.

Every morning starts pretty much the same way. The alarm goes off and I’m tired regardless of what time I went to bed. When I was younger, there was probably a lot more cursing under my breath about having to go to work. There were even days when I dreaded it enough that I simply didn’t go. I’ve gotten slightly more responsible with age, although the amount of cursing probably hasn’t decreased as much as it should have.

Now there are just a few more aches and pains involved.

I’ve always dreamed about retiring and said I’ll do it the first chance I get. I love freedom. I love the idea of waking up and being able to decide what I want to do without an obligation already waiting for me.

But the more I think about everything else I’ve been writing here, the more I wonder what I’m actually wishing away when I say that.

I don’t hate being out in the world. I’m actually the opposite. My wife is more of a homebody, but I’ve always hated being stuck at home for too long. I like running around. I like interacting with people, seeing friends and seeing different things. I hope my wife and I have saved enough by the time we retire that we can travel a lot. Hopefully the boys will come with us sometimes, although by then they’ll probably be busy standing in front of their own mirrors every morning, swearing while they brush their teeth before leaving the people they love for however many hours their jobs require.

I also know there are parts of working that I would miss because I’ve already gotten little previews of what losing them feels like.

I’ve had customers quit, get fired, move on to different jobs and, even worse, pass away. Some of these are people I’ve talked to every week for years. A lot of my customers aren’t just customers anymore. They’re actual friends.

There have been times when I’ve walked into a business and someone casually told me that a person I’d known for years wasn’t there anymore. Sometimes they’re just working somewhere else. Other times the news is much worse.

And I’m still standing there as the delivery guy.

You try to maintain some kind of calm demeanor because everyone around you doesn’t necessarily know what that person meant to you. They don’t know how many conversations you’ve had over the years or how close you might have become. They just know you as the guy who comes through the door every week to make a delivery.

But just because a relationship started because of my job doesn’t mean I can turn off the emotions attached to it when the job changes.

So when I picture retirement, I still want it. I’m not suddenly volunteering to work until I’m 90 because I’ve discovered some beautiful hidden meaning behind my alarm clock. I want the freedom. I want to travel with my wife. I want more time to write, and considering football only occupies three or four months of the year, I’m apparently going to need something else to do anyway.

I just wonder if I’m doing the same thing I’ve already done with my boys.

I’m looking forward to the day when the difficult part disappears without thinking enough about everything that’s going to disappear with it.

There’s something about the whole arrangement that feels a little unfair. We spend so many of our good, healthy years working our asses off to build and provide a life for the people we love. Then, when we finally get the chance to sit back and enjoy the life we built, that life has grown up and had to leave us.

My boys won’t be sitting around waiting for Dad to retire. They’ll have lives of their own by then. Jobs, relationships, responsibilities and maybe families of their own. They’ll probably be doing exactly what I’m doing now.

And I understand that because I’m already living the other side of it.

There are people I love right now who probably wish I called more or came around more often. It’s not because I don’t care about them. I try hard to make time for everybody, but there are weeks when work, my wife, my boys, writing and everything else life throws at me have taken about everything I have. Sometimes there’s just not much left for anything extra.

I don’t know how to fix that.

Obviously we have to work. We have to provide. We have responsibilities we can’t just abandon in the name of enjoying every moment.

But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t feel wrong sometimes to work so many of your kids’ young years away, only to finally get your time back when they’re gone building lives of their own and too busy for you.

You only get so many years on this planet.

It seems a little cruel that we spend so many of them on opposite ends of the life we want to be with, not always by choice, but by necessity.

 

How Do We Stop Wishing Our Lives Away?

I don’t think the answer to any of this is to stop looking forward to things or convince ourselves to enjoy every second of our lives. That’s not realistic. Some moments suck. Some stages are exhausting. Sometimes Friday really does need to hurry the hell up and get here.

Maybe the best we can do is be a little more careful about what we’re wishing away with the parts we can’t wait to leave behind.

And maybe we can stop being so hard on ourselves for not realizing all of this while we’re in the middle of it.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being harder on myself than anybody else ever could be. I can look backward with everything I know now and find a thousand things I could’ve done differently. I could’ve been more patient with my boys. I could’ve appreciated certain moments more. I could’ve handled things differently or worried less about something that eventually worked itself out anyway.

But that’s the problem with looking backward. The person doing the judging already knows how everything turned out.

The person actually living through it didn’t.

We’re human. Our brains can only handle so much, and apparently some of ours max out a little sooner than others. We don’t have the privilege of knowing every answer while we’re making the decisions. We worry about things we can’t control. We get overwhelmed. We lose our patience. We wish difficult days would hurry up and end.

Then sometimes we look backward and miss them.

Maybe empathy isn’t only something we’re supposed to give everyone else. Maybe some of it should be saved for the versions of ourselves who were doing the best they could with whatever they knew at the time.

I can’t go back and enjoy every bedtime with my boys differently. I can’t stop the years between now and retirement from passing. And I can’t keep finding paperwork to file for my mother just because part of me isn’t ready to stop taking care of things for her.

All I can really do is try to enjoy the life I have now the best I can, knowing there will probably be things about it that I won’t understand the value of until they’re gone.

Which brings me back to Friday.

Earlier I said that the house would be signed over, somebody would drive away in Mom’s car and, barring something I didn’t know about yet, that should pretty much be it.

I really should’ve known better than to write that before dealing with the BMV.

I went to Westside Merchants in Youngstown with everything organized. I’m 45 years old now. I had the title, the paperwork and damn near everything that’s ever been mailed to me by an attorney, court or anyone else who might possibly have something to do with my mother’s estate.

When I was 16, the BMV could make me feel like an idiot because I usually had no idea what I was doing.

Almost 30 years later, I came prepared.

They still found a way.

There was one more piece of paperwork I needed before I could transfer Mom’s car. The people buying it had come to meet me, I couldn’t finish the sale, and somehow I was standing there feeling like that clueless 16-year-old all over again.

Thankfully, signing over the house afterward went exactly the way it was supposed to. But the car will have to wait until next week.

A few days ago, another delay probably would’ve driven me crazy.

Now?

Well, at least I’ll have one more week to be useful for my mom.

Thanks, Westside Merchants!

 

Before You Go

If you enjoyed this article, I’d love to stay connected.

Every other Sunday, I share a new reflection about life, family, empathy, and the lessons I’m still trying to figure out. You’ll also get occasional updates about my writing and future projects.

If you’d like to come along for the journey, I’d be honored to have you.

👉 Join the Newsletter

Or, if you’d like to keep reading today, you can check out my debut novel, Not My Brother’s Keeper.

📖 View the Book on Amazon

Thanks for spending a little time with me today.