I’ve been reflecting on a year of my life per day in the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday. Truthfully, it feels like those 40 days have taken longer than the initial 40 years themselves.

In addition to the normal “2020” reasons, in the past 40 days I’ve bought a house, sold a house, moved, and quasi-renovated the new house all while caring for a 20-month-old child and a pregnant wife.

Plus, I got my yearly physical (with flu shot), attended a three-day virtual writers’ conference, welcomed my 15th niece or nephew into the world, went to a socially-distanced pumpkin patch, and (since we’re still living through a global pandemic) taught my daughter that Halloween is when you dress up in a fun costume to “walk around the neighborhood waving at houses.”

But these are all good problems to have, even when I’m very tired.

The cherry on top is that my mother-in-law starts an extended visit next weekend so, “hooray,” another period of time that will feel longer than 40 years.

Especially with everything going on in my life right now, it was important not to let a milestone as significant as my 40th birthday pass without a more-detailed introspection than my annual “State of Chris Gaffney” review.

It would’ve been easy to put it off but I have a bad habit of deluding myself with time by saying if we can just get through this project, or this visit, this sickness, or this year, everything will be the same again. But if 40 years have taught me anything it’s that the reset is never coming – and that’s ok.

You can’t uncook a chicken but if you wait another week it’s just as unsafe to eat.

We wanted to visit Ireland for my 40th birthday (the fun half of my ancestral homeland) but covid shut that down, so I had to make meaning out of the only connection to my past I have: my memories.

A few (older) people have made light of my choosing age 40 as a time for meaningful self-reflection but it feels appropriate to me.

People in their 30s still delude themselves that they’re full of youthful vigor but by your 40s the hostess is more likely to hand you the early-bird specials than the happy hour menu and you need your reading glasses to tell them apart.

Focusing only on a specific year of my life each day has given me a richer perspective of what my life was actually like at that age. When I typically look back on my life I tend to focus on the same handful of moments, people, or woulda/coulda/shouldas.

Looking at my life as whole, it’s easier to see the consistencies.

Some might call me stubborn (I’m still holding a grudge from preschool) and nobody’s ever accused me of being too thin but there’s also an age-defying essence presenting itself throughout my life regardless of clothing, hairstyle, hormones, or inebriation level.

Though I wasn’t exactly an outsider before, my current role as salt-and-pepper-haired dad seems to suit me well. It’s nice to be where you belong.

It took my Jewish ancestors (the less fun half) 40 years of wandering to reach the promised land (though, spoiler alert: it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing after that).

As I now have an equal number of years of wondering (easier than wandering when you have flat feet) under my belt, I find myself questioning whether I’ve reached my own “promised land,” or just found a temporary respite from life’s never-ending struggle.

A long time ago I set my life goals as buying a lake house and retiring. I’m not there yet but I just moved across from a reservoir and (purposely) haven’t worked in nearly two years so I’m getting close.

I tell myself I’m not looking for anything more. I’ve got a wife, a daughter, and (soon) a son, but believing that I’m content would entirely negate the lessons of the 40 years I’ve just reflected on.

There’s always something else to catch my interest and it usually isn’t something predictable.

Ambition, like water, always finds a way. It may temporarily freeze or turn to vapor and float away but it always returns sometimes as a drip of drops and other times as a powerful torrent sweeping up anything it’s path.

I spent so much time in my teens and twenties trying to attract girls that when I finally found one to commit, it wasn’t clear where to turn that drive so I stopped pursuing individuals and started chasing crowds.

I spent my twenties and much of my thirties positioning myself to climb up a career ladder only to jump from one ladder to another before finally jumping off.

I now float in the ether close enough to reach back out in case of emergency but far enough that I fill LinkedIn with confessions of my insecurities and discussions of my flaws.

When I was young, I wanted to change the world (and believed I had the power) but only if I could align it closer to my values – to the promise of America.

This passion still stirs within me but I don’t know how it will next manifest itself. I just know that I’ll continue to speak my truth. I’ll always be more Frank Capra than Francis Ford Coppola championing ideals over power.

I’m also still quite sensitive. Several people tried to stamp it out of me throughout my life but I managed to hold on developing a thicker skin without ever abandoning that central essence of my personality.

I’ll still look the other way if you feed a snake a mouse in front of me and I’ll always root for the underdog speaking truth to power or championing a lost cause.

I’m not afraid to cry although it isn’t something I often do. I’m more of a Dick Gephardt than a John Boehner.

So here I sit on the precipice of 40 with a lifetime laid behind me and, God willing, a future spread before me. I can’t change anything about my past but I can use it to inform my future.

A lot of things will change on Tuesday, November 03, 2020, for better or for worse. My age is merely one of them. Assuming, of course, that I make it through Tuesday in good health.

The world might focus on the “bigger” Presidential election story (assuming, of course, that our democracy makes it through Tuesday in good health), but whichever you decide to follow, no matter what happens (and no matter how we feel about it) there’s no going back.

Milestones are irreversible. A new chapter will begin – different from the preceding ones but the same in many ways. It’s good to have a colorful past to draw upon to know it’ll be okay and to help us find our way.

*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today is the final installment in the series. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*

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When Mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005 and given a 5% chance of living for more than a year, resilience steeled her for the fight and brought our family together to support her.

When I quit my job coming back to Connecticut from Iowa to help Mom in her day-to-day fight, resilience got me a last-minute slot in the LSATs, and admitted to UCONN Law School less than a year later.

And when I graduated into a Great Recession that collapsed each of Connecticut’s economic pillars, resilience let me piece together a living through odd jobs and substitute teaching anchored by longer “contract” positions doing document review for big law firms or working for the Speaker of the House during the state legislative session.

Life had thrown me a few curveballs, but with luck and resilience, I was carving out a professional path for myself in Connecticut’s insular political and legal communities.

More importantly, I’d found the girl I wanted to marry. Jenny was a perfect complement to my life accepting my quirks and encouraging me to take risks like running for State Representative.

In fact, Jenny was so supportive that she even served as my Deputy Treasurer doing all of the complicated filing and paperwork for Connecticut’s Citizens Election Program.

If you ever want to test someone’s love for you, spring a last-minute filing deadline on them with Connecticut’s complicated State Elections Enforcement Commission.

By November of 2010, just after my 30th birthday, it felt like life was finally getting back on track. Jenny and I had been dating for over two years, were talking about engagement rings, and found the perfect condo to move into together in the neighboring town of Canton (even though they overwhelmingly rejected me as their choice for State Representative just weeks earlier).

On the drive over to sign the lease we’d been approved for (with the first-month, last-month, and security deposit check in hand), Jenny casually mentioned on a phone call with the founder of the company she worked for that she was on her way to sign a lease.

The founder told her to immediately pull over. “I can’t let you sign that lease,” she said, “without telling you that we’re selling the company at the end of the month and the purchasing company is going to try to recruit you to move to Austin, Texas.”

It was as if our relationship had just been sideswiped by a tractor-trailer truck.

The next few weeks were a blur of uncertainty. The Texas company did take over. They aggressively pursued Jenny who, as the creator of the product they acquired, was essential for managing the transition.

It wasn’t clear what this meant for our relationship. We knew that we both loved each other and wanted to stay together, but it wasn’t easy to see how it could work with her in Texas and me in Connecticut.

I had spent the past five years cultivating a very specific network and set of skills that couldn’t move with me to Texas.

In Connecticut, I was the three-time-elected youngest Democratic Town Committee Chairman in the state. I was on a first-name basis with every Constitutional officer including the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of the State. My Congressman had just campaigned door-to-door with me supporting my long-shot bid for State Representative.

Most importantly, as a newly-sworn in lawyer, I wouldn’t be able to get reciprocity in Texas without working as a lawyer in Connecticut for another four years. In Connecticut, I was a lawyer; in Texas, I was nobody. Even if I said, “screw it,” and moved with her, would she still love me as a nobody?

A number of gut-wrenching decisions faced us. Connecticut was not bouncing from the Great Recession and without full-time employment, I couldn’t promise Jenny that we’d make it work if she stayed.

Sure, I was working in the third-largest law firm in the state, but for a third-party vendor on a case that could end any day without the guarantee that another job would follow. And yes, I was on very good terms with the state’s highest office-holders, but there was a government-wide hiring freeze that wasn’t ending any time soon.

Plus, there was Mom. I’d originally moved home to care for her, but she was back to working full-time herself and no longer needed me. In fact, that January marked the five-year anniversary of her successful surgery, which is a crucial marker for being determined officially “cancer free.”

So we left.

All of it, behind.

Just weeks after dancing next to the Governor and his wife on the stage at his inaugural ball, Jenny and I packed up everything we owned (on her new company’s dime), shipped it across the country, then got on a plane and set out to make a new life together in Texas.

Austin’s a government town, maybe I’d find something involving legislative process or public policy down there, assuming Texans take kindly to Connecticut Democrats, which they probably do, right?

Or perhaps I’d sit for the Texas bar and get myself a seersucker suit, or try my hand at something new, or finally put my writing degree to work in some creatively fulfilling work.

The years leading up to our Texas move in February of 2011 had forced me to jump from Plan A to B, then C, and so far down the line, I wasn’t sure I even had a plan anymore.

But I know who I wanted to figure it out with. All Jenny and I had was each other as we stepped off that plane into the great unknown and the unshakable belief that resilience would see us through.

*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today I’m focused on ages 24 through 30. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*

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The memories from my late teens and early twenties seem almost magical because there is no contradicting evidence.

We weren’t a bunch of sloppy drunks gathered around shoddily-constructed bonfires located way too close to combustible propane tanks and kegs; we were young and beautiful revelers of freedom kissed by God. You’ll never convince me otherwise.

There isn’t much need to take pictures when you’re going to live forever and are surrounded by the “life-long friends” you just met last semester. 

While I don’t have many pictures from those years, I do have a hand-written record of my deepest thoughts and ambitions.

I started the journal because my favorite high school history teacher told me that all great men (and women) through history engaged in the sort of journalistic self-reflection that both fortify your character to meet great challenges and preserve an authentic-enough record for researchers to rely upon when writing history.

The essence of his advice was: if you want to be remembered, write your story down. 

My entries were few and far between and mostly chided myself for not writing more regularly, but they also offer such an authentic window into how I felt at that time, which is why this week’s column consists mostly of two excerpts from Yester-Chris.

I could write retrospectively about my early contrasts with self-doubt and ambition or about my years-long search to find what I truly believe, but it’s more authentic coming straight from the source.

You can read an awful lot into the gap between these two entries, and I hope that you will. 

The first entry is from July 10, 2001 where I’m 20-years-old, on summer break from Ithaca College, and about to start a fall “semester abroad” program in Washington, DC working in the United States Senate. 

I am spending my days and evenings working as a pizza delivery driver and my free time diving deeply into both the Christian bible and the stories of America’s founding fathers.

I’m studying these subjects on my own, outside of any school requirements, for the sole purpose of finding my own identity through the twin lenses of law and morality. 

On that date, I wrote:

I wonder if I’ll ever be a great man. I have always had a strong feeling that I would do something great in the world, but it could just be a lie that I allow myself to believe in order to make life easier.

If I am to be a great man, when will I start?

In High School, I always told myself that my greatness would begin in college. I’m halfway through college and have yet to do anything that even hints of potential.

Now I tell myself that it will start in Washington, or after I finish school. As more and more time passes I keep changing my expectations. When will the time be right?

I fear that I lack ambition.

People tell me that I have ambition, yet I’ve never aimed for a challenge. The people who tell me this, friends and family, all point to the few accomplishments I’ve made, but to me these are nothing. Do they over-evaluate what I’ve done or do I under-evaluate it?

It would be easy for me to listen to them and see myself as making real progress, but I would be lying to myself. My problem is a fear of failure.

All great men have taken chances. Many of them failed several times before succeeding. George Washington lost more battles than he won. Abe Lincoln lost numerous elections before becoming President… So all great men have two things in common: ambition and courage.

I have all of the ambition in the world, but I never pursue my goals. I stay awake at night thinking about the things I will someday do. But when the sun rises it chases away my courage and leaves me with hollow dreams.

I want to fail. I want something to blow up in my face and leave me shattered and defeated. I think that if I suffered a great loss, I would see that I still survived. Maybe then I wouldn’t be afraid to fail. I wonder how it feels to fail? 

What’s it like to face the people that you once so loudly and proudly told of the chance you were taking? Knowing that they are thinking of how you failed, and that you couldn’t even live up to your own expectations.

It must be the most awful feeling in the world. Maybe that is why succeeding feels so good.

When I think of the chance that America took in signing the Declaration of Independence, I am overwhelmed.

What a bold and daring act for these men to do. All of them had the strength of character, the testicular fortitude that I lack. These mostly rich and powerful men should have been content to live their lives in total prosperity. Instead, they risked their lives for nothing more than an idea.

There is no reason for me not to strive for greatness. James Madison was shorter than me. Washington had worse teeth than me. And Ben Franklin was fatter than me. I am smart, witty, personable, and young. I can accomplish almost anything. 

When it is all said and done and my day of judgment is at hand, I believe I will be asked one question, “You have been given many unique talents and qualities. I have given you both strengths and weaknesses. Did you live up to your potential?” 

Inevitably, my answer will be no. Too much time has already passed for me to answer otherwise. But, my one true goal in life is to be able to answer: “No, but I honestly tried my hardest to use the gifts I have. While I could have done more, I refused to do less.”

I don’t need to be a great man, I don’t need to accomplish anything; but I do need to try. If it were easy, would it really be worth it?

Make freedom ring!

The next entry comes several months after I had graduated from college.

Failing to find any employment greater than that same pizza-delivery job, I took a chance on pursuing something different.

On November 30, 2003, at the age of 23, I wrote:

Last week I had the unfortunate chance to attend a young person’s funeral. It was deeply depressing, entirely moving, and eerily inspiring.

Approximately 24 hours later I held my two-month-old second cousin in my arms for the first time. 

The relationship between life and death is awe-inspiring. We never really become any less fragile than that tiny infant. We also never seem to have less potential than a newborn.

I am so amazed by human capability. We can deal with such heartache, loss, and pain. We are a species that is constantly overcoming difficulties, only to find new ones and overcome them.

Right now I am sitting in the beautiful state of New Hampshire where I have been working on Senator John Edwards’ Presidential campaign for almost 2 months.

There are many things in life that I value and this campaign embodies almost all of them.

I believe in the equality of mankind.

I believe in hard work and family.

I believe in raising healthy, intelligent people who will lead mankind into peace and prosperity.

But, most importantly, I believe in offering opportunity to every person who is willing to realize their own potential.

I know that my new cousin will have healthcare, a good education, and will likely find success in life. It pains me that so many others might not.

As I held my second cousin in my arms on Thanksgiving with Chrissy’s funeral still fresh in my mind, I realized not only how fortunate I am, but once again how much potential I have.

I enjoy life. I have a lot of fun with it. But I also work hard and I’m glad that right now I believe in my work. Before the funeral, I was upset about not getting paid, having no healthcare, and my general uncertainty of the future. But I know this now: I am alive and doing good work.

I am bringing joy into my friends and families lives while working for positive changes in both America and the world. My situation might not be ideal and it may never be, but I’m gonna work like hell to make the most of what I’ve got.

I’m right where I want to be and doing what I want to do. Somehow, the funeral and child combined to remind me of exactly what I value.

I am so proud of who I am and what I’m doing. Nothing can replace that.

*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today I’m focused on my early adult years. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*

The post Revelry and Ambition: Reflections on My Life as a Young Adult appeared first on Uncommon Discourse.

I paid a lot of attention to what other people were doing in middle school and high school because I was still trying so hard to figure out what I should do.

These were the years of my childhood where I steered off the path my brothers carved and started pursuing my own interests.

Baseball gave way to summer musicals. Dropping basketball gave me more time to read and write. Instead of accumulating baseball cards, I started buying comic books and sci-fi fantasies.

At times I was annoyingly enthusiastic with the theater kids while at other times I tried on aggressiveness with the football team (though I couldn’t play because of an incomplete collar bone, I was on the team as equipment manager and friends with most of the players).

Then during other times, I’d hide in the back deconstructing everything with the jaded kids only to later commiserate with the overachievers about how important it was to get into a good college.

I was an aberration: an amenable rebel. As I figured out how the world worked (particularly my high school administration) I lined myself up to successfully jump through all the necessary hoops, but I immediately resented the hoop holders.

For example, the first time I ever drank alcohol was in the Superintendent of Schools’ basement.

That fact sounds so much cooler than it actually was when I don’t provide any context, so I won’t. I mention it merely to illustrate how I awkwardly I toed the line: I was a good enough kid to be allowed inside the Superintendent’s house but bad enough to steal his liquor when he wasn’t paying attention.

The strangest thing about adolescence is that it is the quickest time in your life but when you’re in it, it feels like it will never end.

My senior year of high school was mostly spent agonizing over the fact that even though I’d turned 18, my childhood just kept going. I was still living at home in the same small town with the same group of kids I’d known my whole life.

Even though I really liked almost everyone in my grade, I desperately wanted out. I channeled this frustration into a public access TV sketch comedy show my friends and I created called “Surprise! We Found Your Mom.”

Our most popular sketch – and the one that got us in the most trouble – was a satire of the popular MTV show Celebrity Deathmatch.

Instead of featuring claymation figures of popular celebrities fighting to the death, our skit was called Faculty Deathmatch and depicted Play-Doh renderings of our high school teachers fighting to the death.

It was a huge hit that instantly went “viral,” which in 1999 meant that several people taped it on their VCRs and showed it to their friends.

The “virality” of Faculty Death Match taught us that, while video gives you full control prior to broadcast, you can’t control what happens once it’s out there – like who makes their own copy, where those copies are shown, or how it is received.

We had never imagined that the tape would get replayed throughout the school, or that our teachers would actually see it. We were just trying to make our friends laugh.

Since we used the public access TV channel, the school had no direct oversight of our activities and after many chats in the principal’s office, they decided the only thing they could do is ban us from filming on school property, which worked for us.

Luckily, this all happened when students were still allowed to have a sense of humor and the thought of violence inside a suburban public school was utterly absurd. A few weeks later, the Columbine High School shooting happened and humor’s freedom went out the window.

The administration couldn’t ban public access TV shows, but they promptly banned trench coats, which the shooters had famously worn.

This was a problem because the character I played to host the show was an Englishman named Mortimer Gaffbeeb who always appeared in a blue trench coat under a black umbrella while he searched for his missing mom.

I once again found myself in the office, but this time for being a known trench-coat wearer.

With great earnestness, the Vice Principal told me that he had seen me wearing the trench coat in the past and warned me that continuing to do so would be considered a threat to the school.

Somehow wearing a trench coat outweighed the controversy from simulating several faculty members’ deaths, which given the sudden gravity of our formerly light-hearted offense was more than fine with me.

I promised to never wear the trench coat on school grounds again and breathed a sigh of relief two months later at graduation when I finally stepped away from the stupidity of adolescence and into the stupidity of young adulthood.

*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today I’m focused on my adolescence. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*

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The post I Was Bad at Puberty: Reflections on My Adolescence appeared first on Uncommon Discourse.

If there’s anything 5-year-old boys don’t want in 1986, it’s to be considered a girl.

I vividly remember bracing myself in the door frame and resigning myself to the fact that the costume parade must go on while praying that nobody else would make the association.

I mention this story any time kid’s Halloween costumes come up and point to it as one of the earliest examples of how my parents’ divorce adversely impacted my life.

No 1986 father would let his son get on a public school bus dressed as a kangaroo mom. The solution is obvious, you tear off the pouch, give him boxing gloves, and call him a boxing kangaroo.

This week I discovered a news clipping among old family photos that calls my entire memory into question and proves that the costume was so much worse than I remember.

For starters, I always thought Mom made the costume for me with her sewing machine. She did not. It’s entirely made of taped-together paper grocery bags.

Also, I always thought my “baby” was an awesome toy I owned with a long cord attached to a plastic kangaroo that hopped when you squeezed a bulb pump.

But that wasn’t my baby kangaroo; mine looked more like a paper-wrapped sweet potato.

It’s so easy to reflexively protect our versions of the truth even when they’re wrong. If you had asked me a week ago what I wore for Halloween when I was five years old, I would’ve sworn up and down that I was a female kangaroo.

Reality is often stranger than the truth we stitch together inside our heads.

The foundation of my memory was sound. I was on elementary school grounds but I hadn’t yet enrolled in kindergarten.

I was actually in a preschool summer camp held on the elementary school grounds. And though I was dressed as a kangaroo, it wasn’t Halloween. It was Animal Day at camp.

This is a classic example of relying on too much “if, then” thinking. If I was at Towpath Elementary School, I must’ve been a student. If I was so young I can barely remember, it must’ve been kindergarten. If I was in a costume, it must’ve been Halloween.

None of those assumptions are correct.

My childhood memories are like pipe cleaners pasted on popsicle sticks – they don’t hold up that well and you’ve really gotta love me to think they’re something special.

Most of my memories are emotion-based.

Emotions reverberate through time so much more clearly than facts or dates. I have no idea how old I was when I had my beloved pet hamster Squirmy but I’ll never forget the horror of feeling his tumor for the first time or the sadness I felt burying him in our backyard.

I couldn’t tell you which friends were in my second-grade class without looking at a class photo but I can go on in great detail about my childhood friends even though I flowed in and out of closeness with them depending on who was in my class that year, what sport I was playing, or how active I was in Sunday School.

My friends have always been compartmentalized.

When we look to the future we wonder who we’ll become and when we look to the past we wonder who we were.

The lack of definitive memories allows us the freedom to find glimpses in the past of either the person we are now or of the person we still want to become. Memories are like horoscopes, you can pretty much shape them to fit any view of yourself that you choose.

One of my favorite personal artifacts comes from 1991. It’s my 4th-Grade class magazine publishing a favorite poem every kid wrote in class that year.

The cover of the magazine (I’d include a photograph here but it’s packed in a box because I’m moving next week) has one square each student drew to accompany their poem.

My square, in between pictures of happy people, sunny skies, and beautiful fields is simply the handwritten word “WAR” repeated four times. The poem begins, “Saddam Hussein is insane. While people wait, he invades Kuwait.”

I’ve revisited this poem several times in my life and each time found it indicative of a different part of my personality.

As a young man waving the flag after 9/11, the poem proved that I long stood against tyranny. As a comedian, it proved that I mined world events for humor. Now, as a writer, it proves that I intuitively connect on shared experiences.

The far more likely truth is that we got assigned a poem and I complained that I didn’t know what to write about so the teacher said, “pick something from the news.” But I put extra weight behind it now because it’s recorded and preserved.

I look searchingly at my past as a grandmother might examine her newest grandchild for hints of familial resemblances.

I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince myself that my past was a window to who I am now, or that who I am now lives up to who I once was. I just know it pleases me when they line up and I glimpse the continuation of something I recognize as me.

*September 24, 2020, started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday. Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflecting on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today takes me through Year 10. Daily-ish reflections may be found on my Facebook Page or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.*

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The post Pasted Memories: Reflecting on My Life from Ages 4 through 10 appeared first on Uncommon Discourse.

September 24, 2020 started a 40-day countdown to my 40th birthday.

Since I couldn’t travel to Ireland (½ of my ancestral homeland) as originally planned, I’ve committed to reflect on a year of my life per day for each of the 40 days. Today takes me through Year 3.

Daily-ish reflections may be found on Facebook or on the new 40 Years of Wondering page of this website.

I have a tendency to think about my early childhood the way I think about the French and Indian War. I’m vaguely aware that it happened and can identify the main talking points but I don’t have the context necessary to speak intelligently on the matter.

Indeed, I’ll immediately backtrack if pressed on any point. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about, I’ll believe you since I clearly don’t.

After all, who actually cares about the French and Indian War? It’s just something other people did that directly impacted the young colonists’ lives while nearly crushing them with debt – just like most childhoods!

It is after the colonists stand up on their own two feet and proclaim their values that I start paying attention. And so it’s been with my life.

I hardly ever think about my first few years. Mostly because I have no memories of them but also because they just didn’t seem that interesting.

Until I had my daughter.

Then, I started thinking about them more but still just focused on the few things I knew to be true: I was born the day before Ronald Reagan was elected President. My parents divorced when I was very young. Mom brought a demon cat into the house to terrorize our family.

But those early years mattered – a lot. Early childhood is the most important part of your life that you’ll never remember.

Mom kept a baby book describing a bit about my life and personality through my first three years of life. I read it this week for the first time in a long time.

The book is extremely sweet and thoughtful, though creepy at times.

I could do without knowing how well human hair and teeth preserve inside of paper envelopes.

But it’s nice to have a record of what I was like and how it made Mom feel even though it reads a bit like she’s writing with a future audience (of me) in mind.

There are worse problems to have than a long-deceased mother trying to raise your confidence from beyond the grave.

It’s been a long time since someone other than me wrote about how perfect and sweet and lovable I am!

I’m especially glad Mom kept the book because my daughter’s birth raised a lot of questions about my earliest years and she’s no longer here to answer them.

Instead, she participates through her book. As I read parts out loud to my wife Jenny, she kept laughing and saying, “sounds familiar” to passages about sleeping in late, singing to myself, or stealing other people’s food if it’s left near me.

I thought she was laughing at how I haven’t changed since I was a baby, but she was laughing at how similar our daughter is to the baby Mom describes – me at that age.

What a special moment to have my mother’s love for me as a baby overlap with my wife’s love for our baby – even if only for a few pages.

In addition to reading the baby book, I’ve also been flipping through all of the old family photo albums.

The weird thing about looking at pictures of your own early childhood is that everything impacted the person you are now, but the person you are now doesn’t recognize any of it.

Take Owen, for example. He’s the guy sitting next to me and my brothers on Christmas morning, 1984. He was Mom’s first boyfriend after the divorce.

Owen must’ve had a pretty big presence in my life when I was 3 if he’s sitting with us on Christmas less than two months after I turned 4. But I only know it’s Owen because his name is written on the picture’s back.

I know OF Owen, but I wouldn’t have recognized him in any way without the context.

Confession time: the Maury Povichiest thing about my life is the following sentence: “Mom’s boyfriend was Dad’s girlfriend’s ex-husband.”

Nothing about that entirely true sentence is healthy, but here we are kneeling in front of a Christmas tree pretending that it’s fine.

Happily, they’re all non-memories to me now existing only as an interesting factoid to wonder about years later or to use as the punchline to a Jeff Foxworthy “Might be a redneck” joke.

I can tell you stories about at least three of the ornaments pictured behind Owen but nothing more about him.

The lasting memories are the things we built upon.

The healthy relationships my parents ensured my brothers and I shared with each of them.

The sibling relationships that went from my brothers adoring me for my first year to me chasing after them in my second year and continues for a lifetime of twists of turns.

The only thing I can definitely tell you about The French and Indian War is that it was the training ground for young George Washington to stumble and right himself before going on to become the person we all recognize today. The same can be said of my early childhood.

We all start somewhere.

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The post 40 Years of Wondering: Reflections on My First Three Years of Life appeared first on Uncommon Discourse.