The Flawed Man in the Mirror Looked Like My Father
Identities revealed.
It was more than a mid-life crisis when I got fired for the first time. It was a broken promise to never be like my father.
Dad was a fun and intelligent guy, a former Fulbright Scholar who drank his way through my childhood. He rarely held a job for more than a few months, burdening me, his eldest son, with financial anxiety, lava-like anger and a shame I wore like an invisible iron blanket.
I vowed never to fail as he did. I worked relentlessly to fulfill that promise, building a successful career that provided a jumbo-mortgage lifestyle in a leafy suburb for my wife and three kids.
Yet there I was, unemployed, creating uncertainty and financial anxiety for my family. The man staring at me in the mirror had an unsettling resemblance to my father.
Could I accept that he profoundly influenced me?
It wasn’t all bad. Dad transformed after years of AA meetings and reliance on his Higher Power. He lived decades of unappreciated sobriety until the day I picked up the phone to hear the shocking news from my mother.
Dad was dead.
At his funeral, nameless sober men emerged from the shadows to say he mentored them while honoring confidentiality. I slowly came to realize that my father’s sobriety was a rippling victory of life-changing proportions.
This created a happy problem for the movie about myself playing in my head. I had to rewrite the script with no hope of winning “Best Supporting Victim in a Documentary about Dysfunctional Families.”
My father’s flawed face became a profile of courage. When I stopped playing the blame game, I saw three things about myself:
Yes, I was flawed.
Yes, I failed.
But I wasn’t a failure.
If Dad could remake his life, I could rebuild my career.
My identity crisis became my identity revelation.
