60 Days to Heaven

If you are a religious person, you know that the cornerstone of faith is the complete and unwavering dependence upon divinity for all of your needs. Whatever problems that you face, financial, mental, physical or otherwise, your charge as a believer is to do just that – believe that your help comes from a higher power.

The more comfortable I become in my role as a father, I begin to see the definitive nature of the Heavenly Father. My infant son depends on his mother and me for all basic needs. If he needs changing, feeding or comforting, he is becoming more knowledgeable that his cry for assistance will send us to his aid. But as his father, I’m learning that his dependence on me specifically yields many reactions and characteristics that will shape his life for years to come.

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Just to answer a few questions about my drawn out hiatus from this blog. First, my wife and I are still together and very much in love. Our son is growing beautifully and should be walking soon. Just got his first tooth, and we’re trying to move him on to third foods.

Now, my apologies. It isn’t that I no longer like to write about love and marriage from the black male perspective, or that its not worthwhile. It’s just that things have been growing in other directions, and the thought was if I tended to them, I’d wind up right back here.

Where I always wanted to be.

Isn’t it funny how you mind can take you in a million directions, only to eventually place you right back in the place you always should’ve remained? When you go out and lose all of your money, you wind up right back home with the wealth of family and stability. When you become rich and influential, you yearn for the familiarity and friends and anonymity.

And just when you think your love has run its course, that affection and trust can only keep your interest but so long, the complexity of human relations and the pursuit of carnal and emotional contentment brings you right back to that same loving feeling.

Mistrust or disinterest are often the at the root of a departure, but sometimes, you just grow up. But experience and wisdom are two separate things, and wisdom always yields it influence to the power of love.

So I’m back. Hopefully, in whatever situation you may have departed from, you’ll join me.

Yes, it’s been a long time since I last posted on the joys of spousal bliss, fatherhood, and everything in between, and yes; you deserve an explanation.

I’ve been hard at work building the content for what I hope will be a soon-arriving career move, full-time work on the HBCU Digest. If you are an alumnus of an historically black college or university, or just enjoy following news on higher education, consider checking it out. And if you like it, consider making a donation.

So that’s where I’ve been over the last month. I never meant to be neglectful to the faithful few that read, or to the aspects of my life which I’ve enjoyed sharing over the last two years. I just shifted priorities a little bit. I thought about this blog everyday, about how many things I’ve wanted to write. And somehow, I convinced myself that other work was more important.

And if that sounds familiar to you, you really might want to consider checking up on your relationship. Not that you mean to neglect your wife, your children or your household, but its easy to neglect the things that are most precious to you in an effort to improve your hold on those things.

A lot of guys get tied up in work and fail to see that talking and laughing with your son or daughter will make all of the difference in the crime your kids won’t commit, or the bad relationship choice they won’t make. It seems simple enough, but even in the eyes of my five-month-old son, I see the difference in his smile and reaction when I’m paying attention to him, against when I’m not focused on him.

This is particularly important for the relationship to your wife. Your kids need to see that you can balance your professional power with your parenting power. And they need to see that you can balance both with your partnering power. You can ill afford to lose the love that sustains you when you are empty, holds you when you are hurt, and makes you feel complete. As a man, a husband moreover, the tenderness you can show identifies a semblance of priority; a care that travels beyond the food you can put on the table, the lights you can keep on, and the heat you can keep flowing through your home.

It’s easy to want to expand the certainty for those things, because they are needed for survival. Men and women are wired for survival, but we guys are consumed with its tangible guarantee. We show love though showing and knowing that our families and able to live. That they are physically empowered to make it through the day.

We rarely consider the emotional empowerment that is just as meaningful to our family. The comforting word that shows our children how proud we are of them. The whisper that shows our wives just how much they attract us physically and emotionally.

We have power. We have power to create money out of thin air. Believers out of non-believers, and meaning out of chaos. But it takes balance to support the kind of families we want to grow into healthy, legacy building units of faith and love.

The same kind of balance it takes to make regular updates on a blog.

I love you. I trust you.

See how interchangeable that is? To have one in a relationship is to have the other, and if one is missing, the other one also has found a serious hiding place within your heart.

As hard as it is to accept, and contrary to most Valentines Day cards and psychological advice, you can’t build trust. You can’t build what has and infinite value and place. It’s like being pregnant; you either are, or you aren’t.

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Have you ever stopped to consider how you are the only person in your relationship that can do the things you do? Ever contemplated your uniqueness not only to your partner, but to your family and the universe as a whole?

Sure, there are people who look better than you, cook better than you, are funnier than you, smarter than you, and more engaging than you. But no one combines it like you do. Your spouse, partner or significant other will tell you; you are the one and only.

And its not just in an emotional sense. Perhaps if people realized how much they are the only person responsible for so much in the lives of their spouse or children, many marriages would be spared the injustice of premature ending. In my house, I’m the one who shovels snow, takes out trash, and reaches for things in high places. I get up when the baby wakes up at night, because he sleeps closer to me.

I check up on lightbulbs, do the vacuuming, make sure our heating filter is regularly changed, and bring up the heavy laundry. My wife can do all of these things, but I’m the only one who does them in our house. I’m the only one who bears the responsibility.

You can’t imagine how many responsibilities in life bear your name, and how much other people depend on you to maintain them. No matter how angry, how tired, how frustrated you become, you are the one and only for so many things that make your life and the life of your loved ones run efficiently.

So the next time you question how important you are to someone, or if what you do matters, think about the role you fill that only you can maintain. You may be surprised, and pleased, with how irreplaceable you are.

The number one question that many people in tense relationships ask is “Should I stay?” The qualifying emotions of love, hope and trust often tip the balances of judgment in favor of everyone else but the person that needs them.

And chief among these emotions is hope. You can love someone and leave them. You can trust someone and not make yourself vulnerable to hurt. But when you hope for someone to reach potential and maturity, there is very little that can be done to shake that optimism. You can’t hope and act otherwise.

So when you get to a point where you are considering leaving a marriage, but there’s something holding you back, it’s the hope that you don’t have to leave. It’s a hope that the comfort you’ve known for so long, whether positive or negative in its affect, doesn’t have to be abandoned for the unknown.

Is that a signal that you shouldn’t leave? Probably not. But it surely is a signal that you aren’t ready to leave. You haven’t come to grips with removing yourself from the drama, the incompatibility, or trauma that has been the hallmark of your relationship.

If you listen to the lyrics of this song, which I’ve heard were written by Michael Jackson, you should be able to easily relate to every word if you are in love. It’s one of a few songs that I feel like exactly captures how I feel about my wife – even though the video is full of daughters.

It’s funny how a simple tune can make you fall in love all over again in a matter of seconds. So I hope to inspire all of the folks out there through the power of music with this new feature – Love’s Soundtrack.

Today’s entry is one of my favorite love songs, “There She Goes” by Babyface feat. Pharrell. Babyface is cool, but Pharrell is my favorite producer.

Enjoy, and for all of the guys out there, imagine replacing your sweetheart’s name in place of “she” in the lyrics; chances are, you probably do feel this way and haven’t said it or acted on it in a while.

If you are a newly married person, or someone who is contemplating marriage, let me give you the best advice you’ll ever receive about the institution.

Never take marriage advice.

People who offer advice mean well; we all assume that we’ve been through enough trial and error to impart some wisdom on some less-knowing person in a like circumstance. The problem is that no one ever discloses all of the things that didn’t work for their circumstance. Not failures, mind you; but 10,000 ways that don’t work.

A smart thing to do is to ask about best practices. Habits. Nuances that make life easier for married people. No one has a universal answer; it’s like trying to offer a bride a wedding dress that is commonly worn; it ain’t gonna happen. Never take advice. Instead, try to receive the lighter and more soluble characteristics of successful marriages.

Or at least, those marriages that are successful on the outside.

It’s amazing how life can create ripple effects that echo for generations. One bad thought can echo throughout your day. One negative action can ripple throughout your lifetime.

And one evil person can effect a family for generations.

It seems far gone, but if families knew how their bad habits, their proclivities and their poor judgment cascade down through to their children, grandchildren and beyond, would they make the same kind of faulty decisions? Would they be willing to be so selfish?

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