Thirty three thousand feet over the North Atlantic and my buns are killing me.  It started with a mild gnawing, but was soon a tingling sensation.  Within 20 minutes, I was in full blown agony.  It felt like a thousand gnomes with toothpick swords were stabbing my ass like they were testing the thanksgiving turkey.  The cause of this torture?  Abby, my  seventeen year-old daughter who fell asleep on my lap as we jet toward France.

Paris was the destination of choice for her senior trip, celebrating her imminent graduation from high school. A moment is unfolding right here, right now, when time, as I experience it, collapses, and the present and the past and the now are all caught up together.  Everything is “now.”  As I sit here grinding my teeth to keep from moving and waking her up, there are tears rolling down my cheeks.  But not from pain.  These tears are falling because I am so thankful to be feeling this pain.

Just a year or so ago, Abby was so angry at me over my abject failure as her father and  as a husband to her mother that she could scarcely be in the same room with me, much less put her head in my lap to sleep. That anger was justified, but it still broke my heart, because I had broken hers.  And one of the many consequences of my terrible choices was that a thousand miles had appeared between us.

One of the moments from that awful time of exile just came and settled on me now as she sleeps.  I remember returning from a trip last year and climbing on a bus at Dallas/Ft. Worth airport bound for the remote parking lot.  There was a family on the bus, obviously travel-weary.  The mom and dad  held hands and nodded sleepily  with the rolling of the bus.  My heart ached to see a teen-age girl with her eyes-closed and her head resting on her father’s shoulder.  I thought, “That is the way it’s supposed to be.  A tired girl should have a strong father’s shoulder to rest upon when she needs it.  Who is there right now for Abby?  Who can she call upon when a strong shoulder is needed?  That night there were tears too – bitter tears of regret and remorse.  And I wondered if I would ever get Abby back, if she could ever let me back in, if she would ever again trust me with her tender heart.  I knew I didn’t deserve it, but I couldn’t help hoping that the bond between a father and a daughter was strong enough to survive even this.

The next moment that came to visit tonight was from over fifteen years ago.  Abby, then eighteen months old,  was desperately ill with a resistant strain of pneumonia and the doctors in the intensive care unit weren’t sure what the outcome would be.  Abby was a lively toddler with dazzling, fine blond hair and blue eyes that got her all the attention she could stand.  But on this night, she lay absolutely still, marshaling her flagging strength to continue to fill her tiny lungs.  The wheezing, rasping, gurgling sounds she made with every breath terrified me.

I tried holding her every way I could think of to make it easier on her, but nothing seemed to help.  Finally, when I was about to despair, I noticed that as she was laying with her head high up on my chest, the rasping was subsiding.  I held as still as I could for fear she would lose that tenuous advantage.  After a few minutes my backside began to ache and tingle, and then it started to hurt miserably.  No, miserably was not the right word.  I was happy for that pain.  But there was nothing heroic about it.  I had finally found a way to do something to help her, to bear a little pain so that hers was less.

I sat there hold my little girl for six hours, until I couldn’t feel anything at all south of my navel.  And when the next day came, I flew with her to Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth where she would spend five weeks on the way to a full recovery.  As I sit here now, grateful that my old buns are once again on fire, I can see that her love for her daddy is indeed amazing.

Grace is about getting anyhow what you don’t deserve anyway, and in just a couple of hours this big silver jet will carry us over the top of the world, and as the sun greets us, we will see together something that neither of us has ever witnessed – a Paris morning!  Kairos has again revealed herself.  In spite of devastating failures, a father’s love for his daughter can inspire him to remake himself into a far better dad.  And a daughter’s love for her daddy can cover a thousand miles of pain and disappointment, and together again, they can see another beautiful day.

Tomorrow morning Paris will open her arms to us and reveal her mysteries and her timeless beauty.  But I know nothing will thrill me as much as the fact that I am seeing it with her, . . . my lovely, loving, pain in the old man’s behind.

Thanksgiving has passed again, and again I am staring at the scale in disbelief. Traditionally, Thanksgiving is a time for reflection on our “gratitude deficit.” All to often, it has become little more than an excuse for gluttony.

As a young man, it was my practice to fast for the twenty-four hours before the Thanksgiving meal. The stubborn growling in my gut during that day, and as I sat down with my family to a sumptuous spread, was a reminder to myself that at that very moment, all over the world, there were people who were hungry, really hungry. And not the kind of symbolic, self-imposed hunger that ends in a feast. Real, unrelenting, terrifying hunger that towers over all other aspects of life. First to eat. Then to live. Those who live day by day with nourishment in real doubt, don’t have the luxury of . . . well, you name it.

Okay, it was one of those moments that sends a chill of excitement up your spine, makes your hair stand on end (if you have any – and all you can say is “Wow!”

That moment came for me just a few days ago at the La Jolla Writers Conference.  Kelly and I were in attendance and the first copies of my book had arrived at my publicist’s office that same day.  Copies were on the table in the little temporary bookstore set up by a wonderful local bookseller.  We had spent a delightful day going to seminars on the art and business of writing.  The keynote speaker the night before was Jan Burke.

Jan is a best-selling writer of better than 15 novels.  She burst into the national consciousness when President Bill Clinton during his very first interview as president was asked by a journalist what he was reading presently, and Clinton said “Good Night, Irene, by Jan Burke.”

When it comes to love, there is no such thing as “a safe distance”

Mom used to tell me, “Son, now you keep a safe distance from that _______.”
Now she might say it about any number of things that just might hurt me if I got too close, say a table saw, or a firecracker, or whatever it was my dad was working on in the garage.

While it is true that for most things that can hurt you, keeping a safe distance is a reasonable way to mitigate the risk of injury, there is one exception – love.

When it comes to love, there is no such thing as a safe distance.

With surprising frequency patients come to me hoping I will tell them how to safeguard their hearts, seeking insurance against betrayal or disappointment when it comes to love. “Doc, I was so hurt when my ex cheated on me. Now, with this new relationship I feel so safe and so loved. But now I need to make sure I won’t get hurt again.”

To be remembered. To matter to someone. To live a life that counts for something. Perhaps even to make a difference in the world. Most people are conscious of such aspirations.

Some of those who do not have not matured enough yet, but will soon hear the call to something bigger, to give their lives to a purpose beyond themselves. A few unfortunate souls may sadly have learned to obliterate all evidence of the impulse to serve, to look beyond their own interests. For them, life is merely a matter of meeting the next hunger, of satisfying the immediate need, of sacrificing at the altar of ego all impulses to love anyone or anything but themselves.

I suspect most people live out their lives in tension between these two extremes. They look with admiration on those who have mastered their selfish needs and are dedicated totally, even at the cost of all of their energies and sometimes their very lives, to the larger good. They call them saints and often enshrine them in history as symbols of what they hope in some small way to emulate.

This article is reprinted from “Wichita Falls Medicine” magazine where it was published about a dozen years ago now.

As a psychologist reflecting on his impending fortieth birthday, perhaps it is natural to find myself reflecting on  adolescence. Maybe it is because, after working with hundreds of adolescents and their families, I feel I understand them better than I used to.

This conversation comes up from time to time in therapy.  It probably occurs in unspoken form much more often.  But it points to the mystery inherent in this work.  Over a decade ago, my very first client seemed to understand intuitively the psychotherapeutic relationship really is.  I think he may have been a sort of prophet to me.

“Don’t you have anything to say?”  The voice on the phone was her ex’s, but he sounded like he was in a well.  The question stumped her.  When the silence had stretched to a full minute, he spoke again, “Susan?”  She heard no rancor in his voice, but no passion either.  She quietly sat the phone down and with that simple act, closed an epoch of her life.

Was Sigmund Freud a genius who, in large part, shaped the psyche of the 20th Century?  Or was he a sex-obsessed cocaine addict with the mother of all mother fixations?  You decide.  But at least give him credit for giving us one of the great concepts by which we have come to understand ourselves:  the “ego.”

In Freud’s understanding, the ego was more passive than we think of it today. For him the ego was the battleground upon which the hog-wild and infantile “Id” waged its epic struggle with the punitive, paternalistic “Super-ego.”  Today, we use the term differently. Someone with a “big” ego is said to be self-involved and conceited.  But often we refer to our own ego, meaning the way in which we see ourselves and get our needs met.