Day 34

Name: Michael Smith

Profession: Registered nurse

Location: His home in Phoenix, Arizona

Question: Why are you where you are right now?

Answer: Because I put my family first

Yes, I interviewed my father. Yes, this blog has become less about meeting new people and more about getting to know people. Yes, I’m completely okay with that. The question is, are you?

Being his first born and a resident of his house for eighteen years, it’s hard for me to typify my father. It’s difficult to boil down more than a decade of conscious experience with the man into any sort of comprehensive analysis, written or otherwise. So instead of littering his story with my bias, I’m going to let him do the talking.

“First and foremost, I’m a human being, which means I have a spirit. I’m alive. I’m a benevolent individual, for the most part. But I’m cynical, and I tend to find humor in the dark side of things, even the really dark side of things. That could be a defense mechanism. I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a family man that likes to make a difference in other people’s lives. I guess that’s where I get off. I don’t think I’m particularly great at it, but I have my moments. The outlook on myself is not a negative one, for the most part it’s not a negative one. I don’t think I’m a bad person. I think I’m a good person. I think that I enjoy people, and, for the most part, I’m easy to get along with. People like me. There are many that don’t…. There’s many people I don’t like. And I’m not perfect. I can’t be everything to everybody. And I’ve never ever ever shown all my cards to anybody. Never…. As a person, who you are is part of your own individual identity. And even though you share your life with somebody, or you share your intimate things with your daughters, your brothers, you wife, keeping a little piece of you is important. That’s my own thing…. I’d prefer to keep that between my maker, or energy. Whatever these issues are, not everybody would consider it positive energy. So if I died with it, it would just become negative energy that’s out there and not left with somebody else, if it is negative. All life is energy. There has to be balance. There has to be both. But the more positive energy you leave with people, living, breathing people, the negative stuff can go be wherever negative energy can be. It doesn’t need to be around people’s hearts and souls. But sometimes it’s funny to watch what happens when it does.”

“The new job that I have is that I will be a registered nurse on an ambulance that transports people from facility to facility. The ambulance would not be responding to 911 calls or emergency sort of things. They’ll be transporting people, for instance, that are at a nursing home, and they are getting sicker and need to go to a hospital. They’ll call us and we’ll pick them up and take them there. Or if somebody’s at a hospital and they need to go home, they need to go home or they need to go to a higher level of care, we’ll be transporting them. They need a registered nurse because if the person’s not stable, they’re on a ventilator or they’re in some critical situation, they need to make sure there’s somebody there who has the education and the knowledge of what to look for, how to assess them, to make sure that they stay stable between the two facilities. I needed to do this because the job that I have right now is a very high acuity, very high-stress job on a telemetry floor at a high-volume hospital’s trauma center. My hours are long and they’re very fast-paced. It’s not that I can’t do that job, it’s just that I need to do something else where I feel like I’m running all day, continually feeling like I’m not caught up. We need the extra money and I need to look at some of the other areas of nursing so I can branch out in my career.”

“I like the job that I have right now. I like the people that I work with, I get a lot of kudos, continual stroking. They like me. They tell me how good I’m doing all the time. I get great response from the patients that I deal with. That appeals to me. It makes me feel like I’m making a difference. The benefits are absolutely wonderful. But I know that I wouldn’t want to do what I do right now for ten years, because I put everything that I have into it every day and it sucks my energy dry. I don’t have anything left over for my wife and my family life. It’s not that I don’t have anything left over. I just don’t feel like there’s much left over. On my days off, it takes me until one or two in the afternoon to feel like I can even get up and start functioning, especially when I do two or three shifts in a row.”

His dream job would be “doing something in music. Traveling. I don’t know. I’m not a musician so I wouldn’t be a rock star or anything like that, but that’s a hard question for me because to get paid for something to do…. It would be to just travel, see the world, do that sort of thing. But I really am drawn to what music does for people and how four or five people on stage can get a crowd of a hundred thousand people in their space all at the same time just by doing what they do. While that may not change the world, perhaps it made a difference in those people’s lives. And there’s a hip factor, and I come from a generation where hip is really important. Something along those lines.”

“I don’t have the balls. I feel like I wouldn’t do well because I have absolutely no experience, and I have no talent.”

“I have a family and I have a wife and children who are grounded, who have their home. To do something like that would pull me away. I also know the only people who get those kind of jobs are the best at what they do and I don’t have the confidence for that. I guess that’s a personality flaw. I’m not chasing my dreams because making my dreams come true is not the most important thing. Those types of dreams, aspirations, are not the most important thing in the world to me. The most important things in the world to me are my family.”

“If I could say that meeting Dee would be the one constant thing that would stay, then I would say yeah. There are a lot of things I would do different. I would make wiser choices when I was thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I didn’t have a lot of tools when I was a young man as to how to figure out what it takes to do well in life. I didn’t have a lot of them, and I’m a slow learner. I would definitely do a lot of things. But it would have to entail that I still had a job where I met Dee. That would have to be a part of it. It’s the truth. I wouldn’t want to change anything. There were lots of jobs that I didn’t like that I had, and I could have done a lot better for her, so she wouldn’t have had to work at all, had I made some better moves earlier on.”

“My wife—she’s given me my children. She works hard every day. She suffers every day and she still manages to make everybody smile.”

“I’m not very ambitious. I’m a very passionate, empathetic individual. I use the people around me to motivate me, basically. If I didn’t have the people in my life right now, I’d probably be a slug.”

“I was determined in life to make sure that my children were going to be raised different than me, and I did that. As a weakness, if I applied myself more to things that interest me or that could improve my life, my wife’s life, my children’s lives, I think I could go a lot farther. That’s definitely a weakness. That’s not to say that I’m completely lacking. It’s just not my strong suit…. If I put a little more effort into not being such a procrastinator and not being such an unmotivated individual, that I think a lot of good things could come from it. I think there’s a lot of things that I don’t do that I could do. It wouldn’t take me a lot of real effort to start attempting those things…. I don’t know why I’m not more ambitious. I don’t know why I’m lazy, and I don’t know why I don’t pursue things that could better my life, better my wife’s life, or better your lives, or even make more of a difference in the community. I don’t know why I prefer to lay back. I also understand that if I did put a little more effort into it, I think that the payoff would be much bigger than what I put into it.”

“Did I do anything to prevent my children from having the same personality flaws that I have? In other words, to make them more ambitious than I am? I don’t know. I try to get them involved in a lot of things. I wasn’t involved in anything. I wanted to get them involved. It wasn’t a focus of mine that they don’t have the same personality flaws. It was more a focus of mine that they were exposed to more positive things in life. Maybe subconsciously, that they would be more like you. More curious about things that are going on and experiencing different things in life. I experienced a lot of things in life, and a lot of them were negative, but to ask me if I directly thought about that and said, ‘I don’t want my kids to be that way….” The only thing that Dee and I did was try to get them involved in things I find interesting that would keep them from sitting in front of the TV.”

“You can’t make them live a certain way. You can’t change them as a person. You can just kind of guide them. They’re going to be who they are.”

If, as a new parent, I asked him for advice, “I wouldn’t want to say the wrong thing. I wouldn’t want to say something off the cuff that would hurt your feelings, because I was saying it out of an emotional thing. If it was done, I’d say you have to put your energy into raising the child, which means that a lot of the fun things in life you’re going to have to cut back. And you’re really, really, really, really going to have to understand that if you want that child, it doesn’t mean your life is over, but it means that your life has changed so much that a lot of the little things that you used to do, the ranking of your priority of things is going to have to go way down. The child is a completely vulnerable individual that you brought into the world. I would also advise you to use your family as much as you can to help you through it. Like I said, that’s just one thing to come to my head.”

“Dee and I had Cassity when I was in nursing school…. We weren’t trying not to have a child or anything like that. We knew it was going to happen, but we weren’t counting on it or anything. We weren’t thinking, ‘Okay. Let’s do it now.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God’ or anything like that. It just wasn’t structured.”