{"id":1230,"date":"2016-12-24T11:52:48","date_gmt":"2016-12-24T16:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2016-12-24T12:00:57","modified_gmt":"2016-12-24T17:00:57","slug":"milestones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=1230","title":{"rendered":"Milestones"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a few years now, I’ve been worried about 2016. Not because of the presidential election (although, wow, that turned out to be a mess), but because in September I would turn 40 and, exactly four weeks later, I would become the father of a teenager. Those were two milestones I expected to knock me over. Looking back on the fall of 2016, those two events turned out pretty well, thanks to some intentional planning and a little encouragement from my friends and family.<\/p>\n

\"Utah<\/a>I wanted to do something different for my 40th birthday. My usual birthday celebration is to take the girls out to dinner somewhere with a waitress. It’s a fun treat, but not much of a celebration. This year, we went out to dinner (thanks for the seafood, Puckett’s Boathouse!), but the weekend after my birthday, I took a four-day trip to Utah. If you’ve read my blog, you know I love to travel with my girls and explore new parts of this beautiful world of ours. And you may know I get to travel for work a fair bit. My Utah trip was my first trip by myself, just for fun.<\/p>\n

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After weeks of planning and cashing in some Southwest miles, I flew into Salt Lake City, drove down to the southeastern part of Utah, explored Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park for a day and a half, then drove west to meet up with my brother at Bryce Canyon National Park. We spent a great day hiking around Bryce and catching up on life, then the next day I headed home. I brought all my camera gear and took a couple thousand photos along the way. (I took so many photos, I’m still editing them, three months later!) I even brought my tripod and did a little night sky photography in Arches. The national parks in Utah were simply stunning. If you get the chance to see them, take it!<\/p>\n

\"Utah<\/a>One fun bit about visiting national parks in September: With school in session, there are almost no families. Aside from a few couples in their 20s and 30s, most of my fellow sightseers were retired people. I think this made turning 40 a little easier, too, since I was often the youngest person around! Every now and then, I would spot a couple with kids, and I would wish my girls were with me. Or wish my sweetheart was with me. (She was off having an adventure of her own in Africa for almost the entire month of September!) But I enjoyed the chance to spend a couple of days with my brother. He lives in Arizona now (he’s in the Air Force, so he moves around), and we don’t get to see each other much. When we’re together, however, we’re a couple of chatterboxes. And I enjoyed some time by myself, taking in God’s majestic creation and thinking back over my 40 years on this planet.<\/p>\n

I’m a blessed man.<\/p>\n

Having survived the big Four-Oh, I had four weeks to get ready for the older daughter turning into a teenager. (I like to phrase it like that, as one would describe a person “turning into a werewolf.”) I wanted to make this birthday a special one for her, and I came up with two ideas. The first was a PG-13 movie marathon, just the two of us. She’s seen a few PG-13 movies (Ant-Man in the theaters, Harry Potter at home), but now it was time to embrace her new movie-watching privileges. We came up with quite a list of movies we might watch, but we settled on Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Roman Holiday. Technically, only one of those movies is rated PG-13, but Monty Python totally would have been PG-13 had it come out when PG-13 was a thing. Roman Holiday, on the other hand, was quite PG, but I felt it was time to introduce my daughter to the charm of Audrey Hepburn.<\/p>\n

And charming she was: The now-13-year-old absolutely loved Roman Holiday, even though she was pretty sleepy by the time it ended. (Three movies in a row, even starting in the afternoon, keeps one up late.) She also loved Guardians of the Galaxy, which I knew she would. Han Solo was her favorite character in The Force Awakens; I knew “Starlord” would be a hit. (That scene early on, with him in the ruins trying to convince the bad guys to call him Starlord? Classic.) Monty Python wasn’t received as well. She loved seeing in context all the funny bits she had seen on YouTube (“It’s just a flesh wound.” “What? Behind the rabbit?” “She turned me into a newt!”), but she found the lack of actual plot disappointing. You may recall that the movie ends just before a climactic battle, when the police show up and toss King Arthur, his knights, and the cameraman in a police wagon. “What?! That’s how it ends?!” She was not amused. But two-out-of-three ain’t bad!<\/p>\n

My other idea for making 13 a special day was inspired by something my pastor and his wife did with their oldest daughter when she turned ten, I think. They shared with her ten life lessons they wanted her to know and hold onto, now that she was double-digits. I loved the idea, but their daughter is six months younger than my daughter, so by the time I heard about their plans, it was too late for my daughter’s tenth birthday. So I saved that idea for 13! I spent some time prior to our big day thinking and praying about the lessons I wanted to share. Then I spent an afternoon hand-lettering each of the 13 lessons on colored cardstock paper. I attached them with a ring and presented them to my teenager between movies #1 and #2.<\/p>\n

I won’t share all 13 lessons here. They’re just for her. But I’ll share a couple, just to give a sense of them. One was “God is with you, no matter how far you roam.” That’s something I learned when I spent a semester in Budapest during college, and it’s something I want my kids to believe with all their hearts. Another was “You can’t always control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude.” That’s something my dad taught me, and something he showed me time and time again. Some of the lessons were a little lighter (“Get enough sleep”), but all of them are lessons I’ve learned about life that I wanted to pass on to her.<\/p>\n

That was back in October. Just yesterday, she told me read through the lessons again. She keeps them in her special drawer, with other mementos and souvenirs. I can’t tell you how good it feels to know she treasures this little gift of mine.<\/p>\n

There’s a scene in one of my favorite childhood comic books, West Coast Avengers, when Hawkeye the archer and the other Avengers are stuck in the past with a time machine that only goes backwards. In the 18th century, they run into a young woman whom they believe to the ancestor of a colleague of theirs in the present. Hawkeye writes a note to his colleague, asking her to send the Fantastic Four to ancient Egypt to pick them up, and asks the young woman to save it in her family Bible. This message-in-a-Bible ends up working (the colleague finds it 200 years later), but Hawkeye doesn’t know that when he sends it. There’s a line he says about this being the “longest long shot this avenging archer has ever taken.”<\/p>\n

Thirty years later, I can still remember that line. And it’s what comes to mind when I think about sharing hand-lettered life lessons with my teenager. Or some of the other intentional things I do as a dad. I’m Hawkeye, taking a shot at a target I can’t even see, hoping that one day, years later, I hit the mark and my daughters have what they need to be happy, healthy adults, full of integrity and compassion and faith. Sometimes I shoot an arrow and I get to see it hit (or miss), but sometimes I take a long shot and hope for the best. Parenting takes a lot of effort — I know I have to take those shots — but it takes a lot of faith, too.<\/p>\n

Next year, we turn (in calendar order), 9, 41, and 14. No big milestones there! But, if there were, after this year, I think I could handle them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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