Back to school

My girls and I started school this week. I started my fifteenth year as a high school teacher, Kern started sixth grade, Savannah is now in third, Shelby moved into first, and Alani is officially in school with Kindergarten.

We are now represented in the high school, middle school, and elementary schools in our town. All of us were both excited about the start of school and sad to see our summer of lounging around the pool come to an end.

On Tuesday, I skipped my first period of class to take the three youngest to their first day of the new year. With four daughters, I am often baffled by the differences in personalities that they all posses. One might assume that growing up with the same parents and same environment, there would be more similarities in my children.

Savannah was a veteran of the whole process, Shelby was terrified and crying the whole time, and Alani was... Alani.

She could not be more different than the other three. She is fearless, independent, incredibly intelligent, possesses a sense of humor way beyond her years, and has battled and overcome an addiction of using a foul tongue she inherited from her father. Basically, Alani has no idea she is 5-years-old.

When her mother and I walked her into the Kindergarten class on Tuesday, we were surrounded by other munchkins clinging to their father or mother's leg. Alani simply looked around the room, took a few steps away from me, and quickly turned back and looked up.

"You OK, baby?" I said.

"Yep. You guys can go now. I'll see you after school. OK, Dad?"

What? She didn't want us to stick around until class actually started like all the parents? She might have been ready for us to leave, but I wasn't ready to go.

"Well babe, I think your Mom wants to wait here with you for awhile. It is your first day of real school and all."

"OK Dad, but I am going to walk around and check it out."

After 20 minutes of waiting to meet her teacher, I left Alani and she didn't seem all that concerned with my exit. She sat down at her desk, opened a book, and started to thumb through the pages.

With that, my youngest and last daughter to enter school was ready to get started. It didn't seem to matter to her that I wasn't all that ready for her to move on to the next stage in her life.

"Dad, I got a bra!"

The day I have been dreading for 11 years arrived yesterday. I knew it was going to happen, but just not this soon.

I had hoped it would never happen. But, at 7 p.m., my oldest daughter's mother called me and broke the news.

"Brett, I took Kern out and we spent all the money you gave her on school clothes. . . $250 on school uniforms, socks, underwear, and a couple bras."

I often have to ask Kern's mother "What?". I was never very good at listening when words came out of her mouth. That's probably one of the reasons why we didn't work out.

But, this time, I heard exactly what she said. It didn't stop me from asking her my favorite question.

"What was that last thing you said?", hoping I heard her wrong.

"Yea, we got her a few bras. We have looked at them before because she liked the patterns on some of them. Now, she actually needs them."

I was speechless. I couldn't believe what she was saying to me.

My little girl needing a bra. The same girl I spent three years staying at home with when she was a toddler watching Blues Clues, Sesame Street, and Little Bear. From a bottle-carrying blue-eyed girl whose life revolved around when she would get to go in our pool in the front yard, to a young lady who now sends me text messages and needs a bra.

How did this happen? I know days, months, and years going by is how. But, how did it happen so fast?

You are not supposed to have a favorite child. You are supposed to love them all the same and do your best to treat them equally.

But, Kern will always be special and different to me. She was the first one. The one that taught me how to be a father, how to truly love, and how to put someones' needs, wants and desires in front of my own.

Seems she isn't done teaching me things. Now, I get to learn about buying and washing bras. Took me three years when I was in high school to learn how to take a bra off my girlfriend.

I don't think I will get that same amount time to learn how to be OK with my daughter growing up.

From friend to future bestseller

I met Danny Evans of Dad Gone Mad during my first Journalism class at Fresno State in 1991. We were two Southern California sports fans in a sea of NorCal dweebs who thought the sporting world centered around the Golden State Bridge in San Francisco.

We quickly developed a friendship and I found Danny to be funny, quick-witted, and rather confident in his ability. Spending just a few minutes around Danny, I realized I was no longer the big fish in a little pond. I came from a small Southern California community college and thought I was a big deal having spent two years as the school newspaper's sports editor and also worked part-time at the local paper.

Along with others in that first class, Danny had far more experience in the writing field and seemed much more at ease about being surrounded by people who thought they were good enough with the keyboard to make some serious dough in the future at big market newspapers and magazines.

During our three years at college together, we played on the same intramural basketball team, played golf, drank beer, snuck into the dorm's cafeteria for lunch and dinners, shared the campus radio airwaves as sports talk show hosts and annalists for school's softball teams, and covered the football games as sportswriters for the school's newspaper. In all the time we were at Fresno State, I don't remember ever studying together. Yet, on a Saturday morning in May of 1994, we both walked onto Bulldog Stadium as college graduates.

After graduation, I left Fresno to become a football coach at the high school I graduated from in Southern California. In need of employment, Danny accepted my offer of helping him land a job at my hometown newspaper that I worked at three years earlier.

He spent my first season as a varsity assistant covering the team for the newspaper in one of our school's greatest seasons. A few months later, Danny left for Orange County and we have had little contact since his departure.

Thirteen years later while surfing the web, I googled Danny Evans in hopes of finding out where his writing skills have taken him. I found his blog Dad Gone Mad and quickly became hooked.

Reading his stuff was no different than sitting in his dorm room back in college. With humor, sensitivity, and brutal honesty, it was no wonder that his site was so popular among reader and advertisers.

I loved everything that I read and after eating up every post, I decided in January to give this blogging thing a try. Not because I thought I could be as good or better than him, but because it became obvious to me that his writing was a form a therapy for him and also provided an outlet for him to get anything and everything off his chest.

While I may have not been able to be as committed to blogging as he has been, I have found it to be rather therapeutic. I have also found that while I love my career choice in education and coaching, I have missed writing more than I would ever admit.

As a follower of Dad Gone Mad, I have waited as patiently as I could for the last year for Danny's first book to be published on August 4th. Deciding last weekend that I could wait no longer, I emailed Danny hoping that our onetime friendship and the the promise to post a review of Rage Against the Meshugenah would get me a copy earlier than the public.

I got home late last night and found his book in my mailbox. Immediately, I opened the package, planted myself on the couch, and dove in head first.

I finished this morning and haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Friend or not, Danny Evans has produced something that I was lucky to read. Something that I needed to read.

Still sitting on the couch eight hours after finishing it, I am unable to do it justice and write the review just yet. I need to finish digesting it.

I will say that it is better than I could ever imagined. It is something that anyone who has suffered from depression, loved someone who has suffered from it, or known anyone diagnosed as clinically depressed, has to get their hands on it.

Danny has written something brilliant and I am glad to say that my first impression of him being funny, honest, and an incredible writer was right on.

(For more information about Danny Evans, his blog, and his book, visit Dad Gone Mad.)

Girls, football and vacation home

OK. So, I suck. I haven't submitted a post in quite some time. Seems life sometimes gets in the way of doing the things that you love doing like writing.

My girls, summer school, and trying to get ready for the upcoming football season has made it next to impossible to blog on a daily or even a weekly basis.

I have received a number of emails asking me what has happened to me as of late. The fact is not much has happened.

My girls have spent the summer with me at football practice. When we are not on the field, we have been spending the weekends two hours away at our mobile home in Lake Isabella.

It is a small town community in the Western Sierra Mountains that has some of the best fishing in California. Already this summer, my girls have caught their first fish and have spent many hours swimming in the lake.

They love it and I love reconnecting with a spot that my parents and I went to nearly every summer when I was a kid. I frequented it during my 20s a number of times and even stayed in the same mobile home that I took over from my former head football coach two months ago.

I wrote about this spot in a prior post and shared the story of how I was mistaken in a local bar as the kid from "A Christmas Story." Good times for sure.

However, not as fun as spending time with my girls there. They have already decided that we would be spending the next holiday season up there.

Looks like another version of "A Christmas Story" will be in the making.

For more Wordful Wednesdays go to Seven Clown Circus.

A family for me

There are few times where I have been envious of my married friends. I have been there, done that.

Twice. I am not in any hurry to do that again.

I think I have done rather well as a single father. In fact, I have no doubt that I am a much better father as a single parent than I ever was when I was married.

As a single father, I never walk on egg shells worried that I will upset or disappoint their mother, never worry about someone correcting my parental skills, never have my children see me argue with their mother like we did all too often when we were together, nor have they asked what I said or did to their mom when they see me in the morning sleeping on the couch.

I am certainly not a perfect parent. I have and will again get upset with my girls. When I do get upset, I tend to yell and there is no confusion that Dad is mad. However, after a few minutes, my girls and I are right back to our normal routine of being goofy together and having a good time.

They adore me and I them. I can’t even begin to describe how thankful and fortunate I am to have them in my life. I also can’t imagine that any of us could be any happier than we are now.

However, this afternoon while grabbing some groceries with my girls in tow, I saw something that made me wonder if my girls are being cheated by their mother and I no longer together.

Walking down an aisle in the store, a family of four crossed our path and I stopped and watched them interact with each other.

The father was pushing a cart with a toddler girl facing him firmly fastened in the seat. The two were cooing and cawing with each other with big grins on their faces. Nothing could distract the two of them as they were obviously having fun making funny noises and faces.

A few feet in front of the two, the mother was pointing out canned vegetables to her son who looked to be the same age as my kindergarten-age daughter. She was telling him the importance of eating healthy and he was asking questions about various kinds of vegetables.

After he picked out a couples cans, the mother grabbed them, turned around, and walked back to her husband and younger daughter at the cart. She placed them inside and then kissed both husband and daughter. She then gave them the sweetest, kindest smile as she walked back to the front with her son.

Seeing this, I could not help but wonder if my girls would ever know what a normal, healthy, loving relationship between two adults is about. I grew up with divorced parents and never saw either of them in a good relationship in the eight years that I went back and forth between the two.

I have to believe that has had a big effect on my own inability to make a marriage work. The last thing I want is my girls later in life to struggle over and over again in relationships like their parents.

Continuing to watch them, Savannah brought me back to my own family.

“Dad? What are you doing?”

“What?”

“Why are you just standing there looking at them?”

“Sorry babe. I was just watching them. They look happy together.”

“Yep. But, not as happy we will be when get home and get in the pool. We are always happy when you go swimming with us.”

She grabbed my hand and we headed back to Shelby, Alani and our own cart of food that we would be cooking later with their older sister Kern. May not be the ideal family, but it is our family.

Savannah was right. When we do things like swim together, we are happy.

And, I don’t need to be married to their mother to do that.

My kids, students and the Luau

School is over in a week. The more years I pile on in my career, the quicker they seem to fly by.

With each year, I have become more and more thankful for the career path that I have chosen. I love my job and 14 years doing it has shown me that there is no better career for me.

What fuels my love for the job isn't the satisfaction I get from teaching kids about the positives of being physically fit for a lifetime. Rather, it is the joy of building relationships with the high school kids.

I love them. Each and everyone of them. Sure, there are times when they piss me off or disappoint me. But, there is no greater satisfaction than watching them come in as freshman and seeing them grow, mature and turn into young adults who appreciate the hard work that myself and the rest of the faculty, administration and other school employees do for the kids.

My favorite event at the end of each year is the Luau. Having graduated from the school that I have been employed at since 1994, I have missed this event only six times since 1985.

Yearbooks are passed out, carnival-like games are played, great food is eaten, and memories from the last year are reminisced. Since I spend so much time at the school as both a teacher and the school's head football coach, my daughters go with me so they can say goodbye to so many students who have watched my kids during football practices and games.

My girls love it. They dance with the students and eat more crap than any 4- to 7-year-old should ever eat. The students love to see them and take them from me for much of the night and teach them dance moves like the "Jerk". It is a move that has been a craze on our campus all year and is one that I could never duplicate.

While my girls are off having fun with cheerleaders and watergirls from my football team, I am able to walk around and talk to kids that I have spent so much time with over the last fours.

During this time, I run into a kid who was my quarterback during my first two years as the head coach. A kid that I would gladly and proudly call my own son.

With no reservations or doubts, I tell him that I will never coach a kid again who has his tireless work ethic in the classroom and football field. He was and is everything a coach could want from a player.

As easy as it was for me to Coach my quarterback, my Most Valubale Player from last season was without a doubt the most challenging athlete I had when I took over the program two years ago. I saw a kid who had more potential than any other player on the field who didn't work as hard as I would like, and he saw a 5-7, 150-pounder who looked like he never played the game.

We yelled at eachother, cursed at eachother, and sometimes went a week or two without saying a word to one another. He drove me mad as I tried everything to get him to see that all I ever wanted was for him to become to best player and person he could be.

I don't know when it happened, or how it happened, but, sometime during the last year the tension between us went away and we quickly became eachother's greatest ally. When I saw him at the Luau, we took a picture together and had a few words that I will never forget.

"Who would thought that you and I would actually like eachother after the start we had together?"

"I know Coach. I hated you when you got the job. But, I would do anything for you now. I can't thank you enough for everything you did for me. I owe you so much."

Little do his he know, that I owe him.

It has been kids like him over the last 14 years that has made a career, my passion.

Be careful what you text

I love to text message. I find it to be a perfect outlet to get straight to the point with a person without the annoyance of having to acually have a real conversation with someone.

Nothing worse to have to be on the phone for 10 minutes with someone when all you need is a one- to two-word response from the person. Text a simple question and wait a few minutes for the answer.

"Hey, what time is the meeting tonight?"

"7 p.m."

Perfect. Didn't have to hear about his or her day and got the information I was looking to get. Impersonal as hell, however, gets straight to the point.

But... text messaging does have its' drawbacks. Like when you text something personal as hell to the wrong person.

Oh, the problems that can cause. I have been guilty of it many times.

The first time was three years ago when my ex-wife picked up my kids from me on a night I was to entertain the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. As soon as she was gone, I quickly typed up the following text:

"Hey... I am finally alone. Hurry up! I want you now!"

Instead of sending it to the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, I sent it to the last person I texted. My ex-wife.

Needless to say, my night didn't go as planned. Instead, I ended up driving to the exes house to pick up my kids because the ex threatened to leave town for good with my girls if I didn't come get them.

You would think I learned my lesson after that. Nope. Yesterday, I did it again.

This time a new coach I just hired was on the receiving of one of my personal texts that went to an innocent receiver.

I spent last weekend with two women co-workers in Las Vegas to help put an end to a recent but lingering funk I have been in. We had a blast going from club to club watching each other hitting on and being hit on by other patrons.

It was great fun. The highlight of the night was listening to one of my friends having to endure one of the worst lines I have ever heard.

"Excuse me. . . can I be blunt?", said an obviously drunk man in his late 50s from New York.

"Absolutely,", said my friend.

I sat in excitement with what he was about to say to my very attractive friend. After hearing what he said, I knew I would never make the same mistake.

"You have real nice boobies."

My friend laughed and said thank you for stating the obvious and kindly asked him to leave.

We laughed all weekend about it and I thought I would have a little fun with her by sending that line to her yesterday afternoon in a text message. But, instead, I sent it to my newly hired coach that I have only known briefly for a month.

While he is a big guy, I would never say he has man boobs. Even if he did, I would never tell him, "You have real nice boobies."

I realized my mistake when I got a text from the coach.

"Hey Coach... While I am flattered, I really think we should keep our relationship strictly to football. But, again, thanks for the compliment."

Damn, I did it again. And, I did it to a guy who I am so thankful that I was able to steal from a rival school. While I was kicking myself for the fuck up, I got another text from him.

"You know Coach, if you take me to Vegas, I will show you my boobies."

Well... at least this time the recipient of my wrong text had a sense of humor about it.