Happy Father's Day

This is my second draft on this particular post. The actual experience of Father’s Day changed my story quite a bit.

I was going to have a nice pseudo three day weekend. I was going to work at home on Friday and then camp out with the kids for the weekend, just good father’s day stuff. It didn’t work out that way. A routine generator test on Thursday at work turned out to not be that routine. The Uninterrupted Power Supplies (UPS), that cover power to our servers if a power outage hits and before the generators kick in, decided to break. Thursday afternoon turned into a struggle to find out all the servers that were down and my Oracle RAC cluster decided to not work any longer. Those might help the user but are no end of trouble for administrators. I finally left work at about 6pm, which isn’t that bad for other mere mortals, but that makes about 12 hours for me. I woke up on Friday with an email that all work at home was cancelled and that everyone had to come in. That turned into another 12 hour day. They decided to have several people do shifts to cover for any power outage. The theory was that many servers wouldn’t come back after a power outage and someone needed to call the team as well as start all the services up again. I “volunteered” for the 4am-10am shift since I am usually up then anyway. While I wasn’t expected to “work”, but just be there, it was uneventful but not all that fun. The rest of Saturday was uneventful. Tracy went and spent the day with Madsen and I did wrangle a cheap breakfast at Ikea with the family before we went our different ways. The rest of the day I spent trying to recover some of my lost sleep and do laundry. Tracy did come home at about 6 and I was able to spend the rest of the evening with her.

Sunday morning was another horrible morning. I woke up at two and wasn’t able to get back to sleep until around 6. Bennet had wormed his way into the bed by then and he seemed to be concentrating on kicking and scratching me the rest of the morning. When I finally did fall asleep, I just had a nightmare about losing Bennet at a parade. I figured that it was some sort of divine lesson to learn to appreciate the child that was scratching and kicking me.

I spent the next few hours getting ready for church feeling nothing be sorry for myself. I didn’t want to be awake, I didn’t want to wear these clothes, I didn’t want to go to church, I didn’t want to deal with any other living being. I admit I was feeling very selfish. I knock myself out at work and this was “Father’s Day”. I’m not one for holidays but this fit into my mood. I didn’t want to deal with anything. My day, let me use it the way I want to.

Then I thought about Tracy. Yes, I was being selfish but this woman had given up the last ten years of her life for these kids. She has to deal with my whining and the endless demands of these children. Over the past 10 years, she has had 4 small humans invade her life. She almost died with one of them. Both of her parents have died in the past decade. She had nursed her mother to health, moved her to Illinois and let her be there for the birth of her last grandchild. She didn’t want to deal with these situations any more than I did but she still does it. Who am I to be in such a state? What do I have to complain about?

No, Father’s Day didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. Tracy spent the day painting and fixing dinner. I folded clothes and had my daughter bake me cookies (yet another thing that Tracy really did but it gave Ellie something to do for me). I biked with the kids to the corner and rented a redbox movie. That was pretty much the extent of what I did. It wasn’t what I wanted to do for the day, but my life isn’t about me, is it? I might not do much, but I am there for them.

Happy Father’s Day.