In life we all make mistakes.  Let us learn to recognize our errors and ask forgiveness.

–Pope Francis on Twitter, March 2014.

In December I changed jobs, and it occurred to me that this will probably be for the last time until I reach retirement age.  For the previous seven years, I had been an associate professor at a state community college.  I met many incredibly dedicated, hard-working, and underpaid people during my teaching career, and it was with mixed feelings that I said goodbye to my old life.  On a mid-December day, our president conducted the last all-college meeting of the semester.  A colleague said some beautiful words, and I was called to the stage to be presented with a bouquet of yellow roses and an embarrassingly generous gift.  I turned to face them and was moved nearly to tears to see my colleagues giving me a standing ovation.  I told them that it was an honor and privilege to work with them, and I would miss them all.

What I did not say was that on that very day, exactly one month and one day shy of my forty-eighth birthday, I had outlived my father.  The  irony of holding a bouquet of roses vs. my father’s dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound was not lost on me.  My father’s life had been a spiral of alcoholism, despair, narcissism, immaturity, and infidelity.  My family was pulled into a dungeon with no escape from the dragon.  I see the damage that he inflicted on my mother, my sister, my brother,,,and on myself.  There are some scars in my family that never get discussed but have colored the thoughts. emotions, and behaviors of us in profound ways.

I started down the same path as my father and easily could have followed the road of  alcoholism and despair to its conclusion.  I fully admit that it has taken me longer to grow up than average.  I have been selfish, stubborn, childish, and demanding.  I have wallowed in self-pity and suffered the effects of trying to get things to go “my way” in life:  the damage to my friendships, my relationships, my career, my reputation, but most of all to my inner peace.

Yet I still believe that I am different from my father.   I have made many foolish mistakes and learned some hard lessons, but I have been able to learn from them and alter my behavior.  I was a victim of many things in my childhood and adolescence, but if I am a victim of those things today, then I am a volunteer.

In a word, I needed to accept responsibility  for my life. No matter where I am at any given moment – happy, sad, poor, solvent, fulfilled, empty, etc. – it is because of choices I have made.  That bears repeating:  my life has turned out the way it has because of choices that I have made.  The good things aren’t luck, and the bad things aren’t someone else’s fault.

It was a bittersweet moment standing on that stage, holding those roses, and in the days that followed they were a frequent reminder of all the conflicting emotions and events that were represented that day.  Was I celebrating the beginning of a new life, or mourning the death of life as I knew it?  Would this new job really be better than the devil I knew?  The only certainty was that my life was in transition, and unlike my father, I was choosing to embrace that change.