The other night at the table, our teenage son told us that school is not like when we went to school, and that we just weren’t able to understand the kind of pressures they were under today. I heard this story from almost every kid in the last year of how difficult their lives are, how much harder they have to work than us, and they would trade their lives with us in a heartbeat.
Do you want to swap places? With me? Oh little fools, you have no idea. If you want to know what life is like as an adult, if you want to know about stress, hard work and how much pain your body is really capable of handling, let me tell you about my life and let’s see if you still want to trade:
I went to school in a time before society became so PC and indulgent that they let children sleep in class. If ~I~ had fallen asleep, or even tried to, it would have been in the office with me. Talking to the teachers? Better put on the padded jeans because they still practiced corporal punishment when I was in elementary school, and they hit HARD.
Our generation was at the forefront of the drug problem in schools, and it was our generation that laughed at natural things like marijuana and started cooking up some really nasty synthetic stuff. To this day, I am still amazed that I made it almost to the end of high school before I was sucked into that crowd because it was all around me, everywhere.
I spent 2 years in high school practically having life outside of me every day. There’s really no form of physical or mental humiliation that I haven’t suffered over those two years, and that fact alone is largely responsible for my really long fuse when it comes to holding back my anger and extreme disrespect for anyone I feel like you have to dress, act and be like everyone else.
I’ve learned that it takes guts to stand out and be different, and very few people have that.
I started working at 15. (Actually around 13, if you count the yards mowed from time to time). They didn’t give me a huge assignment. I didn’t expect my parents to pay for every little thing I wanted. They couldn’t afford it, and even if they could, they wouldn’t. My parents wanted me to learn to respect what it took to earn a dollar and feel the satisfaction of spending it well. This is one of the lessons I am most grateful for in my life: I have earned everything I have and I am proud of it.
If I wanted something, I had to work for it and get it myself. I wanted a car and a nice guitar, so I cleaned bathrooms and stocked store shelves until I paid for them myself. And to this day, I still have the guitar.
Since that first job, I have spent 18 years working non-stop. No summer break, no winter break, no spring break. When he wasn’t in school, he was working. When I graduated from high school, I got my first full-time position in a week and a half, digging trenches and big, stinky swampy water holes, here in Florida, in the hottest part of summer.
That pretty much set the tone for what my career was like until I hit 30: a long, uninterrupted series of horrible, unpleasant jobs. If the work wasn’t physically horrible (like when I got chemically induced pneumonia in New York from inhaling acid fumes all day in an unventilated facility), it was mental torture.
But, I had to work. You don’t work, you don’t eat. I was never more than a week away from losing everything. So if he was sick, he worked. If there was extra time, I took it. Just when I finally started to catch up, I got married.
Let me put on record that up to this point, I thought I had conquered it all. Physically, mentally, he had it covered. I felt like life could throw anything at me, and I could handle it because I had already seen the worst.
You have no idea what real life is like until you have kids. None.
Suddenly, it’s not just me I’m carrying with me, but my wife and children. Before, if I found myself in a horrible job, I could just quit.
I discovered in those early years in New York that I can feed myself for an entire week on an $0.88 package of hot dogs (on sale due to expiration date) and a $0.50 package of fresh hot dog buns. I didn’t do this for fun; After paying rent, there were countless weeks when I had less than $20 to live on, and more than half of that was needed for the train and bus so I could get to work. (Heard you say “What about a car?” If your grocery budget for the week is about $7, you can’t afford a car. Period.)
But starving (I weighed 152 soaking wet back then, and I’m 6′ tall) and doing without me, teaching me that I COULD do without, if I had to. So if the job was bad enough, I could walk away. But with a family, you can’t do that. Children are expensive and do not understand the concept of rationing food when there is no more. When you have a bunch of other people depending on you for their survival, suddenly your options change.
When you find yourself working a horrible job with a boss who hates you, and you know, you KNOW he’s just looking for an excuse to fire you, but you need that money, so hang on, man, hang on. Hang in there, walk away, whatever you have to do, but you do the work because you have a family. There is no going back on that responsibility.
When I couldn’t get overtime, I worked a second job. Anything he could get for money. Yes, I packed groceries at Publix. I worked for the Police Benevolent Society, asking for donations. I sold vinyl siding over the phone. I did what I have to do.
After many years of this, constantly working to keep the lights on and food on the table, I decided to go to college so I could get a better paying job.
Once again, I thought I had seen the worst that life could throw at me. I can juggle, baby, I can juggle. Throw it away, I can handle it. Lesson: never say “It can’t get any worse than this…” It can, and it will.
I found myself working 50 hours a week (remember, I still needed the overtime just to pay the bills) as a mechanic in a stifling factory with no air conditioning, going to school 1/2 time (if less than 1/2 time, so you don’t qualify for a student loan. I had to keep that.), doing hours of intense homework and still doing what I can around the house. I got, if I was lucky, 3-4 hours of sleep.
I did it for 4 and a half years.
Now I’m finally at the point where I’m making decent money, but like everything else, that’s relative. Everything is so much more expensive these days, teenagers are ~horribly~ expensive (if you don’t believe it, you’ve never paid for a 14-year-old’s shopping trip, or a 16-year-old’s car insurance), and Even now, I manage.
Today, I get up at 4 am and work a 10-hour day. I still don’t have summer, winter or spring vacations. I haven’t had those since I was 16.
I have vacation time, but I mostly use it to get work done around the house (as I will with my vacation this month). I’ve had a total of 4 vacations (each only a week long) that I can remember in my entire adult life, where I actually GOED ON VACATION and didn’t work.
I come home, and my wife and I make dinner. We clean up after dinner, pick up the trash (teenagers think they’re adults, but they’re really just whiny, demanding 8-year-olds with bigger bodies) around the house, do the math, and run errands.
If we’re lucky, we might have an hour to kick back and do nothing for anyone else.
On weekends there is more work: shopping, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms and the hundred other tasks that make up the running of a house.
So kids, that’s my story. Maybe that will help you understand why I laugh and say “You have no idea!” when you talk about how hard life is right now. One day you will understand the frustration of trying to explain this to your own teenager who thinks he already understands everything. It’s like trying to explain nuclear fission to a 5-year-old: they just aren’t equipped to understand yet.
So yes, I will change all this. I’ll be happy to sleep until 6:30, go to school where I can sleep a little longer at my desk without fear of repercussions. I will come home after only spending 7 1/2 hours at school and play video games or hang out with my friends all day until it’s time to go back to sleep. I’ll let you feed me and clean me and take care of the masses I leave behind. Plus, you’ll take me wherever I want to go, and I don’t even have to pay for it. And the best part is, I don’t even have to thank you for any of that. After all, you owe me.
So yeah… I’ll trade lives with you. Where do I sign???
