Well crap, it has been too long...

I am sitting here, no I am lying here in bed alone listening to the damn cricket outside my window that has drive my wife out of bed and into the living room. It is just chirping away. My wife can't fall asleep with it going on like that which keeps me up listening to her whine about the damn cricket. Now I get to stretch out in bed and ponder on why it has been damn near 3 years since I have wrote in this blog. Not that anyone has missed my misguide attempt to become the next Pulitzer Prize winning author or anything, but it is a great outlet for my thoughts and ideas and prayers and life. A lot has happened in the last 3 years. Three years ago I thought it would be cute to write stories of my past and had this idea that I would be able to put it all on paper and someone would publish it and I would be a star. That is just silly. I graduated from the University of Houston a few years ago and that was a huge deal. I think I stopped posting right about then. So let me summarize. I have had extreme highs since then and the lowest of lows as well. I am writing on fathers day as this is part of the extreme highs. I have a wonderful life right now. A wonderful family. A great spiritual contact with my god. It took the lowest of the lows to get here. So where do I start? January 2010 and I take a position with a new home builder here in Houston. I am still helping with a roofing company that I was with. I am no longer getting paid to roof as I have a nice salary and commission structure at my new job. I am making crazy money and I feel like I should be happy. I am not. I am one of the top 3 salesmen out of about 40 in Houston. I still feel an emptiness. I have been sober for about 4 years when my wife calls me to let me know we are having a baby. That emptiness fills up quickly. I am not scared. I am not worried. Life is good. End act 1... A couple of months later we toto the doctor for her visit. It was a fine October day in Houston. Mid 80's for a high. That cold northern air creeping in at night and leaving a wonderful fresh air smell. I can still recall the look on her face as the doctor is telling us things in doctor talk. I don't speak doctor. All I know is that they give worst case scenarios, and hope for the best. We arrive at a specialist's office. It is a different place and a few weeks later so a the tests can be ran. The first words out of the specialist's mouth is, "your son...oh wait did you want to know the sex?". Those words will never leave my mind. I cannot explain to you the joy in my heart. The be t words. Ironed into my psyche like a hot brand. He has down syndrome. Ok. What does that man for us? Terror has taken the place of the joy I felt only moments ago. I cannot remember much after that. I returned to work. I will work and ignore it and the whole situation will fix itself. We did everything we could the next few weeks to figure out what the hell down syndrome was and how were we goi g to deal with this situation for the rest of our lives. And then I get a call from some guy in Florida saying I owe his company over $40000. What the hell is that about? Apparently I am still a consigner on a line of. Refit with the roofing company I was involved with. My old roofing buddy ran up a tab with a supply house that he could not pay. What is going on? Just a few months ago everything was right. How could it get worse? Well, don't ask that. A little after 7 months of pregnancy we go into a routine check up for Ethan. We are going to name our son Ethan. I wanted to name home after me but not exactly after me. Teachers and classmates can all pronounce Ethan and not but her it like the name Ian. I still remember sitting I the Libby watching some crap like Ellen on tv on that chilly February afternoon. That nurse just doesn't look right and she is coming to get me? The doctor sat us down and explained that Ethan's heart was no longer beating. He was gone. This is just not fair. What did we do to get our hearts tugged like this? We had done everything to prepare ourselves for Ethan. We had joined support groups and local orginizations to help us with everything that we could expect to go through. Just last week we had seen his heart beat on the sonogram at the hospital. We had pictures of sonograms and 3d pictures and heartbeat wave music files and he was you g to be my special little guy. I might have stoically stood there to support my wife over the next few days. Terrible days that she had to carry our dead son inside her and live with that torment. I stood by for weeks and months. I froze. I shutdown on the inside. For the first time in a long time I was hopelessly lost and could not find direction. Work suffered. I quit. I ran back tithe car business half heartedly and was quickly removed from that as well. I sat in my putty pot and let my wife sit in hers. I lost all hope. I sat unemployed for months. We lived off the good fortunes of great paychecks from the year with the homebuilder. It was running out. The debt from the roofing company and the hopeless state I was in dropped me down a few pegs. I finally got a new job. I would be making about a third of what I was making the previous year, but it was work. It was also in my field of study from UH. The overall financial burden led us to bankruptcy and the foreclosure of our home and the surrendering of my Escalade, just remnants of my past. Material items that can be replaced. Shoot, i paid our bancruptcy attorney with the proceeds from the sale of my first Rolex. Ethan could not be replaced. I trudged along down my road of happy destiny. I knew that there was a lesson to be learned from all this, I just could not see it yet. So it had been about 7 months since Ethan left us. The dreams we had for him will never leave us. I was coming around at my. Ew job and was realizing that I was good at what I was hired for. My wife got her job back with her old boss she was forced to leave because of the nature of her pregnancy and every once in a while someone would ask her how her baby was, and every once in awhile she would break down. I had let myself go on all levels. I was spiritually, emotionally and physically bancrupt. I was a mess. I stepped on a scale and the number that read back to me was staggering. 356. What happened? I had just picked up a five year chip for my sobriety and my life was damn near as bad as when I started. I had to do something. I have had a cosmic change you could say. I slapped my face and told myself to get up and start moving. God is not out to get you. He has given you a set of experiences that may seem unique, but since they have a name someone has already experienced them before. Maybe not in such rapid order, but they have experienced them none the less. I came out of my shell that I went and hid in. I started walking, biki g, lifting, jogging and swimming. I started to talk about my experiences. In my recovery I hear a lot of sob stories about people having a bad day or a bad week and try to back out. I had a fucking bad year. I stayed sober. So can you. I would not feel sorry for these people, I would instead tell them to get the fuck over it and turn it to god. Stop playing the victim. I changed everything about everything. I have good habits now. I have life back. Every time I go tithe gym and workout or hit the trail and ride or go jogging and it gets to that point where I want to stop and quit, I put this image in my mind. I imagine a young Ethan cheering me on through my struggles giving me unconditional love. I imagine what he would sound like and what he would say to me about my struggles. This is what gets me up at 4:50 in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. I want to so dearly meet him. I want to make him proud of my accomplishments. I get the awesome experience of Kennedy, my daughter. She is my livi g motivation. She heads to the gym with me and shows me what she can do. Every time I can she goes swim Ing and tries to keep up with me. She wants me to be happy again, and she makes that happen. She has had it hard with this all as well, and I hate to see her hurt. I know that there will be more pain for her from best friends and boyfriends, and she will not always run to me for help, but for now she does Nd she is my living motivation. On a different note I have lost 87 of those 356 pounds. For you at home counting that brings me down to 269. I weighed in at 272 in September of 1995 before the football season that year. I got down to about 250 by graduation in 96. Back York 300 my freshman year in college And back down to 220 my sophomore year. I have flex Ed between 290 and 330 for the last 7 or 8 years and peaked at 356 in October of 2011. I got fat. 56 inch waist. 21 inch neck. 58 long suit coat. Big and tall stores. I bought clothes from a normal department store for the first time in over 10 years last week. That was awesome. I need to get to around 230 and I will be happy. I am going to blog about that journey from here on out. I want to share my journey. I want to make Kennedy and Ethan proud of their dad. I want to be their role model and example. I love my daughter and am so proud of what she has become, and I miss the joys that should have been with Ethan. Life is not always fair. So with that my first step has been taken to run in the Bridgeland TriathLon on August 5 of this year. I am on the waiting list so hopefully I will be selected to participate. If not I will be run ing one on September 30 in Houston. I will be training over the next 6 weeks for this event as I will not know if I am in it until August 4. I am doi g this to make Kennedy proud of her father and for what Ethan was never given a chance to do. Wish me luck. Ian