Then there were the Broncos. Every Sunday the games would come on, and watching John Elway as quarterback was like magic for Rick. To a boy without many role models, having the example of a big, strong man he could aspire to be like reinforced some sense of what manliness could be.
For those who grew up with dads, even not-so-great ones, it’s hard to imagine trying to piece together an archetype of a father from the little bits and pieces you’ve been given. For Rick it was John Elway paired with Transformers on TV, Mike Brady from reruns of The Brady Bunch, The A-Team, faceless military warriors, a dead stepfather, and an uninterested grandfather.
You don’t just become a man because you were born a boy. It requires modeling, teaching, advice giving, action—and it’s not found in five-minute TV sound bites, breathless touchdowns, or impossibly strong cartoon characters. Rick had a lot to learn about being a man and hardly any resources for doing so.
Looking back, however, he can see that the ultimate father role model—God the Father—was walking by his side and leading him slowly in the way he should go through the scraps that were handed to him along the way. As a child, of course, he had no perspective on this. But when the whole act plays out in his memory, he can see that the smallest bits of love and wisdom stayed with him like bits of papier-mâché glued together to eventually form something beautiful in the end.
It would take many years for the transformation to play out. But all the while, God was writing the story of His ultimate glory in Rick’s life.
One day while they were living with their grandparents, Rick and Jenny were told to pack their bags. They were heading to Milwaukee to visit their Aunt Sally. The fact that they didn’t know this person seemed unimportant. What mattered was that they were going to fly there in a plane, just like the ones they saw zooming overhead by the airport near the house.
Rick had always imagined miniature people squeezed in between the broad, beautiful wings—so high and far away. At the airport he was surprised to see that the planes were massive. The kids followed their grandma, gaping at the machines and nervous about takeoff. And then, before they knew it, they were in the sky. To this day, almost thirty-five years later, it’s the one and only plane ride Jenny has ever taken.
They’d each packed a bag, and their grandma had brought a couple of extra suitcases as well. That was a lot of bags for just a few days, but they were too young to really consider this. It was freezing cold when they arrived, and Rick didn’t have a coat, so his aunt bought him one straightaway. She was nice and had three kids around the same age, so they got to play and feel like “normal” kids in a house not overrun by men, booze, rules, or bitterness. After a week they flew back to Colorado. Rick would remember that time in Milwaukee as a highlight of his young life.
Twenty years later, though, he would discover that the trip had actually been a ploy to leave him and Jenny with his aunt. His grandma had taken them there in hopes that she could be done with Sylvia’s antics and stop being responsible for her grandchildren. But Sally, busy with her own three kids, didn’t want the job either. Though they miraculously kept this scheme from the kids at the time, it’s still a sad testament to how unwanted they were by the adults who were supposed to care about them.
Rick and Jenny went back to their grandparents for the time being, then later returned to their mother’s care. As they grew older, the pingponging between homes diminished. But their circumstances only got worse, creating new scars and hindering Rick’s growth, preventing him from ever really beginning to thrive.
CHAPTER 9
BATTLE BUDDIES
There’s much that goes into the making of the man. Certainly family history and cultural factors played a large part in the rocky start Rick had in life. But who was he in all of this craziness?
Everyone is so uniquely made, it’s impossible to know how the myriad inputs in our lives will ultimately affect us. Rick’s journey began on a predictable path, but he eventually took a road less traveled by those who’ve been through what he has.
When you’re the child of a drunk, you don’t know that life is any different for anyone else. You’d never guess there are parents who simply don’t drink, and you don’t really comprehend stability or safety. As you grow older and make friends, however, it begins to sink in that something’s not right at home—and you might begin to crave the comfort of normalcy elsewhere.
Rick didn’t know what it was like to have a father—or to feel safe or protected, unconditionally loved, or appreciated as a human being. To begin life in such a state is a tragedy—and it’s a miracle that he came out of it alive, let alone as successful and thriving as he is.
Unfortunately, a generational cycle is extremely difficult to put an end to. Sylvia may have had a father growing up, but she apparently lacked the amount of stability and attention she needed in order to thrive. The cycle got worse, and it continued with her own kids in even more detrimental ways.
Rick’s world was filled with men who were in and out of his mom’s bedroom and his family’s lives. Some had guilty expressions, recognizing that what they were doing was not appropriate in front of children. But mostly they had numbed out reality with substances, just as Sylvia had.
Rick saw so many of those men, he doesn’t even remember their names—and most never knew his. But being around them instilled some painful lessons about what men were like. They were rough, mean, cold. They were drunks and yellers, and they smelled like whiskey and cigarettes, body odor, and gasoline.
He walked in on one using the toilet one morning. The man yelled at him for opening the bathroom door and then left drops sprinkled on the top of the bowl—marking his territory against a seven-year-old.
It’s no wonder that Rick grew up not liking men—because in men he experienced an innate betrayal. His own gender disrespected his mother, scared children, and showed little beyond an animalistic urge to control, attack, and dominate.
Having very little contact with men—especially good men—left Rick lost in the wilderness when he got older and needed to make friends. He was a bit like a scared, abused animal, expecting the worst and skittering toward the only kind of shelter he knew—women.
“I don’t know how to interact with men,” he recalls now. “It’s why I don’t have a lot of male friends. It’s always been easier for me to talk to women than any man. Men make me very uncomfortable.”
Sylvia herself lived in a bit of isolation, only interacting with the men she dated. She never had a female friend, and so friendships in general are something Rick doesn’t really understand how to have. He’s always thinking that people are out for themselves, that no one could accept him for all his flaws and insecurities, that he could never be himself around another man without rejection or judgment.
How the circumstances of youth taint the aspects of every part of adult life is fascinating and telling. To envision Rick and Jenny’s childhood is to watch two ping-pong balls being bounced from place to place, person to person, without concern. Kids may be rowdy, but when it comes to their hearts, each should wear a sign that says “Fragile: Handle with Care.” They need plenty of hugs, encouragement, compliments, and confidence to equip them for the battlefield of life—starting with the playground and lunchroom and continuing all the way up to boot camp and college, boardrooms, and parenthood.
Rick and Jenny—especially Rick—never had that kind of support and encouragement. But they did have one important advantage: each other.
Today, looking back at their life together, Rick calls Jenny his “battle buddy.” She calls him her “ride or die.” They have both admitted they can’t imagine going through that terrifying roller coaster of a childhood alone.
The comfort of having a battle buddy may have been the only real relief each of them had from their reality—a reality of trauma that would touch their lives for years to come.
Researchers such as pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris have found that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can actually ch
ange a child’s biology and result in severe long-term health outcomes.1
ACEs include childhood experiences of physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, domestic violence, substance abuse, or mental illness in the household, parental separation or divorce, and incarceration of family members.2
The more of these childhood experiences a person can check off, the higher risk he or she has for depression, suicide, sleep disturbances, cardiac issues, cancer, mental disorders, substance abuse, and more.3 And while many people could check off one or more of these experiences, Rick and Jenny could check off most of them. Looking back, it’s clear that they were the prequel to many of the issues each would face later in life—especially Rick.
These siblings never heard the affirmation and encouragement all little boys and girls crave, not even from a schoolteacher or a social worker. So many famous biographies highlight a person who stood out in memory as “saving” the individual in some way—but such a person didn’t exist in their lives. The only person Rick could count on was his sister, but she couldn’t save him because she was drowning too.
They were raised, really, in fear. Pastor and author Louie Giglio describes this dynamic eloquently in his book Goliath Must Fall:
Life is treated like one big threat that never diminishes. At any minute, something could go wrong. And it probably will. The fear only progresses as the child gets older. One domino falls, and then another. After awhile, the fear in a person’s life feels like a chain of constantly falling dominoes. A person’s whole life gets built on shaky ground.4
It would take years before Rick and Jenny realized there is only one way to be saved—physically, spiritually, emotionally. Eventually, they both would open their lives to that salvation—and to the Savior who loves them very much. Interestingly, while their life journeys looked vastly different for many years—he a loner, she veering toward a family of her own—they both encountered God in a personal way around the same time.
Actually, there were two times in Rick’s life when Jenny played a part in his ultimate salvation. The first happened during one of their stints living with their grandparents. They attended a day camp at a local church, where they were told they would go to hell if they didn’t accept Jesus and get baptized.
Later that night, Jenny told Rick she wanted to be saved and he should be too. Rick agreed, mostly out of fear. They were both baptized that week, but Rick doesn’t remember anything changing in his life. He did not start any kind of personal relationship with God. He almost never said a prayer or thought to rely on God in his daily life. As far as he could tell at the time, his baptism was absent any kind of meaning whatsoever.
But years later, Jenny’s spiritual influence would play an even bigger part in planting the seed that led to his true salvation. Her importance in Rick’s life cannot be understated. God was using her in big ways from the very beginning.
They would eventually realize they couldn’t save each other from their past, but there was Someone who could—and Jesus gets all the credit. Jesus used Jenny to point Rick to what would become his ultimate freedom, saving him in every way possible, from mental imprisonment to physical jail to eternal damnation.
CHAPTER 10
PRIVILEGED?
Looking at Rick and his sister today, you’d never guess the impoverished and neglected background they came from. He is a good-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed man with a nice build, a charming smile, and a knack for making women blush with the perfect, subtle wink. He makes an adequate living, lives in a nice house, drives a decent car.
Clearly a card-carrying beneficiary of white privilege, right?
Not exactly.
He is white, to be sure, and that does carry real privilege that shouldn’t be cast aside. But in many other ways, he grew up distinctly underprivileged— and largely forgotten.
My husband’s upbringing actually resembled that of an African American kid growing up on Chicago’s South Side—or perhaps a Hispanic immigrant child in his high school—more closely than the middle-class background you’d assume from looking at him.
In today’s heated conversations about race and privilege, the plight of poor, disadvantaged white children like Rick can be avoided. Issues of class are discussed and prioritized far less than those of race, leaving some in the impoverished white community to feel overlooked.
Rick didn’t grow up in a big city where many government programs are focused, and like so many other children growing up in an impoverished, broken home, his situation flew under the radar, unaddressed by the local, state, or federal government apart from monthly welfare checks and occasional visits by the police. As an adult, he would occasionally hear that he was a “privileged white person” and get lost in what that could possibly mean. The term made him feel invisible and completely misunderstood by the people who had power to help change things.
Privilege is many things—white privilege being just one of them. That’s not to say a focus on racial justice is misplaced. It isn’t. It’s an important and necessary focus that requires input and work from all Americans. At the same time, the hyper-focus on such issues can leave other things, like addressing class warfare, in the dark.
It’s concerning that the problems of children like Rick aren’t addressed as thoughtfully as those of racial minorities. Those populations of course need help and focus, but there is another type of minority—the poor, white, broken family—that needs help and focus too. While in the past white Americans may have fared better in terms of family and social dynamics, things have changed in some areas.
As Charles Murray notes, the problems facing poor whites in America—lower marriage rates, religious participation, single parenthood, work rates, class segregation—are nearly identical to the problems of underprivileged people in other demographic groups. And it’s an issue that needs attention too.1
Comparing privileges doesn’t exactly lead to meaningful change, but it’s worth pointing out a disparity when it appears. It seems everyone has the best intentions and is living out their own experiences, but those who can make change happen must consider the vast nature of what all children across the United States are going through—city, country, black, white.
Governmental and societal factors aside, the most significant lack in Rick’s early years was the presence of caring, loving adults in his life who protected him. There is no substitute for genuine love and care. Computer pioneer and philanthropist Bill Gates touches on this need in his review of J. D. Vance’s groundbreaking book Hillbilly Elegy:
The key take-home for me is that whatever else we do to address the complex realities of poverty in America, we must find more ways to surround children with high expectations and as many loving and caring adults as possible.2
The question, of course, is how such a change can happen. It’s tricky to put a government policy in place to accomplish that goal without government overreach into the lives of struggling families or becoming some kind of a (truly) “nanny state.”
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be an effort. But it’s important to realize that the crisis so many are facing is not cultural but spiritual.
As David French wrote in National Review:
Life has always been hard for the poor, but it has not always been quite so lonely. Part of this is the legacy of the welfare state, which allows and even encourages lives of quiet desperation, cut off from the communities that used to sustain the less fortunate in their struggles. Part of this is the legacy of the sexual revolution, which devalued marriage and irreversibly cast off the “shackles” of self-denial. And, yes, part of it is economics.
Losing a job is among the most stressful of all human experiences. The complex nature of the crisis should not be a license to avoid facing its ultimate truth head on: America’s working class is in the grips of a malady far more spiritual than material. We can spend trillions more, but safety nets won’t save the human soul.3
While there has be
en quite a bit of analysis and conversation about this exact subject matter since the 2016 election, the truth is that analysis and conversation or even policy changes will not solve the problems of the white underclass. Certainly, this demographic needs to be prioritized by culture and society, just as other impoverished minorities are. But the only way Sylvia, her siblings, Rick, his father, and anyone else could be saved from a life of despair is through the power of something greater than government, more powerful than the imperfection of human beings trying to solve human sin.
Galatians 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (NIV).
Only that freedom, found in Christ, can ever fully unburden someone from the chains of the past. Unfortunately, so many people are searching for something else to do that job, but programs and money and all the things in the world cannot heal a hurting soul in the end.
Rick definitely doesn’t see his plight as one with a political answer. He blames his mother’s bad decisions and circumstances she couldn’t always control on her likely mental problems. He recognizes a diverse cast of characters that acted together to create his life. Personal responsibility is a core belief for him, and in that way his conservatism comes out. That being said, he believes in the importance of social welfare programs because he received assistance as a child and relied on that money to keep him fed and housed.
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