by Rory Feek
It was morning by the time I got to my truck and started heading to the house. I was driving down I-65, and the sun was rising over the buildings and the houses to the left of the interstate. I could feel something rising inside me too. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it felt like hope. Real hope. In something greater. In something and Someone bigger than me. I knew I still had a lot to learn and would probably never completely figure out how this religion thing worked exactly, but I would choose to believe, and maybe that would be enough. Maybe. Just maybe.
And it was.
It still is. I can’t say that today I understand much more about God’s plan and how it all works than I did that morning while driving home from the bus station. I’ve never told this story before. Not to my kids or mother or anyone. I’ve always been embarrassed by it. But I’ve learned that most of the time, the things that you’re most ashamed of and don’t want to tell anyone are the things that can become a new beginning for you. And, in time, God has a way of making those moments the first things you want to talk about because it’s from there that He was able to work in your life. To really change you. From the inside out.
And so, though I didn’t understand it, I started just believing it. And if I really believed, wouldn’t I act differently? So I did. And from acting differently, an amazing thing happened. Real change. Transformation. First in myself and then in everyone and everything around me. Nothing is the same. It is, but it isn’t. After a while I didn’t have to remind myself to make the good and right choices. I just started making them naturally. Because it felt so good.
Something happened to me. No, a brick didn’t fall down from heaven, but it might as well have. I guess you could say I was saved. Or forgiven. Or born again. Whatever it was, it was powerful, and it was real. And it’s made all the difference in my life.
Seventeen
BAGGAGE CLAIM
I did the best I could.
Just as I have with my mother and father, I have learned to forgive myself for the mistakes I made raising my older girls. I did the best I could with what I had. That’s not really true, though, for me . . . I could’ve done better. Made better choices. But I didn’t. Something inside kept me from making great decisions with my time, energy, and love, and that something was a part of me. So, in a way, the old me couldn’t have done any better. He wasn’t strong enough.
I forgive him. Me. I am disappointed in who I was. And I think about it and remember the mistakes I made and what they cost. Who they hurt. And I try, too, not to be like him.
I am me because of me. No one else. My decisions brought me here, good or bad. And my thoughts make up how I feel about myself and others and this life I live. I can choose to be negative, filled with regret. Or I can choose to be filled with hope. With life. A life of possibilities and wonder. Every day is a new day for me. A clean slate. I get to make what I want of it. It is a gift from God. The biggest gift, I think.
So I do not dwell on the past. Not ever. I don’t blame anyone for who or what I’ve turned out to be, and I don’t carry around my hurt or my baggage as excuses for how I got here. None of that matters to me. Today is all I care about. And tomorrow, of course. But today is what determines my tomorrow, and right here, right now is all I can really do anything about. So I stay in the moment—or I try to, anyway. It is a constant battle. Being present. Being completely present with the ones around you.
I can’t tell you how many times my kids have told me at dinner or somewhere when we’re spending time together, “You’re not here, Dad. You’re here, but not really.” And they’re right. My mind is on other things. A song. Or a movie script. Or a line in a book I’ve read. My mind is trying to multitask and thinks that it can do everything and please everyone. But it can’t. You can’t be here and be somewhere else at the same time. My kids know that it isn’t a conscious thing that I do. It’s not on purpose. I’m not trying to be distracted and have that blank stare in my eyes as they’re talking to me. It’s habit. Selfishness, I think. Putting my make-believe thoughts over what is real. What is in front of me. Putting myself above others. That is the bigger problem.
But at least I’m aware of it. And I’m working hard to change it. I’ve done better. The kids will tell you. Not just at that but other things too. Like being a father. Really being a father.
Eighteen
FATHER FIGURE
As I think back on those earlier years, before God opened my eyes, I think I loved the idea of being a daddy the most. The truth is, it’s tough figuring out how to be a good father when you don’t have one around to emulate.
As I mentioned earlier, I have a way of putting a blurred or romantic lens on things that are hard. It’s a good thing in some ways, but it can also block out parts of reality that need to be there. Like putting your kids’ education above the romantic idea of them just going to school where the bus picks them up in front of the house . . . the way it was done when I was young. That’s a fine idea, but we are deep into a whole new century since the one I was in as a boy, and things are different now. The world is different, and all schools are not equal. I should’ve put my girls in the school that would’ve given them the best education and experience to grow. I could have. But I didn’t, and they suffered for it. Hopie especially.
And I wasn’t good with money either, so we lived in fear a lot of the time. Fear of what going to a doctor would cost, so we didn’t go. We never had insurance when my kids were growing up, so unless it was life-threatening, we just didn’t go to the doctor. Being sick wasn’t allowed because we couldn’t afford it. Seriously. I never said it out loud, but the kids knew that was how we lived. And that’s fine for a thirty-year-old man, but not for a four-year-old with a cough that won’t go away. Or a seven-year-old who fell off her bike and hurt her shoulder badly. I just iced it and said it was gonna be okay. And it was. Heidi’s broken collarbone healed in time, but it left a scar that she and I both still see and some scars that we can’t.
Another time she broke her leg on the playground when she was five, and I called the ask-a-nurse hotline. I was told to check and see if it was swelling or if she was running a fever, and she wasn’t, so I figured she was probably okay. So for the next twenty-four hours, I carried her with me to set up my equipment at a gig I was playing and everywhere else I went that day. She just had to grin and bear it. And she did.
When I finally took her to an ER, an X-ray of her leg was done, and the doctor took me out of the room and showed me the scan. The bone was broken completely in two. “This little girl’s in a lot of pain,” he said. I looked at the fracture, and tears poured down my face. Partly because I realized how much pain Heidi had been in for the last twenty-four hours and partly because I hated living that way. Hated that I couldn’t provide better for them.
Heidi wore a cast for the next four or five weeks, and then I managed to do what I always did. Skip out on the bill. We moved, or I stayed one step ahead of the billing address I had given and never paid for the cast. I could have. Plenty of people put themselves on a budget, setting money aside to pay a little something each month of what they owe to someone. But that’s not how I thought. Not who I was. I was still many years away from learning the joy of “doing the right thing.”
And it wasn’t just with them. It was with me too. I broke my ankle one afternoon when I left the car running and ran in to get something from the apartment. As I came back out the door, I saw that the car had started to roll down the hill. I jumped completely off a fifteen-foot landing to try to get to it and broke my left ankle in the process. I heard it snap and tried to crawl after the car. Luckily, one of my neighbors jumped in and put the brake on before it could pick up any speed. I got lucky that day with the car but not my ankle. Like the kids, I just had to deal with it. And so I did. In time, it healed and got better.
I was the same way with taxes. We didn’t make much money most of the time, and I definitely didn’t want Uncle Sam to take a bunch of what already wasn’t really enough
to live on—so I just stopped paying taxes. Stopped turning in my yearly tax returns. For eight years I didn’t turn in a single one. By then, I had started making good money writing hit songs and was doing pretty well, but I was still afraid that I might never see any more money and avoided paying taxes altogether. The tax man never came to get me, but Joey sure straightened me out that first year we were married when she found out I owed forty-two grand to the IRS.
I read a book one time that said some people live with a “scarcity outlook” on life, believing there is only so much to go around, and if they don’t fight for what’s theirs, they won’t get any. And if they don’t hold on to it, it will go away, and there won’t be any more to get. I was like that. Always believing there wasn’t enough. And there wouldn’t be. But the book also said that some people live with an “abundance outlook.” This is how I see life now: there is always enough to go around. More than enough. And the best way to have more is to give what you have now away. It doesn’t make any sense, but it works. The other way, the way I was living before—out of fear—made complete sense to me then. But that way does not work.
Nineteen
DUCT-TAPE PARENTING
One man, two daughters, and a roll of duct tape. What could go wrong?
She kept pulling her feet off the pedals—scared that she would lose her balance and fall off her bike. I had to use the duct tape. How else could she have learned to ride?
It’s true. Sad, yes, but true. When Heidi (and later Hopie) was learning to ride a bicycle, I duct-taped her feet to the pedals of her little pink Huffy. After doing what she’d asked and removing her training wheels earlier that day, I had spent the morning running beside her, up and down the block, as she tried to find the courage to ride like a big girl. I kept telling her to keep her head up, to just watch the sidewalk in front of her, but she would get scared and look down and take her feet off the pedals to stop the bike. So, in true dad fashion, I fixed it.
I had the solution in a toolbox in the trunk of my car. A roll of gray duct tape.
But sometimes the solution is also the problem.
Heidi did learn to ride her bike that day, and so did Hopie a few months later. But it came at a cost. You can’t force someone to be brave. To have the courage needed to face their fears. It’s gotta come from inside them, when they’re ready—not when you’re ready for them to be ready. I didn’t know that. I was a man who had to be more than just their father. I had to be their mother too. At times, I did pretty well walking that line. Being both. But sometimes, like with the duct-tape incident, I will go down in history as being not only a crappy substitute mother but also a crappy father.
My kids laugh about it now. They love to hear me tell that story. They think it’s hilarious. Never mind that as a grown-up Heidi won’t go near a bicycle, and Hopie stays clear of anything that resembles duct tape. It is a funny story, though. In hindsight, especially.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the first or only time I used duct tape to solve a problem with the kids. When Heidi was about a year and a half, she would habitually run her right hand through her hair (like her daddy did) when she was sucking her thumb (which her daddy didn’t do), and each time she did, some of her silky-soft blond hair would come out in her fingers. We tried to break her of the habit, but we couldn’t. Pretty soon, there was a big bald spot in the back right side of her hair, and we had a problem that needed a solution.
Duct tape.
We bought her a little blue Cookie Monster mitten at Kmart, and I duct-taped it to her right hand. That way, when she tried to run her fingers through her hair, none came out. Great. Problem solved. In a month or two her hair had grown back, and we were able to throw the now-filthy glove away. But something bigger than that had been set in motion: my belief that a temporary solution could solve a permanent problem. But it can’t.
Twenty
SELF-HELP WAS NO HELP
I came to learn that what I had was a character problem. I wanted the benefits of being a man with good character, without having to change and actually have that character.
I wanted a quick fix. We all do, I guess. A book about real change that I could thumb through quickly while reclining on a lawn chair at the swimming pool at our apartment complex, drinking a wine cooler, and listening to George Strait on my Sony Walkman. While the kids played Marco Polo in the shallow end, I could figure out my deeper problems and head home a few hours later with the same old wet towels and a new-and-improved me.
I bought lots of books written by lots of big self-improvement gurus, such as Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, and Norman Vincent Peale, with lots of titles that sounded great: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Power of Positive Thinking. The truth is, I loved those books. They were inspiring. I would highlight lines or paragraphs I’d read and say them over and over again to myself. Yet nothing ever changed. I would come in from a hard day of reading at the pool, take a shower, and look in the mirror and still see the same guy I was before. I didn’t understand it.
This would go on for a long time. Trying to jump-start change, but nothing ever happening. Maybe some small things. Noticeable to me, but not to anyone else. Things that didn’t last. It was like carrying around a big roll of duct tape for my life, and every time I saw something that was wrong or falling apart, I just ripped off a piece and prayed that it would hold. But it wouldn’t. It can’t. That’s not how real change happens.
I would do the same thing a number of years later with Christian books too. It was a new phase with different authors—C. S. Lewis, Max Lucado, Rick Warren—and the titles were different too: The Purpose Driven Life or I Really Want to Change . . . So, Help Me God. The results, however, were the same. It was the old swimming-pool philosophy, only with a different set of books. I wanted change to happen without making any real changes. This time, instead of teaching or tricking my brain to do it, I was going to trick my heart, using prayer and God.
Honestly, for years, I didn’t understand why it wasn’t working. I was doing everything they said to do. Trying to follow the step-by-step process to a better me and a better life. But the results were the same; only the section at the bookstore was different.
Twenty-One
DIE LIVING
My mother smoked her whole life. She took her first puff around age thirteen, and she took her last at seventy-one.
A Winston was still burning in the ashtray next to her recliner when she took her last breath in July 2014. Like most people, she tried to quit a few times, but it was too hard. When you start anything that young, it’s tough to walk away from it. She finally did quit smoking though . . . when her heart quit beating.
Mom was diagnosed in 2005. My sisters and I went with her to her appointment at Vanderbilt, and we listened to the doctor tell her that it was because of the cigarettes. She was upset about that. Upset mostly that we were in the room to hear it. That the doctor confirmed what we had always told her might happen if she didn’t quit those nasty things. She knew the truth of it, but I don’t think she wanted us to know what caused that spot on her tongue. She wanted to keep it vague, like it was just one of those things that happen to people sometimes. Bad luck. Dr. Sinard could tell it made her uncomfortable and that she wanted to gloss over it, so he said it again: “Those cigarettes are gonna kill you, Mrs. Feek, if you don’t stop.”
And he was right. They did.
Those and the beer and the hurt and the pain. And old age. Who knows what actually causes a heart to stop beating when it finally does. It could’ve been one or all of those things, truthfully, or something else, I guess. But we didn’t need an autopsy to tell us what took our mother from us.
Cancer.
It wasn’t the first time that word had crept into our family’s vocabulary and, unfortunately, wouldn’t be the last. My youngest sister, Candy, had breast cancer in her early thirties, and she had come out of the surgery, chemo, and radiation fine and was still doing well. But this was different. Less random and m
ore scary for some reason. I don’t know why.
Maybe it was Mom’s age—mid-sixties by then. Or maybe it was her years of hard living. Whatever it was, it got her attention and ours.
After a brutal surgery—going through Mom’s neck to take half of her tongue, using flesh from her arm to fix her neck and skin from her leg to fix her arm—Mom was left with scars in all three places and speech that would be forever slurred. She was self-conscious about it. About being hard to understand. But she learned to embrace it in the end. Her lisp became a kind of battle scar from her war with the cancer that had tried to take her down.
When she came home from the hospital after a week in intensive care, she followed the doctor’s orders and quit. For six months she stayed clear of her smokes. Alcohol too. My sisters scrubbed her little brick HUD house from floor to ceiling to try to remove the smell of nicotine so she wouldn’t be tempted when she got home. And it helped. For a while.
To make it easier, my brothers quit too. Or at least in the waiting room, during her surgery, they swore they would. I know they wanted to quit, but instead they just hid their smokes when they came to visit Mom and walked outside to do their smoking away from her. They could see her scars and knew what the cancer had put her through, but as scary as that was, it was no match for the years and years of having a shot of nicotine in-between their fingers when they were nervous or had finished eating or whenever.
After six months, Mom sent my brother to the store for a pack, and she started back up. Beer and wine magically started showing up again in her fridge too. At first it upset me. Upset my sisters. But we learned to accept that this was her life, and she had the right to make her own decisions about how to live it. But she never smoked in the house again. Sort of. She loved the way her house smelled after the girls cleaned it and wanted to keep it that way. So she went outside to smoke. Until it turned winter and that became too inconvenient and she just cracked open a window in the laundry room, put a fan in to blow the smoke out, and lit up. It seemed the same as smoking inside to me, but for her it was change, and real change was hard for her to come by. So we all were thankful for it, no matter how small it was.