A Career Built on Love

It is one of my most treasured possessions, a set of 6 inch x 9 inch pieces of cardboard cut out and strung together with yarn. The cover page is a picture of my family dated January 21, 1986, the month I launched my academic career. It is titled, simply, “A Day in the Life of Your Family.”

I leafed through it today, as I do from time to time. I was struck again by the strength of the love that has sustained me through my academic career. As I am finishing my years as a professor, I am more aware than ever of how much I have in my life that is totally unattached to any measure of academic or professional success. I am not simply the sum of my career achievements.

This gift from my wife was an affirmation of her support for me in undertaking this grand adventure even though we already had three children. I started my first semester in the PhD program at Texas Tech University living in the spare bedroom of Lubbock friends who normally used the room to house unwed mothers. The rest of my family remained in Dallas attempting to sell our house in a collapsing real estate market. It was a house we paid too much for at the wrong time, and we walked away from the transaction when the house finally sold with a check for $400, losing the rest of our investment. We learned the lesson of a lifetime.

I had taken on a full-time administrative job on campus to finance the PhD program, something that would no longer be allowed, period. While I was learning the ropes of a new job and desperately adapting to the rigors of a PhD program, my wife was managing a complex home in another city and trying to unload our financial albatross. I was 29, alone, and underperforming at everything, particularly in my roles as husband and father. Each night when I turned out the light in that little bedroom I felt a void that was difficult to fill.

And then I received this gift. In retrospect, I never thought about the amount of time it took Linda to put this thing together, by hand, after taking the photos and having them developed, all while juggling three young children. This little book served as my tether to reality, to the fact that I was deeply loved and not a failure. It was a statement that we were in this together, and that she believed in me that I could do great things. It was also a statement that she was on board for my dreams of investing my life in students for a lifetime, despite the career security we were giving up.

Each page in the book causes me to pause and reflect, far more than any iPad reminder video. They were each chosen to create a particular message, mundane as it might seem to others, involving the particulars of the day. But they were intimacies of the rhythm of life that I deeply missed, despite the manic pace of each day pursuing my dream in a new place. They were the heart and soul of who I was, and one woman knew that.

People often wonder what makes a marriage last. I wish I had a simple answer to that question. But I am privileged to be known at the deepest levels by one person in this world. And she brought along for the ride three children in that little book, and two others eventually, who attached their lives to me the way she did. They gave me permission to be an imperfect dad, to sometimes be too focused on my job or on my dreams and not enough on theirs, and to send me signals that they loved me anyway. She taught them to be the kind of spouses that five people now are deeply grateful to have in their lives.

I can hear her on the phone in the other room with one of the children pictured in that little booklet, helping her as she encounters the issues of middle age that we had no idea about ourselves back in 1986. Her voice of encouragement and her laughter echo through our house, and back through the halls of my memories to a day when we were apart, and I was struggling. A day when God prompted her to cut up some cardboard and to begin a project that might say, in some small way, “I love you.”

She has no vita with books and articles for which she claims credit and seeks to build her reputation. But when it comes to influential authors, no one compares with her, in my book. She has been the wind in my sails for my entire career as an academic. But never more so than in those very first days, the ones that mattered most.