Walking the Talk of Respect

It’s uber easy to preach to young students about the benefits of building and maintaining good character: honesty, integrity, respect, and responsibility.

It’s a lot harder to walk the talk.

This weekend, I was both grateful and at-times a tad annoyed that my own “teacher voice” echoed in the back of my mind, reminding me that I, too, need to practice respect – especially when it comes to my parents.

Tao of Texas Martial Arts Institute’s 10-point character development system is called “Basic Rules to Live By.” All students under age 16 must know and practice these rules. Adherence to these principles is a condition of promotion, and a blatant disregard for them oftentimes results in demotion.

My young students have the most trouble with rules No. 4 (We must build and maintain a good relationship with our brothers and sisters) and No. 7 (We must clean our room and keep it clean). But for my older students – and me – the one that is by far the hardest to practice in our daily lives is No. 1:

We must respect our parents and family members at all times.

If not for this particular rule, though, I might not have the relationship I do with my father today.

Some background:

My dad has been a barely functioning alcoholic the majority of his life. When he divorced my mom (I was 13 years old), he divorced me, too. We had one father-daughter Sunday together right after they split, and then I didn’t see him again for years at a time. When we did meet, he was always drunk and confused – his brain wet from years of mass whiskey consumption. It became too painful for me to watch him kill himself with booze, so I began a practice of loving and praying for him from afar. I maintained contact through one-way snail mail letters and cards.

Thanks to therapy, the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon, and teaching young martial arts students how to build better character every day, I began a slow relationship re-entry with my father this year after my step mother died. It has been hard, but every time our relationship seemed unmanageable, I thought of how I drill rule No. 1 into my students’ psyche. If I expect them to have respect for their parents, I must have respect for mine.

Walking the talk, I’ve tried to show my father love and tolerance. I avoid being around him when he’s drinking, for I’ve learned that that’s a breeding ground of resentment for me. However, it’s been especially tricky these days to maintain that boundary because he’s heartbroken and lonely. He’s always drank to kill the pain of emotional loss, and now that his June Carter Cash is gone, he doesn’t seem to want to stay sober one minute.

Back to the present: This weekend, my students were at it again: They mentally and spiritually went with me to San Antonio to visit my father in a hospital. He’ll turn 75 later this month, but he didn’t wait for his birthday to go on a doozy of a bender, and this time, it was costly in many ways: He ended up in the emergency room with congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and a vicious staph infection.

And he lost his truck.

When my sister Nancy called to tell me that Daddy had had a heart attack, I was naturally concerned for his welfare, and in the true spirit of rule No. 1, I rushed to the hospital to be by his side. He told us that he drove himself to the hospital and must have passed out in the parking lot. He didn’t remember how he got to the hospital or where he’d left his truck.

Entering his hospital room was scary: A big yellow sign warned us to take infectious-disease precautions. We had to don gowns and Latex gloves before crossing the threshold. Nancy and I could hold his hand, but we were warned not to get too close. He was frail, gray, unshaven, and had the shakes. (His doctor told us he suspected Daddy had Parkinson’s disease. “He don’t have no damn Parkinson’s,” my sister snapped. “He’s an alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink in three days!”)

Lying uncomfortably in a hospital gown that revealed just a little more than I was comfortable with, Daddy made sometimes-incoherent small talk. Every once in a while, we’d slip in a question:
• “So what’s the last thing you remember?”
• “Was it morning, afternoon, or dark just before you passed out?”
• “Do you remember what you ate for breakfast, lunch, dinner?”

He didn’t remember a thing. Blacked out, as they say in AA.

Once he fell asleep, Nancy and I left to drive around the hospital parking lot in the rain, hoping to find his truck parked crooked somewhere. No luck. We worried about the expenses of paying for a truck that had been towed.

At the nurse’s station, we hit an information jackpot. We discovered that:
• They had his truck keys.
• The hospital doesn’t tow cars of patients.
• Daddy’s chart indicated that EMTs picked him up outside a neighborhood bar. (A bartender said Daddy stumbled and fell in the parking lot, passing out in a puddle of muddy rainwater.)
• His blood alcohol level was a staggering .324.

My sister was pissed, and let out a string of obscenities under her breath.

All I could do was shake my head. Through pursed lips, I mumbled, “Respect your parents at all times. Respect your parents at all times.”

With my father still asleep, Nancy and I decided to go bar hopping to try to find his truck. One saving grace about old alcoholics is that they are set in their ways and tend to hang out in the same places. We found his truck at bar No. 2.

His white Ford Ranger was the epitome of an alcoholic vehicle: smashed and banged up, pock-marked with dents big and small and scratches short and long. The back bumper was barely hanging on. I climbed into the driver’s seat and tried to figure out how to drive the truck back to his house without touching a disgusting-looking steering wheel. That’s when I spotted two whiskey bottles in the floorboard. One was empty; the other had been cracked open for a christening swig. Seeing those bottles brought back childhood memories of riding around town with Daddy. Drinking always made him want to get into the car and drive, and he always had a whiskey bottle or two sloshing around on the floorboard.

Respect your parents at all times. Respect your parents at all times, I repeated as a soothing mantra.

I let out a huge sigh, fired up the misfiring engine, and tentatively drove the clunker back to his house.

Finally at his home, Nancy and I entered an unlocked back door to find myriad sources of his staph infection. The place was a filthy, stinky mess. I carefully walked around, trying to conjure up memories of better times in the living room, or tender times when I’d watch Daddy through the kitchen window as he picked up pecans in the backyard. He was so big to me back then. I hadn't thought about those times or been in this part of his house in at least two decades. I felt a mixture or nostalgia and sadness.

“It was easy to respect him then,” I thought, “when I didn’t know what alcoholism was.”

Nancy and I were torn between not wanting to touch anything and needing to unplug all the appliances (the refrigerator would have to be cleaned out another day) and search for some important documents. We gingerly began: Nancy taking a stab at a stack of letters and papers on the dining room table, me on a hunt for outlets.

That’s when I noticed that my father had been living in a fire hazard for years.

I started with one of a variety of lamps on a dining room table. It was attached to an extension cord, so I followed it hand over fist … to a three-pronged adaptor plugged into three other extension cords, each of which was attached to another three-pronged adaptor with extension cords, which were attached to another extension cord, which hooped over a nail on the wall, leading to another extension cord that ran under a piece of carpet, which finally led to a three-pronged adaptor at a wall outlet.

The whole place was wired up like a spider web string game. Every outlet was overloaded. I shook my head, amazed that the house hadn’t burned down yet.

Respect your parents at all times. Respect your parents at all times, I repeated.

Reality set in. Sadness ebbed and flowed. It was very hard not to be mad at Daddy. But what good would anger do?

As I moved to the kitchen to unplug more extension cords – and realized that my dad or stepmother had a lamp fetish – I thought about an end-of-class talk I recently gave to my students.

“How do we show respect to our parents?” I asked the class.

Hands popped up like popcorn. I chose a sweet, oftentimes shy 7-year-old girl in the back row to offer an answer.

“We’re niceth to them,” she said between missing front teeth.

“Yes, we are! What else?”

More hands popped up.

“We go brush our teeth when they tell us it’s time for bed,” one of my older green belts said.

“No arguing!” a kid with ADHD blurted out. “Even when we’re about to win our video game.”

“You are correct, sir!” I said, offering a palm-slapping high-five.

As I looked around my father’s home, I felt grateful for him and my students. It all could have been so much worse. Daddy could have killed someone during his last bender. He didn’t. He could have killed himself. He didn’t. I could have become angry and resentful. I didn’t. Instead, my students helped me realize that I have yet another chance to be a compassionate, loving, and respectful daughter.

Our job done, my sister and I turned to leave, carefully stepping over the rotted, unsteady areas of the porch. It felt good to set an example for my students to follow in an effort to help them understand the importance of respecting their parents. And with walking the talk in mind, I walked out to the car to return to the hospital for the next chapter of respecting my father at all times - especially now.