Happiness is Watching Your Child Succeed, Part 3

My eldest child, Kelly (a regular reader of this blog), has been bugging me since I started it, asking, “when are you gonna write a column about ME?”  For a long time I put her off by pointing out that this is my professional blog, not personal.  Well, since I recently wrote about BOTH of her brothers, I clearly can’t use that excuse any more.  So to keep peace in the family   I will write today’s post about her.

This is Kelly Smith Gibson.  After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, she attended med school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.  She married a wonderful young man from Seattle in December 2007 in a ceremony that took place in the Basilica at the Notre Dame campus, which is where they met.

Today, she and Paul live nearby and Kelly is a first-year resident in an OB/Gyn program that is run jointly by Metro General Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic.  She delivers babies.  Lots of babies.  A lot of the babies she delivers are born to moms in high-risk pregnancy situations, like those who are very young, very old, and those who have diabetes or other complicating health conditions.  Metro boasts one of the finest high-risk pregnancy units in the country, and I know that Kelly is very proud to be a part of the team there.

Not all is a bed of roses for Kelly.  Students who graduate from Med School in the United States carry a huge debt load.  I get nosebleeds just thinking about how much money she owes in student loans.  Residents work 80-90 hours a week – including a LOT of nights and 24-hour weekend shifts — for not a lot of money.  And she has to study constantly – huge big textbooks and journals and new research into exciting topics like female cancers and rates of morbidity for high-risk pregnancies, and so on.  And hubby Paul just got laid off from his job last week as an Actuarial Analyst for a consulting firm.  And the liability insurance premiums for Obstetricians is a scary number – OB’s have to deliver a ton of babies each year just to pay for their insurance.

AND she and Paul are a very happy and engaging couple whom my wife and feel blessed to count as our friends.

So, Kelly, this is your blog post.  Now the whole world (of my subscribers, anyway) know what a great person you are and how proud I am of you and your accomplishments.

Can we be done, now?

And NO, I’m not writing a post about your dog.

Happiness is a Warm Hat

We drove to South Bend to see Syracuse play Notre Dame this weekend.  While there we met up with our daughter and son-in-law, and his parents and his sister and her new husband.  Fun time!

It was cold.  We did a little tailgating, but no one really wanted to spend a lot of time out in a tundra-like parking lot.  The game was the big draw.  Like always, the atmosphere on the Notre Dame campus on a Football Weekend is nearly electric.  Although the focus was on football, a lot of people were also lauding the Women’s Soccer team, which had won in overtime the nite before to boost their record to 24-0-0 — WOW!

So, back to the cold. 24 degrees doesn’t sound that cold… until one has to be outside in that temperature for four or five hours.

And the temperature drops to 18 degrees.

And you are standing on solid ice because it snowed 6″ just before the game.

And your team loses in an embarrassing game filled with lost opportunities.

Did you know that 18 degrees Farenheit is -8 Celsius?  With windchill, that’s -17 degrees Celsius.

Well, despite the cold, we had a great time.  We were insulated with up to five layers of clothing — all of it green or navy, of course — and drank our share of hot cocoa served at 500 degrees (which is a trip and a half to drink when wearing mittens!).

And my head stayed warm under three wraps.

Happiness is a warm hat

Do you see yourself in others?

My oldest son attended the University of Notre Dame.  Justin was a true fan (as in “fanatic”) of Fighting Irish football.  He lived and died by their win/loss record, hosted a weekly campus radio show on the subject, and even dyed his hair kelly green one semester.  He dressed as a (6-foot tall) leprechaun for every home game, and in the midst of a student section filled with screaming fans, he so stood out from the crowd that he was twice named “fan of the game” and we got to see him on national television.

Sometimes we’d say to him, “Justin, d’ya think you’re maybe taking this whole thing a bit too seriously?  It’s only a game, ya know?”  His reaction to our suggestion that Notre Dame football was NOT the center of the Universe was, typically, “ARE YOU KIDDING?!”

We just let him be.  He was, after all, in college.

This year he’s living in Nashville and studying with a chef as he takes a year off before starting graduate school next year.  To keep expenses down, he linked up with five other guys to rent a house.  Those other five are all still in school, two of them in grad school themselves.  Saturdays are spent glued to one of the many flat screen TVs in the house, following college football.

This weekend Justin called home on Sunday to tell us a funny story.  One of his roommates (Joe) graduated from Tennessee State. During their game on Saturday, Justin observed, Joe was ‘over the edge’ — screaming at the screen, swearing at mistakes, jumping up and down, angry when Tennessee fell behind and jubilant when they scored.  And Justin had a huge insight.

“I suddenly realized ‘Ohmigod — that’s what I’m like when I’m watching a Notre Dame game!’  No wonder people are always telling me, ‘calm down.’  I’m a maniac!”

Yes.  And how interesting that you could not see that in yourself until you encountered someone just like you.

How often do we not recognize in ourselves when there’s a concern, yet we can so clearly see it in others?  I think that’s because people are mirrors, and they reflect back at us what we are unable to see otherwise.