I “Had” To

It is foggy off the patio this morning and I am grateful we missed the damaging winds and rains many people in Indiana are dealing with today. As I enjoy my coffee here on the patio I am thinking about another time in my work life where I put work ahead of family.

Yesterday I was surprised with an invitation to lunch by my Aunts. My four aunts have a tight bond and regularly have their "sister days" where they meet up and do Aunt things. Yesterday their Aunt Thing was having lunch with me and my wife.

Sitting at Harlan Café our conversations wound through a lot, from their flattery of my age (they thought I was younger than I am) to a surprising parking lot interaction by one of our 95 year old cousins, to lamentations of the challenges of aging, especially watching your friends leave their earthly fold.

As I sat there absorbing the conversation I was transported back to my Bonus Aunt Carol's funeral. Carol was my Aunt Martha's friend, confidant, and was a fixture in our family.

I remember that afternoon like it was a Memorex moment.

I "had" to leave the wake early on that Friday afternoon to participate in a sales team meeting for one of the teams I supported. This team had meetings every other week and I was invited to share about swine products and try to promote sales.

I "had" to attend because I was both asked and I really wanted to spark sales of swine products in this team that preferred to sell cattle, horse, and chicken feed.

I "had" to attend because it was my job to support this and the rest of my sales teams.

I "had" to attend to show this VP of Sales I was doing my job.

Sitting in Harlan Café almost four years after that meeting I "had" to attend, I realized I had not done anything to improve swine feed sales, did nothing to change this VP's impression of my work, and did nothing to impress my supervisor.

What I had done was turn my back on my family and celebrating my Bonus Aunt. Unfortunately this was not the only time in my career where I had done the same thing, there are two funerals I chose to not attend because I just "had" to make sales calls with my sales team.

Sitting here with a hot cup of coffee on the patio absorbing the humidity I realize that I had fallen into the trap of treating work as more important than me and my family. In the end, the sales VP I was trying to impress was one of the reasons my position was eliminated. My efforts that day did nothing to change their opinion of me and selling hog feed.

The coffee's gone cold and the fog's starting to lift off the patio. I don't get Carol's funeral back. I don't get those sales calls back either, and they weren't worth keeping anyway. Next time something asks me to choose, I already know which one I'm picking.