Funny, Carefree, and Workaholic January 3, 2008
Posted by TimTheFoolMan in New Year's Resolutions.Tags: change, labels, workaholic
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Teenagers are an interesting breed. They are old enough to see into the motivations and biases of adults, but haven’t yet learned to mind their own business.
Yesterday, my wife asked my soon-to-be-seventeen year-old son for three words that describe me, and the title of this article was his response. I’m not much for New Year’s Resolutions, but hearing this from him has me resolving to change.
If there’s any way for me to do so, I want him to see something other than a “workaholic” by this point in his senior year of high school. I just hope it’s not too late.
A Fool and his Words are Soon Parted 
It was more a sudden realization that, regardless of how I may paint my behavior as “trying to support my family,” if the end result is that my son comes up with “workaholic” in a list of three words to describe me, I have made some poor choices. I suppose that qualifies this as bursting my denial bubble a bit, because I can certainly see how this applies to me, no matter how I might try to justify my actions. – Tim
BTW, the timestamps of my responses here tell the tale. I checked my blog for comments as I’m sitting down to get some additional work done before I leave town on Monday (business-related), and it’s about 2:09AM.
Another component of his comment is that I will be out of town on Tuesday, his 17th birthday. – Tim
Found you on LinkedIn, which took me to your church’s website, and then your blog.
First, your church sounds really cool. I worship at Adventure Christian. … I like the focus of your church, from what I could gather in the 4 minutes that I took to review the site. 🙂
Second, certainly the workaholic thing is reason for some introspection. On the other than, if you’re the father of a teenage boy, and he thinks you’re funny, then you’ve got something to be proud of. Many teenage boys want to crawl into a hole whenever their fathers make an attempt at humor.
Tim
Thanks for stopping by, both the church site and the blog.
I worry about my work focus, but the past couple of weeks have given me a chance to step back and reassess. [For some reason, that word continues to make me think that I’m being an ass again, but I digress.] In a subsequent conversation, my son qualified his comment by saying “I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing… just that you always seem to be working on something… not just your job. You work on stuff around the house… on my car… on church stuff… you just seem to enjoy working.”
From that perspective, it looks different, but I’m not sure if it’s better, or worse. Shouldn’t my kids see me as someone who understands the value of play? – Tim