Troy's Times - April 2008


www.TroyEvans.com

Troy@TroyEvans.com

 

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Welcome to Troy’s free monthly electronic newsletter, developed for people interested in overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing oneself to realize their full potential.

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IN THIS ISSUE


“It is not important How we come to the events in our lives, but how we Deal with those events”- Troy


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This Month's Featured Article:

Juvenile Injustice


“The person who sees what he wants to see, regardless of what appears,
will some day experience in the outer what he has so faithfully seen within.”
Ernest Holmes


For every change, there is one pivotal point. The point where status quo is abandoned and an entirely new direction chosen. The laws of physics state that objects in motion tend to stay in motion. This applies to life changes as well. To stop or redirect that object takes power and effort just as life changes do. Reversing a trend that you have spent a lifetime building can take a great deal of power, but sometimes great power is wrapped in very small packages.
May 7, 1993. To that point in my life, it proved to be the hardest day I would ever face. That was the day I stood before a federal judge and was told that I would spend the next 13 years in federal prison. The next 157 months of my life were going to be spent as an incarcerated felon. To that date, it was the hardest day of my life…but it was nothing compared to the next.
May 8, 1993. That was the day that I had to call my, then seven-year-old, son Eric and let him know that his dad was not going to be available to him for a very long time. “Incarceration” is a hard enough concept for an adult to fathom. For a seven-year-old child, a third grader, it's impossible. Eric could not even comprehend the span of 13 years. How do you understand an amount of time that is twice your age? All he wanted to know was whether he was going to be able to come spend next summer vacation with me, as had been the case the prior three years. “No Eric, you won’t be coming to spend next summer vacation with me.”
Well how about the one after that Dad?”
“No Eric, not that one either.”
“Well for sure the one after that, right Dad?”
“No Eric, not the one after that either.”
After asking a few more times, he finally asked, “When do I get to come spend the summer with you, Dad?”
“Maybe the one when you turn eighteen Eric. That will be the next time you get to spend a summer vacation with your Daddy.”
I said in the last chapter that in order to change, I had to come clean with my worst secrets, so let me share a few of those with you right now.
The day that my wife went into labor, I called my friends with the good news. That was their cue to gather up a bunch of booze and cocaine and assemble a little tailgating party in the hospital parking lot.
For the next eight hours, I ran non-stop between delivery room and the impromptu, parking lot drug party, creating an absolute, drug induced haze around what should have been the most significant day of my life.
At one point, I entered my wife’s delivery room to see an entire team of doctors and nurses, attempting to reach my son’s head in the birth canal with a probe because there were some extreme complications. I was so hopped up that I couldn’t even comprehend what was going on. I watched the scene for as long as I could stand it and then returned to the parking lot. I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew that I needed a hit to help me get through whatever was going on.
Fast forward to my son as a young boy, just four or five years old. By this time, his mother and I had separated and he would come and visit me for the summer. There I was, the pillar of fatherhood, stoned out of my mind and supporting my habit by dealing drugs. Our summers were filled with adventures like tubing down the Salt River with my closest addict friends, while we drank ourselves silly, capped off with a drunken race down the Beeline highway on our way home.
On an average day, I would try to steer him away from my drug stashes and take him shopping in true Disneyland Dad fashion. My boy had the best stuff that drug money could buy. I didn’t worry about making him brush his teeth, bathe, follow rules or any of the other things that I should have done as a father, but I did revel in the fact that each fall, I would return an absolute monster to his mother talking about how great it was at his dad’s.
While parenting is supposed to be a full time job, I figured that really only meant daylight hours. After all, how much parenting do you really have to do at night? He’s asleep anyway. So at bedtime, I would tuck him into bed, often in some seedy hotel room and then take off for hours to go party. That’s right. I would literally leave a small child alone in a room, usually in a neighborhood that grown adults wouldn’t feel safe in, because the drugs were just more important. In fact, I thought I was doing the responsible thing. It wasn’t like you could just bring a small child to a party with drugs, right? That would be crazy.
As if that wasn’t enough, here’s the one that earned me the Father of the Year award. One summer while Eric was visiting, I dropped him off at a friend’s because I had to go and “run an errand.” Then, I went and robbed a bank.
If something had happened to me during the robbery, nobody would have even known where to find him. He was cooped up with one of my drug buddies for a babysitter.
Then, of course there is the eventual fact that I got pinched for bank robbery and was sent to prison.
When my son was fortunate enough to be out of my care, he lived in a very small midwestern town. EVERYBODY knew his business. EVERYBODY knew where his daddy was. EVERBODY knew his dad was a convict. Kids can be extremely cruel, and I knew that what I had done would cause my son to be teased, tormented and ridiculed for years to come. I had let him down throughout his life and going to prison was going to make it even worse. I dreaded the question that I knew would always hang in his eyes, the “Why?” that I would never be able to answer. The first time I saw Eric in the prison visiting room, however, I came around the corner to hear my son asking a guard a very different question. “If you won’t let my dad spend the night with me at the hotel tonight, can I spend the night in here with him?”
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Despite everything my son had just gone through he still wanted to stay the night here with me in prison. Despite all of the slamming steel doors behind him, despite having to take off his belt and shoes while going through a metal detector, and despite, at seven years old, being “patted down” to see that he wasn’t smuggling in contraband, I was still a hero in his eyes. I was still his Daddy no matter where I was and what I did. On that day when he visited, I went from being a nameless, faceless, convict among 1,200 inmates—Evans #24291-013—to being a hero. I wanted to grab him, squeeze him and say thank you for still loving me!
That day I came to two very important realizations. Number one, drugs had become more important to me than the most important person in my life. It really had become that simple—drugs meant more to me than my son did. And, number two, I was breaking a long-standing tradition. The tradition of my great grandfather being there for my grandfather, my grandfather being there for my Dad and my Dad being there for me.
My father’s role in my life had been a stark contrast to mine to my own son’s. When my father was 18, he married my mother and worked full time while going to school full time. He was incredibly successful, but always made time to make it to my baseball games. Our weekends and summers were filled with hunting, fishing and camping. He taught me that men held their word dear, worked hard, didn’t lie, didn’t cheat and didn’t steal. That information was passed down through generations of men in my family. I broke that chain.
Did I ever once take my son hunting or fishing? Not a chance. Where would I get drugs in the woods? Show him how to sharpen a knife, stop game, spot birds? That’s pure insanity. I couldn’t even focus most of the time.
Instead of being there for my son, I gave him ridicule at school, an absent father and the eternal question that was always on the tip of his tongue no matter how cheerful he tried to be—“Why did you leave me?”
Incarceration, detention, and prison—they all mean the same thing. They are deprivation. My son had been deprived of his father for all seven years of his life. I was looking with fear at a thirteen year prison sentence having never realized that my son had been born into a prison of his own, his only crime being that he was born to a father who had made drugs his priority. And yet, I heard him asking again and again if he could be with me. I heard the hope in his voice for a father who had never even been very good at it and I decided right then and there that I was going to be a better man. Steel bars or no, I was going to be as close to the father that my son deserved as I could possibly be. If my son still had hope for me, then I could have hope as well.
That was it. That was my pivotal point.

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Like I said before, sometimes the power that you need comes in small packages. For me, it was the hope of a child. Great things can be learned from children.
Remember when you were a child? Did you believe that you could be anything you wanted when you grew up? When did you stop believing that?
I saw hope for my future reflected in my son’s image of me. At the time, I was the least deserving person in the entire world of my son’s hope. I knew what I had done to him and yet here he was, looking to at me like I had been the best father on Earth. In that instant, I regained something that I had lost back in the earliest days of my drug use—the hope that there might actually be a way out of the existence I had created for myself; the chance to turn it all around.
Once I caught a glimmer of that hope, I began to see it when I looked at the reflection in the mirror. He taught me that. He taught me to start believing that anything was possible again. He taught me to live my life with the hope of a child.
Suddenly I saw a path ahead of me. I had a vision of the man that I could become, a man that would be worthy of my son’s love. What’s more, all of the excuses that I had been using to keep myself from changing all of those years seemed trivial and stupid. I was really going to do it this time. I resolved right then and there that I was going to clean my act up and get rid of the drugs for good. I was going to get the education that I had passed up, be the best dad I could be, even though it meant being the best “prison dad” possible, and I was going to put myself in a position so that when I was finally free to be with my son again, I would be a functioning member of society that he could be proud of.
How many times have you wanted to do something, to make a change in your life only to get bogged down with all of the reasons why it could never happen? You may say, “I want to go back and get my degree.” Then you start to hear the little voice in the back of your head. “How can I go to class around my work schedule?” “Who will watch the kids?” “I’m too old to go back to school.” And suddenly you realize you have been defeated before you’ve even picked up a course catalog. I have news for you. It wasn’t the job, the kids or the missed opportunity that defeated you. It was the little voice—the excuses that let you avoid the situation rather than dealing with it. They are the same excuses that cover up the real question—“What if I can’t?”
I had listened to that little voice all of my life telling me why I couldn’t give up drugs, get a job, and love my family. “What if I failed?” “No one would hire me anyway.” “My family was better off without me.” The little voice was always with me. But, the day that I saw hope reflected in my child’s face, that little voice started getting fainter and fainter and the possibility of earning the hero status that my son had already bestowed upon me became greater and greater. For the first time in my life, I was truly focused on what was most important and it was all due to a child’s hope, not my son’s, but the hope that had been reawakened in me.
The day I stopped listening to that little voice, filled with all of the doubts, insecurities and excuses that I had always used as a crutch so that I wouldn’t have to make the hard decisions, or the smart decisions, was the first day I started to live as the new me.

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NEW HARDBACK BOOK -

"FROM DESPERATION TO DEDICATION:
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If you live in or near one of the following cit1es where Troy will be speaking over the next few months, please contact The Ev^ns Groups for details on an opportunity that does not come around often- see Troy present for free!
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About the Author- Troy Evans is a profess1onal speaker and author who resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Pam and his dog Archibald. Troy travels the country delivering keynote presentations, and since his release from prison has taken the corporate and association pl^tforms by storm. Overcoming adversity, adapting to change and pushing yourself to realize your full potential- other speaker’s talk about these issues, Troy has walked them.


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Troy@troyevans.com
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