My story.

My mom, Joyce, shot and killed herself on September 8, 1979. I was 22 months old.

I don't know what my mother's voice sounds like. I don't know what it feels like to have her tell me she loves me. I was too young to keep any of it. No voice, no touch, nothing of my own to remember her by.

She missed everything. My high school graduation and the track scholarship that put me through college. Every meet, every game. Learning to tie my shoes, ride a bike, brush my teeth. Playing tooth fairy when my teeth fell out. My first wedding. The birth of all three of my kids. She missed it because she had easy access to a gun instead of easy access to mental health care.

She missed all my track meets, all my football games, all my basketball games. All my broken bones, all my visits to the doctor and the allergist. She missed everything good and bad about me.

She was carrying untreated postpartum depression. She struggled with alcoholism and with things at home. Add the weight of being a young parent, and a handgun her own father had given her for self-defense, and you have a recipe for tragedy. She was at her lowest, and depression was lying to her. It told her my world would be better without her in it.

In the 1970s, mental health care was not what it is now, and even now it is not good enough. Back then they just did not take care of people the same way. My grandfather had taken her to the range and taught her how to shoot. The statistics will tell you a gun in the home is more likely to be used on yourself or someone you love than on an intruder. That is what happened. She was alone in her car on the side of the road, with nothing but depression lying to her.

When I was about 10, my family told me she died of an illness, and technically that is accurate. Depression is an illness. Alcoholism is an illness, especially when it goes untreated. There is only so much a young father can do. My dad, Eric, is not a doctor.

I would much rather think of it this way: they were just trying to protect me. There is no dummies guide on how to tell a child about their mom. If I had learned before I was 18, it likely would have caused me even greater damage.

My dad remarried, to the woman I actually call my mom, because she raised me. She earned that title. Joyce may have given me life, but Paula taught me how to live. She was a safe place. Always a safe place. I have her mannerisms and her wit. I am a mini her. I did not see that for a long time. I was so angry and bitter that I took it out on the people I cared about.

I did not learn how she died until I was 18. In my dad's office, I found a box with over 100 copies of her death certificate. It read, "self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." It was one of the worst days of my life.

It was traumatic and brutal, and it took years before I could reconcile with it and figure out what to do with it.

I got into roofing in 1996, back in high school. I worked for a company, became part owner, and helped grow it, then parted ways on good terms when my ambition pulled me toward the commercial side. Then I built my own from nothing into one of the top five roofing companies in Wisconsin, union sheet metal and union roofing both.

Then the recession hit. It reached commercial roofing in 2009 and 2010, and customers paid far slower than they had agreed to in writing. I burned through my cash reserves and my line of credit, and I could not keep up. It ended in an involuntary Chapter 7 liquidation in 2011.

The unions decided to force it. The company clearly owed the money, and that was never the dispute. I was owed a significant amount too, and I was doing everything I could to collect it. We got to a point where they were not willing to let me keep going.

I did not run from the debt and I did not hide from it. I damn near lost everything, including the value of my own name. Some of it was bad luck. Some of it was on me. I learned more in that failure than I could have any other way.

I cannot cloak it with "I was young." If you want to play with the big boys, you have to behave like it. I made mistakes, and some of it was plain ignorance. I wish it had gone differently. I learned an immense amount the hard way.

Sydney is 27. We had her when I was 20, while I was still in college, so she has had to grow up about as fast as I did. Kyan is 18 and about six foot five, plays lacrosse on a partial scholarship at Illinois Wesleyan, and he is just an awesome kid. His name is Khary and Ryan put together. Ryan was my first friend in college and my roommate, and he is one of my best men. Josie is 13 and a complete spitfire, funny and creative, and she loves to dance. Amanda and I got married in 2005 and divorced in 2020. We are on great terms. We are good friends, and we co-parent well.

I love being Sydney's dad and seeing the person she is becoming. I love watching Kyan play. He is such a big kid, and when he really grows into himself I think he will be a force to reckon with. And Josie is going to be something.

Then there is Anne. I met her on Hinge on April 13, 2023, at 8:35 in the evening, wearing a black hoodie that said "Say less," because I was trying to be funny. I basically had to beg her to meet me. I was hooked. About six weeks in I told her I loved her, and she said, "Well, I like you a lot." That stung. But I knew she was my person.

On November 20, 2024, we closed on our house in Pewaukee, and I made our first memory the engagement: a piggyback ride through the front door, a ring box too big for my pocket, and a yes. We are getting married on November 21, 2026. Thank God she said yes.