My name is Jim. I am thirty-four years old, and I found out my dad had a retirement party through a guy I share a printer with at work.
Not from a phone call.
Not from a text.
Not even from one of those mass family messages that gets buried under grocery reminders and birthday emojis.
A coworker named Derek, a guy from accounts who I sometimes nodded at in the hallway, was the person who told me my own family had thrown my father a retirement party and decided I was not worth inviting.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
I grew up in Clarksville, Tennessee, the middle of three kids in a house with a front porch, a patchy backyard, and an American flag my father replaced every Memorial Day.
My older brother, Scott, is thirty-seven. My younger sister, Paige, is twenty-nine. Then there is me, the middle child, which I know already tells some people almost everything they need to know.
Growing up as the middle kid in my family felt like being the second coat of paint on a wall. Technically, you are there. Technically, you are serving a purpose. But nobody ever walks in and says, “That second coat really changed the room.”
My dad, Roger, worked for the same manufacturing company for thirty-six years. He started on the floor, worked his way up to operations manager, and retired as a regional director.
The man bled company colors.
Every dinner conversation growing up was about production quotas, late shipments, safety audits, and supply chain logistics, which was exactly as exciting as it sounds when you are eleven and just want to talk about whether the Tennessee Titans might make the playoffs.
My mom, Diane, was a homemaker who ran our house like a small government agency. She had spreadsheets for grocery shopping. Actual spreadsheets. Color-coded.
The thing about my family is that it was never dramatic in an obvious way. I was not mistreated in the kind of way people make movies about. I had food. I had a roof. I had parents who showed up to most of my games.
Most.
But there were patterns.
And once you start seeing patterns, you cannot unsee them.
Scott was the firstborn, the golden child, the one who played quarterback, got a business degree, went into finance, and made my parents’ chests puff out at every family gathering.
Paige was the baby, the miracle child who came five years after me when my parents thought they were done. She was babied so hard that she still gets her oil changed at my dad’s preferred mechanic because he set up an account for her.
She is twenty-nine.
And me?
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