23 and OMG - Happy Fathers Day

(some of you know the story I wrote three years ago, I've cut my original piece by almost a thousand words, with less bio and other info to make it a shorter read) 


        I sat there staring at my phone in disbelief.

No way. Wow... No way.....  I have two half-sisters? This cannot be happening.......

I guess I should start with a little background. I’ve only had one father in my life, or so I thought.

Let me start with the one whose name I share; Walter Joseph Lucas.

My father was fifty years old when I was born, so you could say he was late to the game when it came to having children. My sister Lisa is two years older than I am. I knew my father had been married twice before, but the few times he did talk about his other marriages were very brief. He would only say his previous wives did not want to have children and he did. It seemed reasonable enough.

Even into adulthood, I never pushed him to tell me more. My father had a very complicated relationship with his own family. He was born in 1915 on a ranch near Lockeford Ca. His father died when he was 18 or 19 and he had to take over the responsibilities of running the family ranch. I'm sure he did all he could for his mom, but there was definitely some bad blood between he and his siblings. I only know the little he told me about his family, and I don't know their side of the story, so I cannot judge what really happened.

My father was two generations older than me. He rode a horse to school, and milked thirty cows by hand before and after school. His life was work, money, and family, but mostly work. He couldn’t get into the Army during WWII because he was deaf in one ear. He worked in the shipyards at Mare Island, building PT boats during the war years.

By the time I came into the world, my father was a successful rancher, real estate broker, and owned a land leveling business. He had an extraordinary work ethic and drive. I can best describe him as a combination between John Wayne and Donald Trump. Just imagine that for a moment.

     I loved my father, as most sons do. I loved him despite the fact he was very flawed, like all fathers are.

My father was an alcoholic. Ever since I can remember, my father drank,,,, a lot. He was a maintenance drinker. He was never falling-down drunk, and he was never hungover. He would always get up at 6AM the next day ready to work, but damn, there were some frightening nights at my house growing up.  

     My father was a complicated man. He loved his family, but he had to be in charge of everything. He had my life planned out, and expected me to take over his 'empire' when the time came. However, he spent almost no time teaching me how to do that. 

     He was also a little sketchy in his business dealings. He could also bend a rule, or outright break it, if stood between him and his business success. He was hard working, but had a soft heart. He never talked about his own feelings, and rarely how he felt about you. Unless he had been drinking, and even then, it was 50-50 propositions. You were either the best kid in the world, or a huge disappointment.

Many people loved my father and thought he was a great guy. Others thought he was a son of bitch. I think, in the end, they were both right.

One day in May of 1991, when he experienced intense pain in his abdomen. He went home and stayed there for a few hours before my mother convinced him he had to go to the hospital.

He sat in the ER at Woodland Hospital for three or four hours while the doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with him. By the time a new doctor came on and decided he was bleeding internally, it was too late. He’d had an aneurysm in his aorta that morning. He was airlifted him to UC Davis Med Center that evening. The doctors performed surgery to repair the tear in the aorta, but he had lost too much blood and he died two days later.

Not that there is ever a good time to lose a parent, but it could not have come at a worse time for our family. The cattle market was heading into a decline, along with the real estate market. Losing not only my father, but also my employer, and the person who had engineered my life, was a huge hit. Even though I had my real estate salesman's license, and was working on my father's ranch, I had let him make almost all my decisions for me. He had been running the show, and now he was gone.

I was very immature for someone in my position. At twenty-five, I should have been ready for this day, but I wasn't. Not by a long shot. I went through the motions of gathering the cattle, and trying to help my mom figure out if we should keep the leases on the ranches. In the end, with all my father's bills and past due taxes, we had to sell everything, my house included, and start over.

At the time, all you see are the problems, all you feel is the pain, all you want is to have things put back the way they were. That wasn’t going to happen. You have to move, you have to go forward, you have to grow, and so I did.

Shortly after my father passed away, my mother told Lisa and I that dad had two sons with his first wife, long ago. He had told her not to tell us kids, but now that he was gone, she thought it wouldn’t hurt anything. She didn't have any names, just the little my father had told her about them.

This was fascinating to me.  I’d always wanted a brother, and it started me on a long journey to find my lost relatives. Ancestry.com was a new service, and I signed up looking to find my half brothers. I had no luck. I tried to find his first wife, but without her maiden name, you cannot find birth records at the county courthouses.

Eventually, I found a census record of my father living in Stockton with his first wife Zelda, her mother, and two small children with different last names. So, I think those kids were my father's stepsons, and would be no relation to me. A bit anticlimactic, but the mystery was solved. It was pretty interesting stuff, but I always wondered if could go back further or dig a little deeper.

Enter the new DNA registry 23andMe.

I had always heard from my father that he was mostly Irish, with some French from my grandmother. My mom is full Portuguese, half from the Azores and from Portugal by way of Brazil.

I wanted to see how true that was, so I signed up. A week or so later a package arrived. I followed the instructions and spit into the little tube, sealed it up and mailed it back. They said it would take about 6 weeks to get the results.

I didn't think I would find too many surprises, but being a huge history buff, I thought it would be cool to be able trace my heritage even further. I received an email saying my results were in and I logged on and looked at my DNA results. Nothing too startling. I was 28% British/Irish, 25% Broadly Northwest European, and 35% Iberian, (Spain/Portugal) with the rest a mash up of mostly European lines.

This tracked almost exactly the way I thought it would. Oh well.

I traced my father's Lucas lineage back to Prince Charles County Maryland in 1731, before the founding of the nation. I thought there may have been a little genetic, American-melting-pot, wildcard thrown in there somewhere, but it turned out I'm just a plain old American.

I had told my mom about the 23andMe findings and she wanted to know why I was so interested in it? I said I found it fascinating to know for sure where you come from. Knowing what part of the world you were from, tracing your family's history and such. I thought that would be the end of the story.

A few days later I received an email from 23andMe asking if I wanted to search for my DNA relatives. Sure, why not. I clicked the link.......

I looked at the page for a minute, and reread it a few times just to make sure.

No way. Wow... No way.....  I have two half-sisters? 

     This cannot be happening.......

I clicked on their names and looked at their profiles.

How could this be? They must belong to dad, but when were they born? I found a link to send them a message. What do I say? Hi, I'm your long lost half brother, where did you come from?

I sent each one a message and waited, checking my email constantly. I had so many questions. I asked if they knew my father, and did they know about my sister and I?

Pam was the first to respond:

”.... Tracy and I now know how we are half sisters through information told to us by our mothers when we were young adults. I'd be happy to connect if you want to solve this mystery for yourself. It is just because our parents really wanted us to be born, and all they did to arrange for our arrivals. I was born in 1961. Tracy in 1967. It will benefit us all to know the health and genetic data. So glad to find you. :) "

Wait? What?

I was a little slow on the uptake here just because it seemed so strange. With Pam being born in 61, that was before my mom and dad were married, so no foul there, but Tracy was born in 67, two years after me. Why would our all our parents really want us to be born? 

      I could see my dad having a bit of fun, but I'm pretty sure my mom wouldn’t have been happy with my father out populating the planet.

Like I said, it was staring me in the face, but I hadn't put it all together.

I sent both a message saying it looked like my father was a bit of a scoundrel if we were all related. 

     I think Pam and Tracy had a correspondence between each other, and decided to have Pam spill the beans:

"Well, not a scoundrel actually. I don't want to shock you, but since you are over 50, I think you can handle it. When I was 14, I found out that my father (my legal father) was not my biological father. Before my parents married, he had a vasectomy. It couldn't be reversed. My parents really wanted me, so they went to a specialist in San Francisco who arranged for a sperm donor. All they knew was he was a medical student who was healthy and had a great health history and already had a family and children. I was never to have known. Back then, the secrecy was thought best for the child being conceived. At 14 when I chose to sever my ties to my father, my mother told me the truth of my paternal creation. I didn't know about any of you, but always thought that this medical student may have made several donations. Lol. I met Tracy last year through her daughter making a connection to me. We were both stunned. Tracy found out from her mom about the medical student on her 22nd birthday. She is still very close to her legal father, so she is cautious about making it known because she doesn't want him to feel bad. So was your legal father a medical student? Tracy and I don't know if you were from donation like us or if our parent’s donor was both your legal and genetic dad. Sorry for the shock if you didn't know." 

Wow..... No way.

I was shocked.

So the only man I ever knew as my father was not my biological father.

No flippin' way.

As I sat there staring at my phone, I felt a rush of different feelings.


      My head was swimming, but it was late and I went to bed with lots of different thoughts rattling around. What am I going to say to my mom? Should I even bring this up? I had to. It was just too much to let go. Besides, my mom did nothing wrong. She did something extraordinary to bring me into this world. The doctors had instructed her not to tell me about my biological father, and she kept the secret for over 50 years. She did it out of love, and that is always a great reason.

     This changes everything…..Then again, it changes nothing.

    My father will always be my father. He raised me, for better or worse. It was surreal to me that a man from my father's generation would use a donor to have children. He was nothing if not a man's man. With all his success, all that money, there must have been something missing. There must have been a huge hole in his life he needed to fill with children. It made me wonder about those two stepsons he had with his first wife, and how it must have hurt to lose them when they were divorced.

The next day I called my mom in the morning. We spoke for a while, and then I said I was going to tell her a story. I told her what Pam had told me. The story of Children's Hospital in San Francisco, and the donor, and the instruction not to tell us kids. When I finished, I asked, "So mom, do you have anything you want to tell me?" 

      There was a bit of a pause, "Well, I would say that my story is the same as the story you just told me." She said with a nervousness in her voice. 

We talked about dad and her not being able to have children, and how the special clinic at Children's hospital was cutting edge for the 1960s. How it was very expensive, but it was their only hope of having children. She said my sister was conceived the same way. The doctors said it was best not to tell the children. Mom said she never really thought about it about it as the years past, and didn’t think it was important to tell us when dad died. We were going through enough turmoil at the time.
  The fact that I signed up for the DNA tests out of pure curiosity was something no one could have even imagined back in the 1960s. 

      If I had not spit in that little tube, I would have never known about my biological father. Surreal. 

So, the real question is: Now what?

What does it change? Like I said before; it changes everything, and it changes nothing.

Walt Sr. will always be my father. He raised me, he showed what it was to be a man, to work hard, and he showed me you can always do more than you think is possible. He also showed me some of the darkness in life, darkness that we are all capable of. Taken all together, the good and the bad, I will always love that man.

So what about my biological father? Do I want to know more about him? Yeah, I guess so. I would like to see a picture of him, and see if we look anything alike. I would like to know something about his personality, his temperament. Those kinds of things.

I'm sure he never imagined DNA testing back as a medical student, and that three strangers would someday find each other through an ounce of saliva. I wonder if he ever thought about how we all turned out?

So many questions.
  In the end, I am glad I know. I am also glad my mother and father went to that specialist in San Francisco. I am here, on this planet, for whatever that’s worth.

I have a wonderful family, a wonderful life, and memories to last me a few lifetimes. Here is the really strange part,  23andMe is a new company, not many people have signed up. I may have more half siblings out there. 

    I always wanted a brother. (Sorry Lisa, love ya)

To be truly good, you have to know how truly evil you are capable of being.

Those of you who know me, understand my fascination with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.  He makes you think. He doesn't tell you what to think, he helps you figure it out how to think. That way, you can become better at figuring out all kinds of things. Figuring out the world around you, and more importantly, the world between your ears, is a necessary and critical skill.

I've been listening to Peterson's podcast the last few days on my commute to work. In the latest one, he interviews Joe Rogan. Rogan is the host of a one of the most popular podcast on the planet, and has been a pioneer in long-form podcasting.

The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is downloaded millions of times a month. I listen to Rogan's podcast all the time. He interviews fascinating people, from MMA athletes, stand up comedians, psychologists, doctors, physicists, evolutionary biologists, mathematicians and sometimes, just  people he finds interesting. 

His long-form podcasts are great because people don't really get past their canned answers until the first hour is over. By then, they know Rogan isn't trying to "get them" or to make them say something dumb that gets a headline. Rogan is genuinely trying to understand them as a person. People let the guard down and start really communicating in this format.

Peterson's podcast was great because it turned the tables on Rogan. Peterson spent a few hours asking Rogan about his childhood, his martial arts career, his transition to being a stand up comedian, and how he started his podcast.

As they spoke about comedy, they brought up Bill Cosby. They both thought the worst part of Cosby's destructive fall, other than the damage to his victims, were the two completely contradictory sides of his behavior. His public persona was that of a wholesome, funny, father figure, spokes person, actor. However, deep within the heart of the man, he had a very dark side.

Peterson spoke about a book by Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology. The part he touched on was the idea: Don't be better that you are.

Meaning, beware of adopting a persona of someone far better that you actually are. The danger is, that dark part of you, that part you are not willing to admit to, or deal with, is going to go off and have some fun of its own.

When I see a public fall from grace, I used to think those people just snapped and went off the deep end. As I've grown older, I have started to see how these things don't "just happen", there's usually a long lead up of behaviors, and patterns of thinking, that start long before the fall.

I remember reading a story about a group of small town promoters, who in the late 60s, had booked Paul Harvey to speak at a local venue. Harvey was a popular national radio personality back then. As the date drew nearer, tickets sales were not going well and the promoters needed something else to sell tickets or they faced disaster. They needed another act, but had no money to pay for one. A local reporter thought of a young couple who had a puppet show, of all things, on a Christian broadcasting channel in their town. He asked the couple if they could do a live performance to open the night, and they agreed. They would do it for free.

Jim and Tammy Bakker put on a great show, and the event at least didn't lose money. Jim and Tammy were so strapped for cash, they asked for bridge toll and gas money to get home.

The point is, Jim and Tammy Bakker were once very, very nice people. However, they had a dark side they never dealt with. Looking back, as their popularity grew, and the money and fame came rolling in, they probably started to believe their own press. Those dark, secret, thoughts and urges were probably welling up and gaining strength, all the while their pristine image kept growing.

I'm not sure what that first, solid step, down the road to destruction was. Maybe something as simple as a kiss, or a late night dinner that ended up in a hotel room, but when that ball started rolling, Jim Bakker could not stop it. As those two sides battled inside for control, it must have been torture. The persona of a wholesome man of God, pitted against a sexual libertine looking for more and greater pleasure.

I would imagine Bakker was actually relived, in some small way, when it all came crashing down. At least he didn't have to pretend any longer. He finally had to confront his dark side. It was laid wide open for the world to see.

So what is the antidote to catastrophe? How do you keep that dark side from grabbing the keys and taking your life for a joy ride of destruction? I wish I knew for certain.

One thing I am sure of: The ability to stave off destruction, of your own making, is in direct proportion to the effort you put into understanding, and dealing with, your dark side. It isn't very pleasant, seeing yourself at your worst. That's why you haven't dealt with it.  Like Carl Jung said, "That which you most need, will be found where you least want to look".

An example of this is the lens we view our lives through. Peterson says that most people read history from the perspective of the victim. You imagine you are the Jew being rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto. You are the Gypsy being stuffed into a train car, on your way to the death camps. No one wants to read that story from the perspective of the oppressor. However, throughout history, that is the most likely scenario.

If you were a man born in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, you were almost certainly going to be fighting for Adolph Hitler. No way, you say. I would never do that! Sorry to break it to you, but you probably would. There was an extremely small, active resistance to the Nazis within the German population, especially during the late 1930 and early 1940s. The odds of you being in it are one in a thousand.

In the beginning of the war, they needed factory workers and farmers, so maybe half of the men would be able to stay out of the army. By 1944 and 45, if you were a 16-50 year old German man, and were able to hold a rifle, you were going to be fighting in the Wehrmacht. You would have been the one poking the Jews with bayonets to get them in the rail cars. And the crappy part is, so would I.

We want to think we would be have the moral courage to stand up to this kind of evil, but that's not how most people are wired. More than likely, we would do what everyone else is doing. We would follow orders. How many of us are ready to see our family taken out and hung in the town square for our treason? Not many.

When we start to imagine ourselves as capable of doing something horrific like this, we can start to understand that anyone, and everyone are capable of doing these things. You, me, your spouse, your parents, your children, the Pastor at your church, the famous actor who has given millions to charity, your musical heroes, every single human being has this capability within them.

Some people understand this all too well. They have seen it in flashes or short bursts. The worst parts of them come out, sometimes by surprise. Be it cruelty, fury, sexual depravity, lying, deviousness, name your dark side, they see it, and they recognize it for what it is. Even if they never act on these dark feelings, they know they are in there, somewhere inside, just under the facade we show the world. 

We as a society, we don't want to talk about this dark side inside us. Especially, to our children. When our kids have these thoughts, as they all will, they think they are somehow broken. They think they are the only ones. This is a very bad thing. Talk to your kids about this, please.

As adults, we love to point to "those people" as the folks with dark sides. Criminals, and deviants of all sorts, it's those kinds of people, not us.  Yeah, not so much. We do a great disservice when we pretend we ourselves don't have these thoughts and urges. .

Look, some of you are better at tamping down these thoughts that others. So much so, that they only pop up once in a great while. When they do, you grab the RoundUp and spray those bad weeds as soon as you see them. Others, myself included, we will let them grow in the back yard of our mind until they take over. After some time, you have to hack your way through them just walk around. This is not good. Once they take over that back yard, it's not too long before they make their way around house to the front yard. 

One of my buddies, who worked with me on campus, had a great analogy. We were working in the summer, and some of the young ladies on campus wear very revealing outfits. We would be on some job site, and some woman would walk by with just enough clothes on not to be arrested. Look, I'm a married man, but it's hard not to notice. We would catch each other looking.

He would always say. "I'm a man, I'm going to notice those kinds of things. But those thoughts are like a bird. If it flies over your head, and keeps going, you're good. If it stops, and stays there, and builds a nest, brother, you're in trouble."

That's good advice. 

So, maybe you are a pillar of the community. Let's suppose you are in a leadership position in your company, your government, your church, or just within a group of friends. Maybe you always do the right thing. Maybe you have a spotless reputation. Okay, that's great, or is it? Is it a lie?

Are you hiding an affair? Embezzling funds? Abusing your spouse at home?  Or maybe you're  struggling with a terrible thought life, or an addiction to porn, or booze, or pills?

You can do something about it. You should do something about it.

The farther the divide between those two sides, between your public and private life, the worse the disaster is going to be.

If you need to resign from some position, or organization, so you can get some help, do it. If you need to come clean to your spouse, or your boss, or your coworker, do it.

If you just keep ignoring that dark side, one day you will be sitting in a court room discussing bail, or signing divorce papers, or in the ER on a ventilator. Maybe one day you will wake up with your picture on the front page of your local newspaper, and wonder how it ever got this far? Hopefully, your fall won't make nation news.

This first step is an honest, 360 degree assessment of the distance between your public persona, and your inner self. Look in the darkest corner, and root it out. It won't be easy. Even if no one ever knows how hard it was for you to change, it will be well worth it.