Lucky Bastard: My Life, My Dad, and the Things I'm Not Allowed to Say on TV

by Joe Buck

I think: staying together for the sake of the kids. It’s an offshoot of the first mistake: ignoring your relationship with your spouse so you can focus on your kids. You are still saying, even subconsciously, “The marriage isn’t important. The kids are.” Trudy had twelve more years of school at that point, but I was thinking, “We’ll stay married that whole time. For her. I’m going to slug it out!” Like “Ah, heck, that’s only a decade of my life, plus a couple of years—what’s the big deal?” I really think, even after they get married, husband and wife must continue to “date.” They have to keep courting each other and find some time to be together, just the two of them. In my opinion, that is key to survival. I wanted to keep our marriage going and raise the girls together in a household that looked perfect from the outside. It’s what pleasers do. If something bad happens, I assume it’s my fault. And that’s a problem, because you try to make everybody else happy, and the last person you think about is yourself. But if you’re not making yourself happy, you can’t make other people happy. That’s why therapists talk about the speech that flight attendants give: If the cabin loses pressure, you put your mask on first before you assist your child. You need to be right to help them be right.

This is great advice for me becoming a teacher or substitue teacher.