Origins Pt. II – My Dad the Fun Killer

I like to think that I am an honest and upfront person. And in the interest of full disclosure, I would like to take the opportunity right now to apologize to my future wife (I don’t know who she is, but she sounds good looking). Sweetheart, you are marrying into a family of weirdos. And in this family of characters, it doesn’t get any weirder than Gordon Richard Hilton, Sr.

Let me just start by saying that my dad and I are not friends. I literally defriended him about a year ago because he was stalking my profile and trying to make assumptions about who I was dating. Since then, I have denied friend requests from my mother, two aunts, and even my own grandmother. I just don’t believe that old people should be on Facebook. Facebook is just one of many examples where my father has taken something fun and tried to ruin it for me.

Facebook is actually a sore spot in my family right now. You see, my dad suffers from an affliction known as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and his current obsession is Facebook. He feels that Facebook is a great tool to keep in contact with relatives and hometown friends. He has thus taken it upon himself to scan and upload every picture our family has ever taken onto his profile. This would be alright if he knew anything at all about the principle of moderation. Unfortunately, he doesn’t and often spends as many as six hours after he comes home from work in the evening uploading pictures.

He has also taken it upon himself to teach all of the old people in our extended family how to use Facebook so they can stalk their children and grandchildren more efficiently, effectively creating an army of elderly Facebook stalkers. If you have an old person stalking you on Facebook, it is more likely than not my dad’s fault.

Growing up, I knew that whenever my dad came home from work, the time for playing video games was over. I actually needed a little advance notice so I could run into my dad’s room and return the cords to their hiding place in one of my dad’s shoes. I was once grounded from video games for an entire year, during which time I enjoyed many hours of mind-numbing entertainment and false alarms that had me running back and forth from the television to my dad’s shoe.

One can sum up my dad’s parenting style in two words…mind games. I spent hours the other day trying to convince my little brother that my dad doesn’t have people following him around here at BYU. My dad once told me that he had people following me around at school and that he knew that I was using my lunch money to buy candy. I knew he was lying because I was actually using my money to buy Pokemon cards.

I learned from my dad that if you aren’t working hard you should feel guilty. And even if you are working hard, a little guilt is always healthy. And when guilt isn’t sufficiently motivating, there’s always humiliation. My dad once scheduled a meeting with all of my high school teachers, in which it was discovered that I was getting bad grades because I was lazy, a fact that was a surprise to no one. I guess my dad knew his boy, however, because I started getting test scores so high that students in my class began to complain that I was ruining the curve.

My dad’s real philosophy is “decide what you want to do and work your butt off.” When I told him I wanted to be a Major League pitcher, he had the gardeners build a pitcher’s mound in our backyard. Every night he would take me outside and have me throw pitches to him while he crouched behind home plate with nothing but a catcher’s mitt, bifocals, and a whole lot of arthritis. Eventually, we decided sitting on a paint bucket would be more comfortable for him.

Oftentimes, I used to wonder if my dad was a ninja. Even though he was a busy high-paid business executive, he always found time to attend my sporting events. I don’t know. It just seemed like something a ninja would do.

When I was a boy, neither of my parents was active in the church. My dad had been inactive since he was sixteen. My mom would attend sporadically; other times she would drop me and my sister off on Sundays. As my eighth birthday approached, I decided that I wanted to be baptized. The standard procedure when a child turned eight in my family was that my dad would attend church for a few weeks, and the Bishop would allow him to perform the baptism. This time, however, the bishop wasn’t having it. I told my dad that I still wanted him to baptize me, and he decided that it was time once and for all to investigate whether the church was true.

Over the next six months, my obsessive-compulsive father read the entire standard works (the Book of Mormon, the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price), had the missionaries over every Monday night, and attended church every Sunday. Over time he realized that he had known all along that the church was true, and on December 2, 1995, my father baptized me a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He and my mother have been active members ever since.

My father has always stood as a great example to me of how people can change. Though he does have a reputation as a fun killer, he can actually be pretty fun when he wants to be. However, I don’t think Thanksgiving dinner is going to be very fun this year because of another of his current obsessions…weight loss.

Origins Pt. I – My Mother the Dream Killer

One cannot get too far into writing a blog without throwing out a tribute to mother. As next week is my mother’s birthday, I thought this would be a good time for such a tribute. People have always said that I am a mama’s boy, and by people, I mean my mom used to always say that. She’s probably right. I tried being nice to my dad once, and he made me clean the loft.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has been a dream killer. Although she has on occasion killed me in my dreams, I am actually referring to her killing of my hopes, wishes, and aspirations. When I was a child, she told me that the chances of becoming a professional baseball player were slim, that the pink power ranger was too old for me, and that becoming a dinosaur was a physical impossibility.

My mother is also a liar. For example, whenever we passed by a train, she used to always say, “Look Steve, Dumbo’s on that train.” Imagine my disappointment as time and time again I somehow failed to see a cartoon baby elephant riding on the back of a train. To this day, I have very little trust in my eyes. Another time, I asked my mother what I should eat so that I could grow tall enough to grab the rim on the basketball hoop in our backyard. Her answer was, “vegetables.”

From my mother I learned that if you are a good boy, you gain your parents trust. And when your parents trust you, you get picked up from school two hours late every day.

When my mother finally did pick me up from school, she would engage in her favorite hobby…lecturing. You can pick just about any topic in the book, and she can lecture you on it for over an hour. Although we all got to hear all of the lectures in her arsenal, she definitely had her go to lectures for each child. Her favorites for me were “don’t put all your eggs in one basket;” “I don’t know why you like this music…I’ll yell at you and you don’t have to pay me;” and my personal favorite, “don’t be like your sister.”

The lecture that had the biggest impact on me growing up, however, was my mother’s testimony. Oftentimes, she would list to me all of the blessings we have as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Even if somebody could somehow prove to me that Mormonism isn’t true, I would still attend church because it makes us better people,” she would then tell me. I learned through my own experience that the church is true, and these blessings are just icing on the cake.

So, I suppose my own testimony is strong today because my mother taught me how to have faith and how to recognize blessings in my life. She may have killed a few dreams along the way, but she also opened up a whole new landscape of dreams by helping me gain a testimony. I guess what I’m trying to say is…my mom’s alright.