Finally Home With No Plane to Catch

What man WOULDN'T be beaming??

While a rare biblical-level storm pours down on my beloved hometown of Austin Texas tonight, I'm wrapping up an amazing week in which love has rained down on me like a flood. For the first time in almost a year, I'm home living it up with my family, without having to worry about a plane to catch.


July 2011 to July 2012 was one of the most challenging and unstable years of my life. After a few things went haywire with my job situation last summer, I headed to New Jersey for a three-month freelance gig that ended up stretching to eleven months plus. Though I was blessed with some great rewards professionally, the personal sacrifices I had to make felt just plain dumb.





Even though the lesson can be found in books, sermons, and classic TV episodes, no one really needs to be told that "family is most important." It's a gut feeling that comes as natural as breathing. But what do you do when your obligations to your family come into conflict with each other?



That's the dilemma I found myself facing this time last year when I was suddenly jobless, as well as banned from even working in the Austin TV market for six months. I looked around town and considered changing fields, but ultimately my best opportunity to both make money and keep my career moving forward came in the form of a three-month freelance offer from MLB Network, 1700 miles from home. I had to make a choice between supporting my family from far away, or being there with them but not contributing much to the bottom line.


Though it wasn't quite Dennis Hopper screaming "pop quiz, hotshot" in my ear, I felt a lot of pressure from the decision. My girlfriend (Eunice) and I had an 18-month-old daughter (Roma) at the time, dozens of my extended family members live in Austin, and I have a great, strong circle of friends here in town that I like to spend as much of my free time with as I can.  Forget three months, these were not people I wanted to leave behind for three minutes! On the other hand, I also had a built-in support group that could/would be waiting for me in Jersey, with a handful of former colleagues from my days at ESPN now crushing it at MLB Net....and they offered me enough pay to flat-out embarrass the local news outlet I'd been slaving away for, pretty tough in an industry that has very little shame.

I couldn't be prouder to rep this logo

With Eunice's support, and even though I knew at least a few family members thought it was the wrong move, I made the hard call and chose to give Eu and Romy my providence instead of my presence. I took the MLB offer, packed a few things into the cab of my truck, and headed north, into one of the strangest psychological places I've inhabited in my 33 years.

I can't deny, I loved absolutely everything about being an employee of MLB Net. The product was great, the people were great...working there completely revitalized my career after 18 months of hating my job producing a "whatever the consultants say goes" newscast for a local affiliate here in Austin. The three month agreement stretched into an ongoing, month-to-month, "you can work here as long as you want/need to" understanding, and since I had that ban keeping me out of the Austin market until January 2012, I was happy to take the good people in Secaucus up on their offer. Though the job was technically below my previous experience level (Associate Producer), I found it to be incredibly liberating and I think I did some of the best work I've ever done. (I mean, I better have, right??) I made a major contribution to MLB Tonight's Best Daily Studio Show Emmy win, picking up the first "statue" of my career. I also got to reconnect with a bunch of old friends while making a ton of great new ones in the process.  Professionally, the move to MLB couldn't have worked out better.

Without a doubt the coolest TV Studio in America

Personally, though, I was a wreck. For Eunice and I, the distance was kinda cute at first, we started our relationship long-distance after all, but it got old fast.  Sure, I was able to send home plenty of cash to pay the bills, but that didn't stop her from feeling like a single mom most days, stuck in full-time parent mode without ever getting a break. Of course we Skyped often and I even made enough to pay for plane tickets for visits home most months, but as Romy kept getting older and smarter, our goodbyes kept getting more painful. I realize that military families and others often have it much worse than we did, so I tried to keep things in perspective. But as with most struggles in life, knowing others have it worse shouldn't really make you feel better, and it sure didn't do so for me in this case.


Truthfully, the personal negatives always hurt me more than the professional positives helped, but whenever I started feeling blue I'd just remind myself that I was making a sacrifice for a purpose. I'll also cop to an unhealthy dose of bitterness at times, mostly towards the three people I felt had put me in that situation for reasons I found petty and indefensible. I spent some of my lonelier nights cursing names and entertaining revenge fantasies...on better days I just held out hope that things would get better in some mythical "someday,"praying that, once and only once, John Fogerty was wrong.

I even tried for a brief time to get Eunice to move north and join me in Jersey, but she smartly resisted. After living all over America, I know that Austin is the place where my soul feels most at home, so my energies were better spent trying to find a job back in Central Texas. Eventually the calendar turned to 2012 and the ridiculous ban that kept me out of the market expired. I could set myself seriously to the task of coming home for good.


Progress was slow. A couple places I applied to showed some interest but then things didn't pan out for one reason or another. Still, as Winter melted into Sprummer, I started to feel my hand being forced. Romy, who could barely walk without tumbling over when I first left, was now a running, jumping, giggling, question-asking little nina, and I realized that the scales had shifted...suddenly my presence was needed more than my providence, and even if we had to eat Ramen like college students, my girls needed me at home, job or no job. In mid-May, I got my June schedule at MLB, and told myself that I wouldn't be there in July.

Leaving w/out a party? Not if these gents could help it!

A couple weeks into June, I gave my official notice that I was leaving. Again the folks in Secaucus were amazing, thanking me for my work and wishing me well...some of the leaders there even told me sincerely they were just sorry they couldn't find a way for me to work for MLB in Austin somehow. They were great, just great. When friends found out I was planning to hit the turnpike southbound immediately after my final shift on Friday June 29th, they wouldn't hear of it, telling me that I was staying in town an extra night for a goodbye party, or else (Thanks, Schemmy!).


After giving notice, I felt at peace, and I know Eunice was excited. A few days later, I got to give her some even better news: I received a job offer from ESPN's Longhorn Network in Austin.  I've been trying to work at LHN for years, even since before ESPN got involved. Now, nearly 8 years after I left Austin for Bristol CT, almost 4 years after first learning about the drive to create a UT Sports-themed TV station, and just over 1 year since I thought I would be joining the LHN launch team (before all that haywire started), I'm finally getting my dream: a job I love in the city I love, that allows me to take care of the people I love.


I had my Goodbye Party, I took a fun road trip home, and then, like I said up top, I've spent the last week in joyful reunion with the two people I love most. Fatherhood is sheer joy now that my daughter and I can have actual conversations. Eunice is as charming and gorgeous as ever, and doesn't even hate me for staying away so long. Topping it all off: about a month ago my sister, her husband, and their two kids moved to Austin, giving us even more family in town and giving Romy two more cousins for regular playdates.


Eunice, bless her heart, is a huge fan of the Ryan Reynolds romcom Just Friends.  We watched it this week, in fact....me for the first time, her for the first time in month or two. I didn't fall in love with the movie the way I fell in love with Eunice, but I did think Anna Farris was pretty funny. Her character's song "Forgiveness" cracked me up, but also made me think about that bitterness and those revenge fantasies that I had clung to in my dark hours while separated from family.

I'd like to be able to say that, even before the new job came through, I had started to forgive the triumvirate of dunces that I blamed for my exile, but I'm not sure. I do know that if it wasn't the new job that started me on the path to positive karma, it was definitely the Emmy. I'd be a better man if I'd been able to move forward even before good things started coming my way again, it's something I'll continue working on, for sure. 

Through it all, I feel like I suffered a lot, but now on the other side of that rough patch, I find myself in perhaps the best, most fortunate situation of my life. My work at LHN won't start in earnest for another couple of weeks, so I've got some good lounge time in July to hit pools and reacquaint myself with Austin (first re-impression: we continue letting way too many Californians in, sorry cousins J & T!).  When I do get back to the grind, I have an exciting project that will challenge me more than just about anything I've ever worked on. And when I think about the joys in store for me as a dad over the coming years, my heart swells.


Thank you to everyone who supported me over the past year with constant phone calls to see how I was doing, especially my mom and my brother Gabe. Thanks to MLB Network for embracing me as a part of a world-class TV production crew, while also giving me a way to provide for my family during a tough stretch. Thanks to LHN for keeping me in mind after things didn't work out last year and eventually finding a way to bring me into the fold. 


Thanks most especially to mi querida, who probably didn't realize what she was in for when she originally blessed my Garden State excursion, but never made me feel guilty about the hard choice I had to make. Eu, you are a wonderful partner, a fantastic mother, a stone cold fox, and my favorite person in the world. May the next year of our lives together be as full of amazing as the last year was full of trials. Te quiero.