You may have noticed that I haven’t said much about my kids so far. After fathering five children in the past thirty-five years, you’d think I should be some kind of expert on the subject of fatherhood. So I have been trying real hard to figure out what I have learned about fatherhood, and I have come up with one important lesson. I learned that my own father was doing the best he could. You probably have to reach middle age and experience all the problems and joys of fatherhood before you can understand the truth in such a simple statement. I was, before I realized it.
It’s certainly tough for a kid to understand that the guy they call Father who is out there screwing up right and left is really just doing the best he can.
The guy you call Father is just a kid himself in his own mind. Maybe he’s got some gray hairs and his face is wrinkled like a road map, but inside he is wondering how it can be that the mirror tells him he ain’t young any more. The face he sees in the mirror changes from being a little kid or a teenager into being a grown-up and then an elderly person so fast it seems impossible.
I wake up feeling eighteen years old physically and somewhere in my thirties mentally, and then half a dozen children come to the door and say, “Good morning, Granddad.” It’s kind of a shock, really. I love being a grandfather, but how could I possibly be old enough to be one? When I was in my twenties, I was pretty sure I’d be dead by age forty. John Derek said a line in a movie we thought was romantic—“live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” I remember turning thirty seemed like a big deal at the time. We were raised to regard thirty as some kind of watermark. By thirty you were supposed to be full grown and in command. You were either an up-and-comer, or you weren’t going to make it in life. Forty was the dreaded beginning of middle age and fifty was when you finally got it all together just in time to turn sixty and die.
I think the Indians had the best way of talking about age. An Indian was a baby, then young, then prime, then old. They never referred to years. When a guy was prime, he was expected to be out doing the hunting and the fighting. It was not his job to sit and dispense wisdom to the young, because he was still out there learning what life was about. He sat around the campfire and bragged about how much meat or loot he had brought to the family, and how many enemies he’d knocked in the head. The Indians had big families around them, all moving together from place to place, with a lot of wives to tell the kids what to do. An Indian child looked upon all the mothers and grandmothers in the family as the child’s own mother or grandmother. The child’s real mother’s sisters were just naturally considered as close to the child as his real mother. The old people sat around the fire and told long stories about their lives and what they had learned, passing on the knowledge of the tribe to the following generations.
The “Willie Nelson and Family” that grew together over the years was not consciously modeled after the Indian family concept, but, as you can see, it has a number of similarities.
My daughter Susie had a hard time adjusting to our constant moving around and our financial ups and downs. When she was in high school in Nashville, a cheerleader and in love, we jerked her out and stuck her in Travis High in Austin. Susie dropped out of school and took a job at Mr. Gatti’s pizza parlor. I asked her why she had done it.
“To pay for my car,” she said.
We both knew she wasn’t responsible for car payments.
I asked Susie to go for a drive with me. I told her to take the wheel. “Just head west,” I said.
Susie drove us through the Hill Country, past the peach orchards and the old stone farmhouses with tin roofs, and the sheep and goats in the meadows with the creeks running through and the hills rearing up higher as we went farther west. I wasn’t saying much, just listening to Susie and picking at my guitar.
“Why don’t we go see Freddie?” I said after a while. Freddie lived near Evergreen, Colorado. I sang all the way—songs I was writing for my Phases and Stages album. This is the story album that tells about divorce and discovering how to love again. One song I had written directly for Susie: “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” The song is a father talking to his daughter, saying to her what I was now singing to Susie. Instead of trying to give people advice, I am better at putting my feelings into a song.
By the time I finished singing “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way,” Susie and I were both crying.
I wasn’t really trying to talk Susie into or out of anything. I just wanted her to know I loved her and was thinking about her.
A man likes to believe his wife is his best friend.
But when children come along, your wife doesn’t have time to be your best friend. She has babies that must be taken care of. They may be very small people, but they are real, and they require a lot of attention.
When Martha and I started having children, all of a sudden she had to stay home and change the diapers. She couldn’t go out with me as much as she had before. And she had to work because we needed the money to support our family. I’ll admit that I was jealous of the kids because they were stealing time away from Martha and me. I’d come home off the road and have two days I wanted to spend with Martha, and with the kids too, but there was very little time. People used to tell you that two kids were no more trouble than one. We rapidly found out that two kids are ten times more trouble than one. With three kids, you can triple it. You could pack up one kid in ten minutes to go to Grandma’s house or the babysitter, but three kids took an hour and a half. We spent some good times as a family. But the little things that Martha used to do for me, like wash my hair or scratch my back, she didn’t have time for anymore. I’m sure my jealousy had a lot to do with some of the asshole stunts I pulled.
I think under different circumstances, somewhere in another time, Martha and I would have made it together. But me being a picker, and Martha loving to party, it was just an impossible situation. If Martha and I couldn’t understand it, how could we expect Lana, Susie, and Billy to understand it?
You know you fall in love and you go together a while and you decide this is it, this is the perfect deal, it can’t get no better than this, and you get married, and you’re no longer lovers any more, you’re husband and wife. Then from wherever you come from, whatever raising you’ve had, you start drawing on that knowledge of how you’re supposed to act as a spouse. What do I expect my husband or my wife to do? That’s where all the problems come in.
I’ve been married nearly my whole life, and I’ve been a road musician nearly my whole life. And I know those two are incompatible.
I’m fifty-five years old. I’ve been married to three women. Maybe it’s not supposed to work for me.
My marriages weren’t really failures. I’ve got a whole gang of great kids. No matter what, I’ll always have a big family around me. Someday I’ll hear them saying, “Here comes Great-Granddaddy Willie again. That old son of a bitch must have just finished his new TV show.” I mean, my family ain’t going to forget me, and I ain’t going to forget them.
Back when Lana, Susie, and Billy were little, and I was with Shirley and Martha was getting a divorce, I wasn’t allowed to talk to my kids. About four or five months before Martha’s divorce was granted in Las Vegas, I wrote my kids a letter trying to explain myself to them.
It has been a different story with Paula and Amy in that they grew up without ever knowing what it is like to be broke.
When Lana, Susie, and Billy were little, I’d go in to buy a pack of cigarettes and they’d have these toy racks where you could buy little, cheap toys. I bought a lot of that stuff. It was all junk, but the kids liked it anyway.
With Paula and Amy growing up, the price of toys shot through the roof. Not their toys, necessarily. My toys, too. We were surrounded by the trappings of success and by mobs of people we sometimes didn’t even know.
Once Paula and Amy came along, Connie couldn’t travel with me anymore because she had to be a mother. We started spending time away from each other. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder, regardless of what people say. Maybe it will for a few days or a few weeks. But if you start spending too many hours or days or weeks away from each other, things start happening.
Probably everybody around me feels that some of the people around them are using them to get to me. Some of it’s true and some of it isn’t. Still, you have that paranoia. You never know whether someone likes you for you or for another reason. I think Susie felt that and all the kids felt that, and maybe still do to some degree, but they’ve toughened up some and come to realize that it’s not that serious. People just react differently around celebrities, that’s all. But Connie wanted to spare Paula and Amy all of that and raise them like normal kids, whatever normal means.
Normal is just a word our society uses to describe kids who fit the pattern the authorities have laid down at the moment. Kids are people, and people are different in different ways for different reasons that have to do with working out their Karma. You can’t tell a kid to be good and expect it to work automatically just because Father said so.
I’ve watched kids raised in all sorts of ways, following every theory ever invented by parents. I’ve seen kids who were poor and neglected and abused turn out to be outstanding people. On the other side of the coin, some of the worst people I ever met have had what seemed like ideal childhoods—loving, undivorced parents, plenty of money, a good education.
I guess having money and nice homes made it even worse for me to be at the golf course when I should have been at home. But I couldn’t really convince Connie and the kids to move out to the golf course and stay with me. It was just a matter of where do you want to live? You may say it’s not important but it damned sure is. When you’ve got time off you want to spend it with the people you love, but you also want to spend it at home, a place that feels like home to everybody. That seemed to be our problem. We were all too scattered and what was home to one of us wasn’t to the other. What I had wanted everybody to do was to move back to Abbott and all the kids go to school there where I’d gone to school. But that wasn’t necessarily what they wanted. You force your ideas on everybody, it doesn’t work. Yet me being stubborn as I am and was, I tried and tried and then I would get upset because I couldn’t make it happen the way I wanted it to be.
One thing I do know. In a few more years—a lot sooner than they realize—my kids will look in the mirror one morning and realize that while they may still feel like kids inside, they are in fact grandmothers or grandfathers.
I trust when that morning comes they will understand—if they don’t understand already—that I did the best I could.