Overcoming Adversity: Navigating Life's Unexpected Turns with Clay Boatright

Baggage and drama, however, are often all in how you look at it.

SPEAKER_00: Welcome to great, great, and it's great.

I'm to Kevin L and I'm excited to welcome you into the podcast.

And today, it's episode number 195.

Hopefully, you're having an amazing day.

And the whole point of this podcast is in case you're not having an amazing day, well, I want to make it better.

Or maybe the day is just getting started for you.

So you really don't know if it's going to be amazing or not.

Well, why not set the stage with a conversation like this one?

Because I'm in the studio today with a guy named Clay Boat Wright.

And Clay is an amazing guy with an incredible story.

Incredible because, well, it's life.

And rarely ever is life easily going.

No, life has its ups and downs.

It has its love and it has its losses.

It has the good days and the bad.

And Clay's story is no exception.

Clay is the author of a book called God's Plan for Our Circus.

A title that totally resonated with me as soon as I heard it.

Clay has got a story that is truly heartfelt.

It's probably one of my most favorite interviews that I've done because we get to hear this man's story.

The story of a man, of a husband, of a father, all wrapped up into one beautiful story.

You're going to get to hear about his wife, Carol, and about their family.

But you're also going to get to hear about Panzer and the loss of his wife.

You're also going to get to hear about when things don't go the way we think they're going to.

When starting a family all of a sudden comes with other things that we didn't expect.

Because, well, when we start a family, you of course think everything's going to be perfect.

Everything's going to be just as good as it ever dreamed it would be.

But maybe it's not.

Maybe though that's okay.

Because, well, it's all part of the fight.

After all, it's part of the fight.

And just as you left thinking a little bit more about it.

A little bit more about what matters in this.

And I guess we have plenty of rights to think about.

Because he is the star of today's show, and I'm excited to introduce him to you.

SPEAKER_02: God has a plan for all of our lives.

And our challenge or opportunity is to identify what is that plan and then to bring it to fruition.

But God's plan may be different than our plan, what we want.

And sometimes, God being smarter than we are, we need to get over it.

And and God's plan sometimes doesn't look exactly the way we want it to.

That's this sovereignty of being God.

And and from our standpoint, our layman standpoint, human standpoint, it can be crazy.

It may not make any sense.

It may be an absolute circus at times.

And sometimes we have to get through the storm to see the sunlight on the other side for it to really make sense.

So that's what it means to me, is that God does have a plan for all of our lives.

And sometimes that plan may not necessarily look like what we would have charted out.

But that doesn't mean it's wrong.

It means that we uh we need to step up and get through it and hopefully get through it with a smile.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Well, I love that so much.

So, Clay, thank you, you know, kind of for setting the stage with us on that.

Now, kind of unpacking your story, you know, for me and my audience.

Looking back at your life, kind of before you ever met your wife and began your family, what did life look like for you before that chapter in your life?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was um blessed to uh be able to live at home all through uh college and and grad school.

So I graduated high school a year early, undergrad a year early, and then uh graduate school a year early.

So I had my grad degree at 21, moved out of my uh parents' house finally.

Uh I was the last one out, so they were quite relieved to uh finally reach the empty nest stage.

And uh I had a grad degree in marketing, so I'm gonna go out and take on the world from a uh consumer packaged goods marketing standpoint, and yeah, hopefully make a lot of money and be successful and business success and all that kind of stuff.

So that's kind of what where my goals and objectives were.

And I was, again, 21 years old at the time, as interesting timing would have it.

Quite literally the same week I moved out of my parents' house into my first apartment, I had my first date with the woman I would marry three years later and then spend you know the next 33 years with.

So I I jokingly say I went from one domineering woman to another domineering woman in the in the course of four days.

And so so when you when you when you asked the question, what did what did my life priorities and so on look like prior to meeting my wife, it was an interesting week, you know.

SPEAKER_00: Wow.

Well, well, you know what?

I I guess that meant that they helped to keep you out of trouble.

SPEAKER_02: That's exactly how that is.

There is so much truth in that statement, it's just unbelievable.

And considering the amount of trouble I can get I do get in, I mean this quite literally.

Lord only knows what it would have happened without.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's that is so funny.

Now, at the time when when you guys met, where were you guys living?

We were both from Memphis, Tennessee.

SPEAKER_02: Okay.

So born and raised in Memphis, went uh to both went to college at what was then known as Memphis State.

It's now known as the University of Memphis.

And uh I had just gotten out of grad school.

Uh Carol was finishing her undergrad.

Um we met through a mutual friend and um pretty soon uh found ourselves within a couple of weeks dating each other exclusively, and and soon thereafter, a lot a life starts happening.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Now, at some point you guys would would end up choosing to move and would end up in Texas.

How did that all come to be?

SPEAKER_02: So it was uh kind of a traditional deal follow following jobs.

So uh got married uh after meeting uh yeah three years earlier.

Uh we were married a year after that.

We moved to St.

Louis for my job.

I got a job uh at the old Ralston Perina Company in St.

Louis.

We were there about uh two and a half years.

During that period of time, uh right after we moved there, Carol was diagnosed with her first cancer, which is uh Hodgkin's disease, which is a form of lymph node cancer.

So she went through chemotherapy uh there and recovered fully.

But our uh you know, still being relatively young, our first move away from home a month or two later, she's diagnosed with with cancer.

We're like, well, St.

Louis is a nice town, but interesting, not quite what we planned on.

So um, a couple years later, had the opportunity to uh move to Houston with uh the Minute Made Division of Coca-Cola, so another job transfer.

Went to Houston, was there for two and a half years, and then transferred here to the Dallas area, and thought, we live in Dallas three or four years, and then I'd probably get a job either within Coca-Cola or some other company, and and we move again.

And lo and behold, I've been in Dallas for 25 years.

So it's funny how those those plans met out.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, interesting.

Interesting.

So along this journey, you you mentioned that she had cancer.

Was that before you guys had your first daughter?

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

So Carol was diagnosed with Hodgkins a little over a year after we married, went through six months of chemotherapy and again uh recovered fine.

And our uh doctors suggested that we wait at least five years before having children just to get the chemicals out of her system and and all that kind of stuff.

And during that period is when we wound up moving to uh to Houston.

As it turned out, we were married about eight years, eight and a half years before Blair, our oldest daughter, was born.

And she was born here in the Dallas area.

SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.

What was it like for you becoming a father?

SPEAKER_02: Oh man, it was all the stories you you hear about how it changes your life and perspectives change and and so on was was very, very true.

I share in the book when we went for the uh first ultrasound, and I'm sitting in the lobby.

Now it's more common for the dad to be in the room for the ultrasound.

That time I was sitting in the lobby, and stenographer comes out, uh and uh stenographer rather, and uh shows me the little picture.

And at that point, you know, I I was in love.

I I was done.

And uh all priority shifted, so family was always important, but at that point I realized that uh my my purpose in life was to care for uh a little peanut, I called it.

There was a little peanut in that picture, uh, and her mom and any future peanuts.

And uh the the career thing, it was important, but it it was much more it's its only reason for the career was to put a roof over our head and food on our table.

Uh, that's not where my uh self-realization, my self-actualization was not gonna come from how I paid my bills.

It was gonna come from my family and my faith.

By that point, I was getting much more stronger in the faith.

And um, I that's where that's where I started to get aligned.

But it was definitely becoming a father is what kind of kicked me over the edge on that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.

Now, when you guys had your first starter, did you guys have plans of always having more children?

SPEAKER_02: Well, we always envisioned two as a good number, a manageable number.

My wife was an only child, I was one of three, so you split the difference, you get two.

Yeah, it maintain maintains population, you know.

You know, you kind of keeps the population steady over the long term.

And uh, so that was our our thought.

And you know, I guess ideally, if we're gonna have a girl first, it would we're thinking, oh, it'd be nice to have a boy second.

But then again, yeah, God has plans different than we do.

And uh three years later, uh we wound up having twins.

And at that point, we're like, yeah, we're done.

We're we're one one ahead of the game here, so we're gonna we're gonna call it quits on that one.

SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness, too funny.

Now, now the twins that you had, talk to me about them.

SPEAKER_02: So uh Paige and Mia are my identical twins, and they uh are completely identical inside and out, so it's very hard to tell them apart uh visually, but uh developmentally they would eventually become diagnosed with autism and severe intellectual disabilities.

And in looking back at it, like looking at Carol's pregnancy with Blair, it was like the smoothest, smoothest in the world, no issues whatsoever.

And then Blair was born and constantly smiling and happy and upbeat, and so it was great.

But we were also smart enough to realize that lightning doesn't strike the same crib twice, right?

So we're thinking that to get this lucky again, not really expecting you know huge challenges, but you know, it's it's natural, not all babies are smiling and happy.

So twins were born, and looking back in hindsight, Carol's pregnancy was fraught with many more issues, almost almost from the point of conception.

She just had a series of medical issues of having to go into the hospital and and different things.

Then the twins were born, and we brought them home, and at first they wouldn't nurse, so that was that was a challenge, and then cried a lot.

Just it was much more, much more difficult uh pregnancy and uh and early years of bringing them home.

Then I guess it was it was a two-year, it was the two-year well baby visit when we uh go to the pediatrician and uh we go in there and Carol's holding one twin, I'm holding the other, and uh they have this developmental checklist, developmental milestone checklist that you go through when you've got infants, young kids to see how they're developing.

And Carol's you know filling it out for I think she was holding Paige, I think I was holding Mia.

So we're filling it out for the respective child we're holding, and we get to the the bottom of the list, and we realize that neither one of us has checked anything off.

And we're like, oh, well, this probably is not good.

So our uh pediatrician uh sent us over to Easter Seals, who did an assessment on Page Amia, and that's where they got their original diagnosis when they were two, which uh really was very surprising, because we had been told that yes, they they were developing slowly and uh they had they were not crawling yet, and there was no uh verbalization, they they weren't using words yet or anything like that.

But everyone said, uh yeah, they're twins, they were born premature, uh, it's not unusual, just kind of wrote it off to that.

But uh at this point, now we had an actual diagnosis that uh things were gonna be a little more uh non-traditional than we thought.

SPEAKER_00: And what were what were you and your wife going through at that moment?

SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, there was a um a lot of challenges.

Uh in the book, I described the uh um stages of grief.

So you go through the denial stage and you go through the bargaining stage, and you go through the anger stage, and uh eventually, hopefully, you wind up in the acceptance stage.

And I got to the acceptance stage much quicker than than my wife did.

And then that's not to say there weren't times where I was mad, and and I've you know a testimony one that I uh I share about being mad at God one night and uh what came out of that.

It was it was difficult.

And plus just raising three children and two of them being twins.

So, you know, we we had uh three children under the age of basically under the age of three.

So that's just natural chaos, even if you don't bring a uh a diagnosis into the mix and and and plus working and and so on.

So it was it was it was a little crazy.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to say the least.

Wow.

So at what point I guess uh I'm wondering because the autism spectrum, it's a wide spectrum.

At what point did you guys realize the the degree that that your daughters had?

SPEAKER_02: We didn't have that realization for quite a while.

And early on, and I think uh it was we were still in the denial stage.

So the uh the doctors and the pediatric neurologists and so on were were giving us diagnoses, but you know, when you're two years old, two and a half, it's really hard to gauge what things are going to look like down the road.

So they kind of caveated everything.

And if you if you think about if you look at development, if you think of uh say have two children, one who does not have a diagnosis, who's developing traditionally, and then another child who does, and and you start at point zero being birth.

Okay.

Well, at point zero, day one, those two lines, those two developmental paths, are basically the same.

And then time goes on, and the traditional path goes as it goes, and then the the the one that has a disability starts to veer off that path.

Well, it's it's like that's just it, it's veering off.

And so in the early stages, you really can't tell the difference between a child that has a traditional uh development path versus one that that's non-traditional.

But as time goes on, as that divergence continues over time, eventually the gap gets bigger and bigger as as time goes on.

So at birth, you don't see a gap.

At age two, we saw the gap, as pointed out by the uh the checklist that we were going through.

But then as time continued to progress until they were three, four, five, six, seven, so on, then you realize their path is significantly farther off than the uh the traditional one.

So there were a lot of frustrations.

Uh we started reaching out to different organizations to uh to learn about autism and to learn about developmental disabilities and what services there were or what services were not there, and just kind of figure it out as we go along.

I mentioned a moment ago being mad uh at one point and being uh mad at God.

I had a aha moment that occurred when the twins were about four years old.

And I uh it was a Friday night, and everybody was upset.

So Paige and Mia were were having meltdowns.

Blair was what seven years old, I guess, at the time, and she was upset because her sisters were upset, and her mom was upset, and so everybody's crying and and feeling feeling terrible.

And I'm sitting there, so as the the father leader of the family, yeah, I take a strong leadership move and I go to bed.

And I'm I'm sitting there thinking, you know, I there's everybody's upset.

At the end of the day, they're safe, they're fine, I can't fix it, so I'm just gonna remove myself from the situation.

So I go to bed and I'm laying there, and uh like I said before, I was mad.

I was mad at God.

And I'm saying a prayer, and I said, quite literally, you know, God, why'd you do this to Paige and Mia?

You know, why were they born with a disability?

Or if it was developed later, why didn't he intervene?

You know, why did you do this to Paige and Mia?

And to be blunt, why'd you do this to me?

And that was the question that was on my mind as I fell asleep.

So why did you do this?

And uh I don't usually go to bed mad, go to sleep mad.

Uh if I do, it's it's almost like the emotions marinate overnight and I wake up almost madder the next morning.

But that night was different.

On Saturday morning, I woke up full of energy, you're ready to take on the world.

I describe it as waking up like on a mountaintop on a bright spring day.

You've just you've got wind in your sails and you're you're just ready to take on the world and you're full of excitement.

And the very first words that entered my mind were to help people like Paige and Mia, which I immediately interpreted as helping people with severe disabilities like they had.

Yes.

So it's important to note that given my mindset at the time, so being kind of mad about the whole situation, I was focused on my family.

I wasn't, yeah, thinking about others, I wasn't, you know, I was focused maintaining my family, my career, all those types of things.

There is zero doubt in my mind that I fell asleep asking God a question, and he sent the Holy Spirit and answered it.

Because there is no way, given my priorities and mindset at the time, that I would have cooked that answer up on my own.

Absolutely none.

There's no way I would have answered my own question with, oh, God did this to help other people.

That that would not have been in my mindset.

So I woke up, had that that thought, the answer to the question, and really two great things happened at that moment.

Number one was it happened.

Number two was I had the wherewithal at the time to realize that it had just happened and to piece together that basically God answered my question.

So I laid there on the bed and thought, wow, this is big.

Um what uh what do you do?

So I I did what at that time millions of people were were starting to do when they had questions and and issues to be addressed.

I uh got up, went to the family computer, and typed four words.

And uh please forgive, this was the vernacular at the time, so diagnoses have have changed.

The the terminology has improved over time.

Uh now we use the phrase uh the terminology intellectual disabilities, but their original diagnosis at that time was uh mental retardation.

So I set at the computer and I typed mental retardation, Dallas help four words, and hit enter.

Up on the screen came uh an organization I'd never heard of before called the Ark of Dallas.

I went on their website and like, okay, well, this looks like an organization that helps people like Page Amia.

And uh long story short, contacted them on Monday, was on their board of directors two weeks later, and uh soon got involved in the statewide organization, uh, the Ark of Texas, uh, meeting a lot of legislators, meeting elective leaders, the uh people at state agencies down in Austin.

And uh within about, I guess it was nine years, I was appointed by President Obama to a presidential advisory committee in Washington.

So for people with disabilities.

So what started off as me asking God a question on a Friday night launched an entire series of experiences, the goal of which to help people with uh disabilities like my children, that never would have happened, I don't believe ever would have happened had I not asked God that question falling asleep on a Friday night.

SPEAKER_00: Wow.

And and I go back to the thing that that always says God certainly does work in mysterious ways.

SPEAKER_02: Oh, absolutely.

And and it's very rare in ways that we would expect it to happen.

He's really good, really good at catching us by surprise.

SPEAKER_00: Yes, extremely good at that.

Yes.

Now, during this whole time, the advocacy work, your wife was she on board with it, was she apprehensive about it?

How was she?

Advocacy work?

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

She was fine with it.

So our house was pretty crazy.

I referred to it as the Boat Right Circus.

So there and that's that's part of the origins of the title of the book.

They've got to play our circus.

So it was the Boat Right Circus.

And uh just raising you know three children and then Pagamiya's disability and all the uh doctor issues and therapies and everything associated with that.

She had by that point decided uh to stay home so uh and and and take care of the family.

She stopped her career.

So um that's where where her efforts and and time was.

And when it came to my advocacy work, which I was doing in parallel with my professional career, I mean, she thought it was fine.

I mean, it if if it when I would learn things that would benefit our family that made it more meaningful, I think in some ways she almost viewed it as uh my my hobby in a way.

I mean, she wasn't opposed to it, but again, she was understandably very engulfed in the day-to-day caregiving activities of uh of our family.

And uh, and then when I could learn something or discover something and and bird dog something that would uh would make our lives easier, that's when it really became more meaningful for her.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, understandable, understandable.

So now we kind of fast forward through through life and kind of switching back gears, I guess, from your daughters to to your wife.

At some point in time, your wife would be diagnosed with cancer again.

Yes.

SPEAKER_02: So we had the original diagnosis, which then launched, you know, the the the craziness of raising the kids.

So I was doing also doing my advocacy work as I described and was learning about the support system and what's available.

And one thing, another kind of revelation, I guess, that happened was on the on the day that Paige and Mia started kindergarten.

I remember this clearly.

We we took them to the elementary school, which was the same school that the Blair was attending.

So we take everybody to school that that first day of kindergarten, take them in, and Blair goes off to her, I guess, third grade class, and and uh attendants come and help uh with with Paige and Mia, uh, the paraprofessionals.

And I remember walking back to the car with Carol and telling her this, something that just hit me.

And number one, two things hit me.

Number one was there were people in this world much better skilled and trained to teach folks like Paige and Mia, much better skilled and trained than Carol and I were.

And those people are found in the public school system.

And that that's a really big deal because Paige and Mia's disability was and is so severe that any other most organizations would would never consider working with them.

Uh, and that includes uh other schools, a lot of therapy clinics, and so on.

Many places wouldn't touch them because of the severity of their disability.

Because when you think about it, if if you're running a private organization or you're running a clinic or so on, you want to bring in people who you believe will be successful in your program, who will benefit from it.

And very few organizations, and when I say very few, I mean like none, thought that they could make a significant impact on PageMeo's development, so they wouldn't wouldn't even try it.

Public schools are different.

Public schools and emergency rooms, okay, hospital emergency rooms.

Public schools and emergency rooms are the only two enterprises in the United States legally required to take everybody who walks or rolls in the front door.

They cannot turn anybody away.

And hospitals can send their patients out once they're stable.

Public schools can't.

They have to keep them for the long haul.

That makes them unique.

And when you're the father of two children who nobody would touch with a 10-foot pole, that's a really big deal.

Okay.

That's a really, really big deal.

So that was the first thing.

The second thing that hit me was holy crap, this train's gonna stop someday.

You know, they're not they're not gonna be in school until they're 90 years old, right?

Exactly.

And and I would find out fairly soon thereafter that they uh would be, given their disability, would be able to stay in in school here in Texas until the year they turn 22.

So they age out of school at 22.

Okay.

So you do some do some quick math in the head, and I realized, well, they're physically they're they're pretty healthy, so they're probably gonna have a natural lifespan.

Well, they're gonna live a lot longer outside the school system, you know, as adults, than they will in school.

So as their father, I needed to get ahead of the curve to understand what that adult system looks like, and what do I need to know in order to prepare them and prepare us for when they when they transition out, when they move on to the next stage.

And so that that was so that is also kind of timed with me getting, I was already getting involved in the advocacy world.

So I was in a in a great place to learn those types of things.

And I uh pretty soon realized that I'd go into different meetings, either here in Dallas or in Austin and whatnot.

And many times the other people around the table were either professionals, so professionals in the industry, professional advocates and so on, or volunteer parents.

And the parents and and self-advocates as well, uh, of course, but also but on the but on the parents' side, they were all parents whose kids were in their 20s and 30s and so on.

And here I am with two eight-year-olds, right?

And uh it was very, very unusual.

And uh, and I consider it a blessing to have had that kind of revelation that day, because so often parents will wait until their children are teenagers or late teens and getting ready to transition out of school or or leave home.

And they're like, well, what happens now?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: And in Texas, and this is true in other states as well, some other states, but in Texas, if if you're waiting to that point, the train is train's gone.

You're gonna it's you're gonna have to wait 15 years before the next train shows up to help you because of waiting lists that we have for disability services and and so on.

And uh, and I didn't want to be yeah in that situation.

So I started learning the the system early.

And uh also Carol and I, it's I I I say this jokingly, I I refer to uh as parents that we suck, which we didn't, but but I look at what I always refer to, well, what the good parents do.

So the good autism parents, you know, they've got uh the therapies every other day, and they've got the schedules in their kitchen, and they've got the little pennies for incentives and other things.

We never did that stuff.

But that's what the good parents do.

You know, we're like, and and and to be quite honest, it was it was because Paige and me is this it just wouldn't resonate.

That was the main yes.

But in in that whole good parent, bad parent thing, there are a lot of uh parents, and I I respect this, totally respect it, understand it, who their operating philosophy is that their child will with a disability will will live with them kind of forever, or will live them with them for as long as possible, which is very commendable.

Uh, and and I understand that.

Carol and I never never had that belief.

My thought was everybody kind of needs to get at some point grow up and and move out.

And why should Blair the oldest one?

Why should she be the only one lucky enough to get away from me?

Right?

Yeah.

So I was always looking at what are the uh residential options or what are the other options that are out there for Paige and Mia when such time comes along that Carol and I are no longer able to uh to take care of them ourselves.

And we ran out of gas when uh when they were about close to 17.

It's arguably is is still a little young, but again, we had not one, but two children, severe disabilities, very time intensive, physically labor intensive.

Uh, and we did have some help at home, but but we finally just and I refer to it as running out of gas.

And uh, and even though I was heavily involved in the system, it still took me a year and a half to find a provider, service, uh disability service provider who was willing to work with them because of the the severity of their disability.

So then that's when they uh eventually moved out.

SPEAKER_00: Wow, wow, well, well.

I mean, I commend both of you though.

I mean, as you said, I mean, it's not easy, but the fact that you know you guys did it for that long, and I mean, we're talking about full-time care here, you know, and I just I mean, I have to applaud you both as parents for not only taking care of your your children, but for putting their best interest at heart as well as your own.

SPEAKER_02: Well, well, thank you.

I I appreciate that.

And a couple of things come to mind.

Number one, the uh family caregivers.

Families are the predominant caregivers in the United States.

And we as a society and a lot of uh government support programs and so on are being better structured to support family caregivers, and they should be, because families, uh and you see it on both ends of the spectrum.

It's not just parents taking care of children with disabilities, you see it the other way.

You see couples caring for their aging parents at home.

So you see the sandwich generation that many people will eventually be in, where you're you're sandwiched between taking care of your own kids as well as taking care of your own parents.

So so helping the families maintain themselves is a huge deal.

One of the things we have to be careful, though, is that we don't want that to be the expectation because not every person is skilled and geared to be the greatest caregiver for either their child or their aging parent.

If they choose to, that's great.

But and if they have that ability, that's great.

But it shouldn't necessarily be expected.

There's been several analysis, analytical rigor has gone through to come out and say that family caregiving is the primary objective for a lot of families.

And that's not necessarily true.

It's happening not because everybody thinks it's the best option.

It's happening because it's the only option for a lot of people.

And they don't have any other choice.

So you that's that's where they they go with it.

So uh a big part of my advocacy is trying to get systems changed and get structures changed so that uh there are different options out there for people, for families, based on the unique family dynamics that they have and the unique needs of the person who needs care, whether it be a child or a young adult or adult with disabilities, or even uh someone who's elderly who needs help.

What different options are out there that best fit that unique person and that unique family dynamic, as opposed to assuming, well, you know, Joe and Jane, husband and wife, they're gonna do it until the day they die.

And that's also another thing to keep in mind.

And I've I've talked to parents very bluntly about this in the past, and that is we can have the best positive intent on wanting to care for our child at home, which is super, and uh, that's great.

But each one of us will do something horrible.

And and shame on us for doing this.

But every one of us someday is gonna die.

And there's no no getting around it.

And when that day happens, our people prepared for it.

And one of the things I wanted to do, and and this is really in the interest of Page of Mia, was to help figure out what's the best scenario for them.

Well, while I'm still here and still young enough and energetic enough to be able to help craft it and supervise it and and so on, as opposed to waiting until I pass away, and then Blair suddenly has to make decisions on behalf of her sister.

And and decisions made in a crisis, urgent crisis situation are almost always gonna get hosed up in some way.

So so there was a level of of long-term planning that went into that along as well.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

I mean, again, I guess I guess I I listen, I think just how admirable of you.

And I mean that with just the utmost sincerity.

So we kind of looking back at this kind of timeline.

So here the the girls have have now moved out, they're in a home.

So kind of what happens at that point for for you, for for your wife, you know, for your older daughter.

SPEAKER_02: So Blair had uh gone off to college by that point, so she went up to uh Oklahoma State.

And pretty soon thereafter is when Carol and I realized that uh I use the phrase we're running out of gas, that we needed to pursue uh something for Paige and Mia, and finally got a group home developed for them.

And uh so got them moved out, and uh, and their group home, the first one was very close to our house.

It was like less than a mile and a half away, which was nice because it enabled us to be close enough to check in on them and help with the transition.

And and I think it was good for everybody to have them pretty close uh at first.

And it's kind of funny because I mentioned that Carol had had decided to stay home and to take care of the kids.

Well, Blair's birth date is March 13th, just for what it's worth, was March 13th.

So she uh so Carol officially became a stay-at-home mom on March 13th, 1997, the day Blair was born.

Carol's staying home.

Three years later, the twins were born.

Pretty soon they're diagnosed, the circus is up and running, everything's going crazy.

We uh get the uh the kids out of the house, or Blair goes off to college, we get the group home set up, you know, eventually, and then Carol decides to go back to work.

And she was very excited about this.

Okay, so she goes back to work right after we got the twins set up in their group home, and it just so happened her first day of work was March 13th, 2017.

So Blair was born March 13th, 1997.

Carol went back to work on March 13th, 2017.

She was a stay-at-home mom literally 20 years to the day.

20 years to the day.

She was technically a stay-at-home mom.

So she's all excited.

So she goes back to work, March 13, 2017.

Having been out of the workforce for 20 years, things changed a little bit.

You know, uh Microsoft Excel has had a few uh few updates.

You know, Word's not quite the same version it was back uh back back in the day, Lotus Notes.

What the heck was that?

You know, I mean, that that's no longer uh part of it.

So so she had a learning curve with uh modern technology and so on, and uh starting in March, and then uh June rolls around a few months later, and uh she uh called me and said, something doesn't feel right.

Um just didn't wasn't feel she called me from work, something didn't feel right.

So she uh went to the doctor, and long story short, come to find out that she had uh ovarian cancer.

And uh she went, had surgery, thought they got it all, had uh after the surgery, a few months after the surgery, they did the test, thought they had it all.

Then six months later, after that test, so in January of getting my ears confused here, but it's in January, she had her test, everything was clear.

June of that uh same year, again wasn't feeling well, almost passed out of work, go to the doctor and find out that she has a five-pound tumor that's come back.

So it went from nothing to five pounds in the course of six months.

So she went on 18 months of chemo, and she kept having different variations of chemo, so they would try something, it didn't work, and then you try something else, so went through five different variations, and ultimately it was uh not successful.

Wow.

So that so that was kind of a well, obviously, losing my wife was was was difficult, and I was about to say it's a bummer, not to minimize it, but but the fact that she was so excited about going back to work, and then soon thereafter getting diagnosed, the that was a shame.

I that was very disappointing because I know she would have enjoyed a few years of uh true independent freedom during that period.

SPEAKER_00: Wow.

So as of today, the day that we were recording, approximately how long ago was it that she passed away?

It was a little over three years.

SPEAKER_02: Wow.

So it was February 11th, 2020.

So this was interesting.

She passed away February 11th, 2020.

And Blair and I, we've we've say joked about it, but we've laughed how it's interesting.

She never, Carol never heard the words COVID-19.

The concept of a pandemic never hit her.

I mean, she passed away right before it happened, or right before, you know, it was really going rampant.

And in a weird sort of way, I mean, obviously, I'm I'm sorry she she's gone.

I miss her.

I'm kind of glad she didn't have to go through that because she would have thought the whole world had lost its mind.

Yeah.

That's probably a podcast for another day.

But um, but in just in terms of uh behaviors and so on, I mean, her Carol's mentality was okay, I've given birth twice, one of them was to twins, I've raised special needs kids, I've had cancer twice, I've done through this and this and this.

The world's reaction to COVID would have she would not have responded well.

Yeah, put it that way.

And uh so, in a way, I guess it was God's blessing to her to bring her home to him, uh, so that she didn't have to endure all that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

Wow.

So here you are.

You go from a man, a father, a husband living in a circus for for all those years to then the kids are out of the home.

It's you and your wife, and now it's just you at home.

What was that like for you?

The the grieving process, the just overcoming it.

SPEAKER_02: So uh imagine that you're just driving down the street and you're going about 70 miles an hour and everything's fine, and all of a sudden you realize you just drove off a cliff, and there's no more street below there.

It kind of had that feeling.

So we uh in the course of a a couple just a couple of years, on a given night, we would have seven people in our house.

So there would be Carol and me, our three children, and then we would have two attendants, one each for for Page and Mia helping with them, which was a blessing, which was was very nice.

So, but that's seven people in the house.

Yes.

In the course of a couple years, we went from seven to to one to me.

Yes.

And that that was a shock to the system.

Uh something uh interesting happened.

I uh so Carol had passed away, and uh Blair, it was the living in Nashville at the time and come back for her her mom's service and then uh and then went back home.

And we're now a f a couple months after Carol had passed, and uh I uh was in my old house, the house that we raised the kids in.

And I uh realized it was like six o'clock at night.

I'm thinking, you know, I need to make something for dinner.

And I sat there for a moment and realized I could not remember the last time I had had dinner.

Okay.

Now, if you looked at me, you will realize I have not missed many meals.

Okay.

So for me not to remember what the last time I had dinner was weird.

So I started unpacking this in my head and I realized what it very quickly what had happened.

So over the years, I've eaten lunch by myself a million times, and you still do, no but no big deal.

Over the years, I've been on business trips and had dinner by myself.

No big deal.

I could not remember in the course of basically 30 years the number of times, and when I say I couldn't remember, I don't, I it maybe happened once in 30 years when I had dinner alone in my own house.

It never happened because either Carol was there or the kids were there.

Yep, and and it was weird, and I just didn't like it.

I didn't like that feeling.

And I think my brain subconsciously told my body not to be hungry.

So I was eating lunch, as I'd always had, no big deal.

But I think my body was telling my brain not to be hungry at night.

So I unintentionally put myself on an intermittent fasting diet.

Yes.

And and as I realized that, I I didn't realize, well, you know, my my pants are a little bit looser.

So that was uh that was kind of an aha revelation, was the the way the mind can work in those situations.

Now we're talking about what happened after after Carol died.

So I mentioned she passed away on February 11th, 2020.

So it was a few days before Valentine's Day.

And uh Blair came back from Nashville for her mom's service and so on.

And Valentine's Day comes up, the 14th, and she and her her then boyfriend, now husband, uh wanted to go out.

I'm like, that's cool.

Let's go ahead and do that.

So I'm now by myself on Valentine's Day, three days after my best friend, arguably my only friend, has passed away.

And uh I'm feeling sad, understandably, sad and lonely.

And I uh go to a local grocery store across the street from my house, and I walk in there and I'm like, well, woe is me.

You know, life sucks.

You know, Carol's gone, my only friend is gone.

We've been this would have been our 33rd, 34th Valentine's together.

You know, this is terrible.

So I'm walking through the store feeling woe as me then all sad and depressed.

And then I get to aisle nine, the hair care aisle.

I'm not sure if that hair care is relevant in the story, but it happens to be in aisle nine, where everything changed in an instant.

I opened up my eyes, and I kind of had this aha moment where everything was positive and upbeat.

And again, that like that feeling on that Saturday morning where everything was like, wow, this is this is good.

And I I stopped thinking, okay, what just happened?

I believe God revealed two things to me there in aisle nine when I was being all depressed and sad, revealed two things to me with absolute clarity.

Number one was Carol's doing great, she's doing a lot better than the rest of us.

You know, she is experiencing what all Christians aspire to.

She is experiencing uh God in his greatness, she's at the throne.

Of God worshiping him and not having to deal with cancer and not having to deal with raising kids or any of the stuff that was not having to deal with COVID, not having to deal with any of that stuff.

She's doing great.

So it was as though God released me from having to mourn my wife.

Because you don't need to mourn someone who's doing doing great.

So that was number one.

Number two was that okay.

So number one had to do with her.

Number two had to do with me.

And it was this.

I was, what, 55 at the time, had been married for 30 years, and I'm 55, married for 30 years.

God will, and I mean that literally.

I've got hopefully another 30 ahead of me.

So I'm not even halfway done yet.

Right?

Yep.

Okay.

For the first time in my adult life, had virtually no obligations and responsibilities.

I was barely responsible for myself.

Carol was now with God.

Blair was off, independent.

Paige and me were in their group home.

So they were all taken care of.

I was not responsible for anybody any longer.

And I remember sitting there thinking, or standing there in the aisle, thinking, huh, well, that's not a bad place to be.

I quite literally, for the first time in my adult life, can quite literally do whatever I want.

unknown: Huh?

SPEAKER_02: Yes.

So Carol is with God, having a much better experience than any of us are.

She's with God.

Paige and me are set up in their group home where they're being where they're continuing to grow and being proactively challenged and so on.

And they were also still in school, so they're doing great.

Blair is independent, out of college.

unknown: Huh.

SPEAKER_02: Okay.

So I launched what I refer to as Clay 2.0.

And nothing wrong with the 1.0 version.

Yeah, but it was the very traditional father, husband, advocate, you know, all that all that stuff.

And nothing wrong there.

Learned a lot and provided great great grounding, of course.

But but Clay 2.0 may be maybe different than what uh uh the the 1.0 version, and that's okay.

So that uh then led to me you know selling my house that I'd raised the kids at there.

There was people say the craziest things.

Yeah, they, whoever they are, yeah.

They say, well, when you lose someone close to you, you lose a spouse.

Yeah, you shouldn't make any major decisions for like a year.

First off, who are they?

And who are who are they?

And you you run this, you run this in, you see this in other parts of life.

You know, people give great well, they say, well, okay, who are they?

I want names and I want to know their credentials for having for having an opinion on my life, okay?

Well, I ignore they.

And because there was no way on this green earth that I was gonna live in the five-bedroom house that I had raised my family in, that my wife died in our master bedroom.

There was no way I was gonna stay in that house just because people thought I should wait a year to no.

So I sold my house as quickly as I could, moved into an entertainment district here in Plano, Texas, called Legacy West, which is kind of an uh upscale urban thing and lots of people, restaurants and and so on.

So just a totally different experience.

Looking back at it, I may have also been going through a midlife crisis, I don't know.

But but regardless, the the Clay 2.0 needed to change it, change its environment.

So did have that move, and then uh a friend of mine over the years had had told me, Clay, you really need to write a book because it's crazy life experiences, and I have a hopefully generally positive attitude that maybe people can benefit from.

So decided to uh to start tackling the book thing, and and there you go.

So that brings us to where we are today.

SPEAKER_00: Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Clay, man, I gotta say just one thing is you know, uh, if no one can take anything else for away from our interview today, it's the fact that in this life, in the midst of the storms, we can have a good life if we choose to.

And we can choose to be happy, and we can choose to see the bright side of uh the darkness because you have.

And I listened to you and I think to myself, just again, like this is a guy who had everything falling apart.

And yet on aisle nine, he reinvented himself.

He put on a new pair of boots, he changed into 2.0 and he embraced life again.

And I again, I said it earlier about applauding you.

Again, I applaud you for for having the courage, the strength, and the faith to do that.

SPEAKER_02: Kevin, I I appreciate that.

Yeah, that that's very kind.

And uh you talk about the the the happiness piece.

There's I've started to go out and talk to people about the not just the book, but also the the underpinning of the story, which uh really is exactly what you just hit on.

And and I I appreciate that.

And that is happiness is a choice.

And that's what I titled the presentation as is happiness is a choice.

And I uh I circle back to a conversation that I had probably about a year after Carol passed.

So the the the comic relief of the book is the the final chapter, which is the the joys of dating in your mid-50s.

I gotta tell you the world's changed a lot in 30 years.

And it turns out that you know, here I was.

Last time I was on a date, I was had just moved out of my parents' house and I was 21 years old, and we didn't have dating apps, or you know, we did we met people the old-fashioned way through through friends, you know.

And uh 33 years later, it's a little different.

Anyway, so I I I chronicle a lot of that, but I I describe a conversation that I had with a woman, which was particularly meaningful.

I was having this conversation, she wanted to hear my story, and I shared it the edited version, and she made a comment.

She said, Well, we all have experiences and challenges, baggage and drama.

And I replied, Well, yes and no.

We all have experiences and challenges.

That is absolutely true.

Baggage and drama, however, are optional.

Yes.

It's all in how you look at it.

And again, happiness is a choice.

So sadly, there there are people who I think if they enjoy their baggage and drama, but they get very enamored by it.

They uh they they they like swimming in it and they'll swear they don't.

You know, they'll they'll they'll say that no, I don't know.

I it's just so much difficult, it's so hard.

And like, okay, well, it's hard, got it.

Yeah, life's hard, got it.

Okay.

Everybody's life is hard.

I'm not a fan of doing comparisons.

And and and thank you for the graciousness that uh you offered a moment ago about my story, which some people may compare that to others and say that my story is is harder or more challenged than others.

I'm not gonna say that because I don't know what another person's walk is.

And uh there's a there's an old um how old it is, but it's been around for a few years, uh, axiom of um everyone you know is going through a crisis that you know nothing about, so be kind.

And I believe that wholeheartedly.

Again, as the comment was made, we all have experiences and challenges.

And some people uh through through God's grace are given more given more challenges than others.

That's that's another another thing that I describe that people look at me like I've got three heads.

When we talk about blessings, sometimes you know God blesses us with things that we consider positive, right?

So good things, so jobs and families and vacations or whatever.

So so God blesses us in those ways.

I think God also blesses us with challenges.

And that's how we grow.

Think about it, we we tend to grow through or we grow faster and more heartily through the difficulties in our lives, not through the easy things in our lives.

And I think that quite often God may either instigate a challenge, or I more often than not, I think he chooses not to intervene.

And him choosing not to intervene is is part of his plan to let us in have us endure that challenge so that we are then stronger on the other side.

And in in my situation uh with Pajemea, he he allowed them to have their disabilities because his plan was for my family to help others like them in different ways that we would have never imagined otherwise.

I truly believe that was part of his plan.

And because he was involved in that, because he consciously allowed that to happen, which again part of his plan, that makes it good.

That makes it a blessing, even though there were days where it didn't feel like a blessing.

It was like, and again, I've I've described a lot of the challenges that won't take through again, but yeah, so through a lot of that, it did not feel like a blessing.

May not realize that until after the fact.

But um, again, that's why God's smarter than we are.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Clay, talk to me a little bit about the book.

SPEAKER_02: So God's Plan, Our Circus, came out in January.

It is available on Amazon.com as well as Barnesandnoble.com.

Shared in there some of the things that I've uh described here this morning.

It's a, I think, a pretty easy read.

And uh it's intended to use humor and faith to help people who are going through some some difficult challenges to understand that uh God is always with us.

And as we were just describing, it's our choice if we want to look for the positive or simply you know soak in the negative.

And uh, and again, there's a fair amount of humor in it.

The uh the opening uh scene is my uh future wife on the evening she and I met, and me perhaps uh behaving uh inappropriately.

It's it is a PG-rated book, so you don't need to worry about that.

But I'm pretty sure that there are very few other uh disability or faith-focused books that open the way the way mine does.

But again, it's part of that uh that uplifting kind of comedic uh spirit that I wanted to inspire in there.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

Last question for you What is behind the saying that life is too important to be taken seriously?

SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Life is too important to uh be taken seriously.

I've I've used that axiom, I've had that on my Facebook page forever.

I think it is obviously life is important, but sometimes we are so tempted to get caught up in the drama and in the baggage and do this whole woe is me thing.

And sometimes we just need to step back and look at our own situations and just laugh.

I saw something on uh on the internet uh the other day.

I think it was Ricky Gervais, the comedian, who's kind of controversial in some ways, but I guess this quote's being attributed to him.

He said, uh, you chose to be insulted, you chose to think it was insulting, I chose to think it was funny.

That's why my life is happier than yours.

And think about it.

There are a lot of people who choose to be insulted by everything right now.

I guarantee you, in this conversation that you've been so gracious to offer me, I have insulted somebody.

I just know it.

I don't know who or what, I just whatever.

I will sleep well either way.

Yeah.

But but there are a lot of people uh who choose to choose to be insulted or choose to to dwell on the negative, but then there are those of us who don't.

And be blunt, our lives are happier as a result.

And uh and it brings us back to that.

It's it's a matter of choice.

So that's why I'm saying that you know life is life is important, but it's too important to be taken seriously because you can grossly overthink things and weave conspiracies into every turn.

That there's there's no benefit from that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

Clay, man, I want to thank you, dude, so much for for not just being on the podcast, but for literally having a conversation that combines seriousness with sadness with just life lessons that are done in the most heartfelt yet brutally honest way possible.

And man, I just don't think anybody else can bring the heat like you did.

So thank you.

SPEAKER_02: Thank you.

I appreciate that.

I'm uh I'm enjoying our time together.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, well, Clay, thank you.

And for you listening today, I hope you've enjoyed today's episode.

And even more so, I hope that you've really listened and taken some things away to maybe influence your own life.

And remember this when life is hard, it's not over.

Every day is a new day.

When the sun rises, that's just a signal that a new beginning has begun.

And maybe you just need to take a walk on aisle 9 and see what your 2.0 version has in store for you.

This is Kevin Low with great rates of inspiration.

Get out there and take on the day.