Jeff Burgess Motivational Business Manager
Author

Childhood Chaos and Painful Family Dynamics

Growing up, I was one of four kids, plus a stepsister twelve years older than me. The stepsister, Judy, never had a chance after her dad married my mother. Especially after my sister was born seven years after my twin brother, Jim, and me. She became my mother’s sole focus.

In hindsight, I was better off for it. The less attention she gave me, the better for me. I always had an inner bond with my dad, not that I wasn’t a fuck-up and piss him off on a regular basis.

I never really learned about consequences, like the time I jumped off that roof back in third grade.

But, at sixteen, it cost me getting my driver’s license a month later than I could have, as a few days before, I was on the roof of a friend’s two-flat with a bucket of water balloons, and we were hoisting them down like hand grenades on unsuspecting innocents riding their bicycles down the sidewalk below.

Good clean fun, don’t you think? NOT! I made the tragic mistake of nailing an older guy riding his bike, then standing up and yelling, “Take that old man!” Busted. The old guy called the cops.

But that had always been how I did things. Act first, think later.

My dad said I was too immature to get a license on my birthday. He was right, again. But the month went fast enough. And my brothers and I were still able to blow through three transmissions on my Dad’s Mercury Montego with its 330hp V8 engine. Nothing like the soft asphalt of a Cock Robin restaurant parking lot for doing tranny-drops (transmission) with muscle cars.

In all fairness, all my siblings were fucked up in one way or another. Hard to believe I was the only sane one. That’s saying a lot! More than anything, I was the only survivor.

My sister was born in early 1964. That was the day that officially, none of the others mattered anymore. Well, to my mother, anyway. Judy never mattered from the get-go. She was her husband’s other daughter. My twin brother sadly died a few years ago, made sadder that he could never get the love or attention he needed so desperately from his mother.

From an early age, I always felt a sense of independence. Jim and I were fraternal twins and complete opposites. I remember as far back as third grade, when my mom would call us downstairs for dinner as “Twins, time for dinner!” I would not budge until she called me by my name, which she eventually did. It took her a while to figure it out, though!

My eldest brother spent twenty-two years in federal prison for bank fraud and wire fraud. His mother’s favorite, go figure.

He was always trying to sell something that wasn’t necessarily his to sell. Too bad he got caught selling real estate at a Little Rock, Arkansas golf course community, from his office in Dallas. Two issues here: Firstly, he did not own the property, yet he took down payments of $100K. Two, he did it across state lines. Thus, he was arrested by the FBI.

When Your Mind Remembers Every Detail, Including Painful Memories

Me? I was always a bit of an oddball growing up. A weird kid with a photographic memory, not just of the event, but every detail within it. Later in my life, it did become much more of a blessing than a curse. The curse of having that photographic memory is that you remember the painful, bad things, too.

My first ever childhood memory occurred at four years old, when I fell sideways off my tricycle on our neighbor Alice Barasa’s lawn – not even on the sidewalk! It wasn’t so much that I remember the incident; rather, the technicolor of it. It was a blue tricycle with white handles, and I was wearing a red and blue striped short-sleeve shirt, with blue shorts, white socks, and P.F. Flyers on my feet.

This memory was captured some six decades later, as I began drafting my legacy to leave my three adult kids, which wound up being the book, It Worked For Me!

That was the first of four broken arms by the time I was twelve years old. Not many 12-year-olds are on a first-name basis with the Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at a hospital. I am not sure if that made me lucky or what? Especially with two of the broken arms happening simultaneously. It’s all in the book.

I think much of that photographic memory is somehow related to my always being so impressionable. It wasn’t as if I lived for drama, yet dramatic things hit me hard on the inside.

Two movies from the late 1960s did exactly that, two or three years after they were originally released, when I was thirteen. The first was To Sir with Love starring Sidney Poitier. I still watch or record it anytime it airs, and still get teary-eyed at the end when, at the senior dance, Lynee Sun Moon hands Mr. Thackeray the silver cup as the bass drum starts Lulu’s movie theme song yet again.

To Sir with Love was such an important movie for me, as growing up in a lily-white Chicago suburb kept me pretty much isolated from the racial tensions that I witnessed in the movie. It remains one of the easiest yet most impressive movies I have ever seen. Granted, I was only thirteen.

It’s interesting that I never did see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, also released in 1967 and starring Sidney Poitier. Both shared a common racial theme, essentially swapping high school for dinner with the parents.

The other impressionable 1967 movie I saw, this time when I was fourteen, was The Graduate. Although I was likely a little young at the time, growing up in what was considered an affluent northern suburb of Chicago made the story very relatable. The Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack certainly did not hurt, either.

Although the soundtrack to my neighborhood could just as easily have been Pleasant Valley Sunday (The Monkees), as there really was charcoal burning everywhere. It is likely why I am still a charcoal guy today.

Lessons Learned the Painful Way – How I Learned Compassion 

My fourth, and happily, last broken arm came at age 12, while playing Little League baseball. Another random circumstance in the Life of Jeff. As I was batting, I jumped out of the way of an inside “fastball” (a 12-year-old Brian Abrams fastball, anyway!).

Regardless, the ball hit me in the knee as I was in the air (although I never had much hang time!) and literally landed left-arm first onto the baseball bat. My arm looked like an S-Curve.

Nothing like spending seven weeks of your thirteenth summer with an elbow-to-wrist cast on your throwing arm.

I had been a pretty decent baseball player as a twelve-year-old. And left-handed pitchers rock. I still contend that Bran was throwing at me intentionally as I had two hits – a double and a triple – at the time. There goes that photographic memory again!

The next season, my arm was healed, and as sixth graders, players were allowed to throw curveballs. However, with last year’s season-ending injury stamped in my head, I was too busy ducking out of the batter’s box as soon as the pitch was thrown to be able to swing the bat. The official baseball term for this is “stepping in the bucket”.

The unofficial term for this was, “Jeff’s baseball career was over.”

I wish kids my age back then had shown me more compassion. I would never want anyone to endure the ridicule I faced daily. But, giving credit where credit is due, my parents, more often than not my father, taught me a life lesson that I have carried on this this day – compassion. He was always a kind and caring man.

I try to always have compassion for others; no one knows the burdens they carry.

Sometimes, having a photographic memory REALLY sucks.

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To learn about this entire journey, pick up a copy of 𝙄𝙩 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙙 𝙁𝙤𝙧 𝙈𝙚: 𝙈𝙮 𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙞𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙊𝙥𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘽𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙎𝙪𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨 today! Also available now in audiobook format!

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