Death By Adulting
A podcast focused on helping you make decisions today that you won't regret tomorrow. Hosted by Dr. Steve and Megan Scheibner. The Scheibners share wisdom and advice regarding marriage, parenting, dating, communication and even sex.
Death By Adulting
Slapstick Penguins and Unconventional Romance: Navigating Love, Faith, and Adulting
Ever wondered if there's more to the penguin's love life than meets the eye? Steve and I certainly did, which is why we're tickled to share our revelations about the slapstick world of emperor penguin courtship and its uncanny resemblance to the human quest for love. Grab a front-row seat to our laughter-infused chat where we compare avian slap-downs to swiping right, and unveil the lengths we've gone to in the pursuit of partnership. Our personal escapades in love just might make you look at those tuxedoed birds—and your own dating history—in a whole new light.
The journey to the altar isn't always a straight path, and our story is a testament to that with a spiritual twist you didn't see coming. Tag along as Steve and I peel back the layers of our unconventional love tale that began at a place called "The Rat" and deepened through Bible studies and weddings (where a little friendly rivalry never hurt). Our walk down memory lane is dotted with laughter, faith, and a candid look at the unexpected ways love blossoms from friendship. If you're a believer that life's greatest romances might just start with a bit of divine intervention, this chapter of our lives will resonate with you.
Let's face it, "adulting" can feel like a series of comedic errors, and we're not ones to sugarcoat it. From dealing with apartment floods to the financial faux pas that taught me more lessons than I bargained for, I'm ready to spill the beans on the trials that come with the grown-up territory. Steve chimes in too, sharing the wisdom we've gained from embracing chores to keeping that kitchen sink spotless. So, adjust your clocks for daylight savings and join us as we muse over the bittersweet symphony of responsibilities and life's unexpected joys, because, let's be honest, we're all just fumbling through adulthood together.
On this episode of Death by Adulting. First up, we discover what do penguin slapping and swiping right have to do with each other? Next, we'll discover that 90% of adulting falls into this category. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it. And last but not least, a both-barrels-Megan-hardhead-scratching. Look at who thought that was a good idea. Plus much, much more. Roll the intro.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome everyone to Death by Adulting. I'm your host, megan Scheibner, and I'm joined here at the Death by Adulting table by my co-host and, more importantly, partner in crime, dr Steve Scheibner. How are you doing today, steve?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. It's been a lot of work to get here today.
Speaker 2:It has been a lot of work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it has been, but I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you teased some pretty exciting things in the intro. I'd skip to the last one personally if I could. But why don't we get started with what penguin slapping and swiping right have in common?
Speaker 1:Okay, that's coming up, and then they spend the next 25 minutes talking about something else until they get to the first topic. So our intention here is to get right into at least the first issue before we start talking about other stuff. And in the tease we talked about penguin slapping, which is a thing, and swiping right.
Speaker 2:Which is a thing, which is a thing right, and it really has to do with the essence of the male female attraction.
Speaker 1:It's as old as dirt itself. You know, how do you find a mate, how do you find that life partner, how do you find somebody that you really want to spend the rest of your life with, right, all of those things? It's, it's been a science and an art over all the years and so. But the penguins got it right, and the penguins, as you're going to find out in a minute, actually have something to do with our relationship and how the two of us got to meet each other. But let's go back to the penguin slapping thing Now. I'm going to show you a short video here in just a minute of some emperor, uh, penguins, smacking each other around, and they're all males, right? So this is definitely a male thing when you think about how guys, young guys especially try to attract, um, girls. Sometimes they're kind of immature and and they uh, you know, our boys used to do something called sting pong, is so attractive, right and sting pong was um, basically they would play ping pong with their shirts off.
Speaker 1:Now, remember, this is before you know. They're not all bill, right, they're. They're 16 years old, so they're like skinny, you know, and all drawn there's no hair no hair at all.
Speaker 1:And and then, if, if somebody missed the shot, then the other person got to take this, the ping pong paddle and the ball and smack the ball into them in their bare skin as hard as they could. Um, I guess that's some sort of mating ritual, I don't know. But uh, at any rate, the, the boys, did all that stuff. Penguin slapping is not much different, all right, so the male penguins, they'll fight over a female by slapping each other around, and then they do, and, as you can see in this short video, they do. Uh, you know the the stare each other down thing that men do you know, dude, think, dude, I'm not backing down, I'm not backing down, all right, so let me show you what I'm talking about here. It's going to take me just a second to get this uh keyed up, uh in the video queue, but it's, it's worth watching and it's only 20 seconds long, and I'm going to stop the video halfway through and show you something that's going on in the background which is really a lot of fun. So the point is what does penguin slapping have to do with swiping right in the male female mating ritual? Okay, watch this now. It happens real quick that the slapping goes over fast and we put you on your screen. There we go. There's the penguins.
Speaker 1:All right, these guys, it's all dudes in the front here. And here we go. Right, these guys go after each other. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap. Okay, and now they do the stare each other down thing. I'm going to pause it right there. This is what dudes do. They just face off with each other, chests out, you know, and they're just staring each other down to see who's going to be the first penguin that kind of you know backs down off of the the thing here, right? So let's go back to our penguins, and I want you to watch this. There's something going on in the background. This picture I'm gonna take my cursor and just kind of run it over here. This gal in the background and I'm I don't know much about penguins that could be a dude I don't know.
Speaker 2:She's a little chunky.
Speaker 1:I don't know. But the whole time that these dudes have been smacking each other around we're just going to call this a female. We're going to say she's been just preening. The whole time she's been like, you know, checking out her hemline and she's making, looking back at her rear end to make sure it's not too big, you know, or maybe these days it's big enough, you know, and she's been preening. Every once in a while, out of the corner of her eye, she watches these guys fight over her Right corner of her eye, she watches these guys fight over her right, and so she's, she's very aware of what's going on.
Speaker 1:These guys have no clue what's going on around them, right, let me, let me pick up on the tape and see watch, what happens here. This, this guy right here, I think this one right here, he gets a little too close to this guy over here and he, he gets, uh, he gets what's for here? We go right, watch. So they're just kind of moving around. A couple guys aren't kind of disinterested here. We go Right, watch. So there's kind of moving around. A couple of guys are kind of disinterested. This guy gets a little peck hey, dude, don't get. And now this guy starts to speak up, right, and as he's doing that, that's the equivalent of of men going dude, dude, dude, dude. They're just doing each other out until finally, I guess, one of them gets the girl.
Speaker 2:And the girls are over there going. I think he likes me All right.
Speaker 1:So, honey, watching the penguin slapping video and swiping right? What in the world does penguin slapping have to do with you and me?
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny, I've always thought of you more as a chest thumper when it came to our mating ritual, but I guess I can see you as a penguin. You're even kind of dressed like one today. But so our story, because here we go on, death by adulting, and maybe you need to know a little bit about the adults who are talking to you. So one of the things you should know about both Steve and I is we both just really love Jesus. But that was not always true. We're not your classic, you know, got saved in Sunday school, grew up in a Christian home. We both came from a little bit, a lot of bit, rougher background and I personally, by the time I was in college, was well established as a. You're not the boss of me. Um, I do it my way. Uh, almost professional, unsaved person, right and um.
Speaker 2:But the end of my sophomore year of college I came to know the Lord and I came back to my college campus and in high school I had been involved in a parachurch organization called young life. Many of you probably know what young life is. It's still growing and expanding today. Um, so I am this new Christian. On my college campus, I reached out to the Young Life leaders. And that first week back at school I think it was about the third night the Young Life college leaders came to meet me and they took me out to dinner and we were rich college kids. So, if you remember this, steve, we went to a really elegant place called the rat short for the wrath skeller and, um, we sat in this dim, dark basement of this pizza place and that night I sat next to is the picture up here?
Speaker 1:Bring the picture up honey, yeah, here we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, here we are Now by this picture what I'm going to share. Some of it had gone away, but some was obviously still there. I sat by this skinny, long haired guy named Steve Scheibner, Right and there you see him in the picture. By this point in our relationship the hair was gone and, honestly, it never really came back and we never had that long hair again. Sorry, Sorry about that, honey.
Speaker 1:It hurts. I mean, I can do something about the skinny part, but the hair it's not a deal. We need to go look at the picture one more time. Sorry about that. Yes, there we were. Yes.
Speaker 2:And if you notice me in that picture here, bring it back a minute. That also was the only period in time where I had the mom mullet right. As you see, it was not party in the front so much as big bangs in the front and party in the back right. Oh, there are regrettable periods you were so adorable, there was unbelievable, how adorable there are regrettable periods in the history of my hair. I gotta throw to throw it up one more time. Look at this.
Speaker 1:Look how adorable she is. You're just like super cute, and the point is, you're still super cute.
Speaker 2:The cheeks are still there. Yes, yes, okay. So I sat next to that skinny, long-haired guy, steve Scheibner. We talked all night and at the end of the night I told anyone who would listen I have met the man that I am going to marry Now, unfortunately, steve was telling people you know that new girl, megan Pierce. She's okay, but I would never date her, and so we were at cross purposes, would you agree?
Speaker 1:I would agree we were at cross purposes.
Speaker 2:And when he met me, actually I tried to dress like a punk rocker, so that was an even different hair phase for me. But we became best friends. Now we never dated really, but we were best friends. The first Bible study I ever did was with Steve Scheibner. The first verses I memorized were with Steve Scheibner we would meet at 5 o'clock in the morning for a Bible study because he wanted me to learn that for a sacrifice to be a sacrifice, it has to be a sacrifice right, and I learned that from him.
Speaker 2:So, fast forward six months and I had moved in with the Young Life staff woman and she and I were great friends and Steve and she were great friends and she was getting married. And at that point I did everything with my best friend Steve. We went out to eat together, we went bowling together, you know, into young life meetings together. So I naturally assumed we would go to Cindy's wedding together. And about a week before the wedding my best friend Steve said to me oh, by the way, I'm taking my old girlfriend to Cindy's wedding. And um, I said, oh, cool, cool, yeah, that's great. But, ladies, you know what I was thinking inside? I was thinking game on buddy. So I called the best looking guy I had ever gone out with in college. His name was Dave and he really was good looking. You have to admit he was good looking.
Speaker 1:Dave was a beautiful specimen.
Speaker 2:He was a beautiful specimen.
Speaker 1:You hit a grand slam that night and I just remember thinking wow, what a beautiful human being. And it worked, honey.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It worked, let me just put it that way.
Speaker 2:A plan gone right, yes. So Dave and I got dressed up. We went to the wedding. All night people were coming up to me saying, if you and Steve were seeing who could bring the better looking date, you won. You know kudos for womankind. But about 15 minutes into the reception, dave and I left, and we left because we were bored. That's why we weren't dating anymore. We bored each other to tears. But Steve didn't know why we left. Steve didn't know why we left and he got to sit there all night thinking that we had gone off to have our own private date, while he was back with his old girlfriend at this wedding reception.
Speaker 1:This was a brilliant upon brilliant move on your part, Thank you. The leaving early thing, it just tore me up. I'm like, okay, where'd they go? What are they doing?
Speaker 2:Obviously they're making out in the backseat of a car someplace, because he's so good looking, it's horrible.
Speaker 1:And then she did this to me and I was oh, I just yeah, okay, so really what I did was I went back to my apartment and went to bed early.
Speaker 2:but whatever, sure, yeah, bye, dave, I'm tired. It's been nice, you're boring. Um, so the next morning, steve called me and he said hey, I was thinking we could go out to lunch today. And so, you know, we went out and had some of God's chicken Chick-fil-A existed even back then and he said you know, there's something I've been praying about for quite a while, and like since eight o'clock in the morning, I think and he said I think that you and I should begin dating you. And he said I think that you and I should begin dating.
Speaker 1:You have a problem with what I just said.
Speaker 2:Keep going, just keep going he said you and I should begin dating with the goal being marriage. Now, remember, I really liked this guy. I still was telling people I know we seem like just best friends, but I'm sure we're going to get married, so that should have been really exciting news. But there's a curveball, and please could you put on your no judgment hat right now. See, when I was in high school, I had dated the same guy basically all the way through high school. His name was Steve. I'm a pretty symmetrical person. I like things to be even. You know, I had four boys and four girls and I like things lined up, and so I dated mostly Steve's.
Speaker 1:So you only dated Steve's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 1:Mostly Steve's. There's something pathological about that, but we'll get into that later.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that can be another episode and and. But we had broken up when I went to college, but once a semester we would try again, like maybe this time it's going to stick and we'll actually end up getting married. And so I had a date with him that night. It was our once a semester date. So I said to Steve Scheibner, could you hold that idea till tomorrow, because I have a date tonight with my old boyfriend Steve and we can talk about this dating looking toward getting married tomorrow. And he seemed like he understood. And we ended our lunch and off I went and six o' about this dating looking toward getting married tomorrow. And he seemed like he understood. And we ended our lunch and off I went. And six o'clock that night the doorbell rang at my apartment. I opened the door. There stood Steve, as it should have been, but it was the wrong Steve. It was Steve Scheibner. And I said what are you doing here? And he said I'm going along. And he went along on the world's most awkward date.
Speaker 1:It was awesome. I had a great time and you two were awkward with each other and I and I and I spared that poor fellow.
Speaker 2:I did you might've, because you.
Speaker 1:you treated him poorly. I did treat him poorly, and you had him wrapped around your little finger and he kept coming back every six months like a little puppy.
Speaker 2:You know, and I'm like, okay, that's enough of that. He was a sweet guy.
Speaker 1:So the point of all the penguin slapping is that that was my male equivalent of the penguin slap. I showed up on your date with your guy because I had told you since eight o'clock in the morning, right, that you were the gal for me. And it wasn't just from 8 o'clock in the morning, right. I had given that quite a bit of thought and consideration and prayer. But you know what, at the point where you go, this is it. I better get in there and I better mark my territory, right.
Speaker 2:You did stare him down at dinner.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I've had enough of this, and you know what. And 40 years later. 40 years later, I'm sorry, other Steve.
Speaker 2:Yes, here we are.
Speaker 1:We all got on in life and things worked out pretty good for all of us.
Speaker 2:Here's one of my favorite things. Years later Steve told me he said I woke up that morning and I thought do I have the stomach flu?
Speaker 1:No, I like Megan, Okay, being all right, being in love and and uh, and the stomach flu have a lot in common, because it's that, it's that rumbly feeling in your stomach, where you go, I don't know. I, I, the back of my mouth is a little moist and I, I might feel like I don't want to throw up. And for men especially, you know that I guess I'm in love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know we have four sons and they've all come to us with that Like I don't feel very good, I think I like, and it ended up being their wife.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we said to him well, you're doomed buddy, better pick out the ring, it's like the Lion King in that song. You know, your old pal is doomed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, your old pal is doomed. So I guess you could say, steve, that when we, you know, when we got past the what are we? We kind of grew up and became adults and, like you said, 40 years later, here we are. But you know, I was thinking about that because here we are, death by adulting, that was an adultist decision when we got married. But for you, when was the point that you were like I'm the adultiest adult in the room right now?
Speaker 1:that's a good question. Um, I, uh, okay, I I don't. I don't know if many of us have a moment where you can just pinpoint and go oh, that's the moment where I grew up, but I think I remember it actually very specifically. It was just. I think it's weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's just really strange. Well, you are.
Speaker 1:But I was. I had already joined the Navy right and I had been in the Navy for about a year and a half. I had earned my wings, and so back to that picture with the two of us. I can't bring it up there it is. Back to that picture with the two of us. There it is Notice I've got wings on my uniform.
Speaker 2:That was the day they put the wings on. Yeah, that was the day they put them on. Yeah, that was special.
Speaker 1:That was a monumental day in my life the earning of my coveted wings of gold. And the neat part about that story is and I get all kind of choked up when I talk about it was that what you can't see off the picture is all of our friends were there. My mom was there, our whole families were there. Everybody came down and all of you pitched in money to buy me actual, real gold wings.
Speaker 1:We did Because the ones that they give you are kind of cheapo. They look gold but they're not real gold. Those were solid 24-karat gold.
Speaker 2:I've still got them to this day. An important point to make on that is I have never kept a secret about a gift in my life. I am that person that buys a gift and says I got you a Christmas gift. Do you want it now? But I kept that secret. You thought you were getting a bowling ball all along, bowling ball covet kept that secret.
Speaker 1:You thought you were getting a bowling ball all along. Okay, all right. Bowling ball coveted wings of gold, you know? Okay, yeah, I did. I. I'm an avid bowler, I love bowling, and so I I thought honestly that you got me my own custom bowling ball. Wasn't sure how you were going to do that, since I didn't get fitted for it.
Speaker 2:You know you have to put actually your fingers, it would have no holes in it but you know, I was gonna, I was gonna love on you anyway and say, oh honey, it's the best bowling ball I ever got it wasn't the bowling ball?
Speaker 1:all right, but anyway. So your question was when was the moment where you thought you? You grew up?
Speaker 1:or you are adulting happened for the first time. I joined the navy. I had got my wings of gold. Um, we had. We were, uh, going to, I, my first squadron, my first fleet squadron, flying an airplane called a P-3. It's a big, four-engine turboprop airplane and we hunted submarines and this is back in the 1980s, okay, and we were tracking Soviet Union submarines, real world stuff, and I wasn't qualified on that airplane. I had just gotten my first squadron, we had deployed to Keflavik, iceland of all places, and we had done a mission where I got plussed onto a crew. I was the fourth pilot on a three pilot crew, okay, and so not qualified.
Speaker 1:In this. We, we, we travel a thousand miles North. We're way out there in the extreme conditions. It's very bad weather that night and finally, the other three pilots just got tired. It was about three o'clock in the morning and they decided to put me in the seat, all right. So they bring out the new guy and they go all right, it's time for you to fly, right. So they put me in the right seat of the airplane and we descended down to 500 feet to track this submarine. And I looked over at the other, the other pilot and the engineer who sits in between the two pilots, and the two of them are doing this. They're doing the.
Speaker 1:You know the like that little bird that goes into the drink, you know, comes back up there. They're both falling asleep. It's three o'clock. I'm all excited. You know, this is my first opportunity and we're in this bad weather and the airplane is getting beat up and buffeted and the instruments are going like that, in front of me and I'm trying to, you know, fly this thing and I'm thinking there's 12 people behind me and there's two people falling asleep next to me and I remember that moment, thinking this is it, I'm the adult supervision, right, I'm.
Speaker 1:People depend on me, their lives depend on me, and I can, I can see. I can see the instruments, cause they were all red. They and I can see the instruments because they were all red. They have a red light on them at night and I can see them all bouncing around still to this day. And I remember having that moment. That epiphany of this is I better grow up, yeah, right. And I think that's an important moment for a lot of us. Is that moment where you think, hey, this is it, I've grown up. Okay, so let me return the favor. Do you have a moment where you knew that you became an adult, or your first?
Speaker 2:adulting moment I do. It's not as dramatic as yours, for sure, but it has to do with that same deployment Cause we had. We had bought our first house what? Two weeks before you left on deployment, I was on Young Life staff. I was doing a church partnership with Young Life and I was in charge of all these high school kids, and we bought a house that was a duplex, but not like a side by side, it was a upper lower and so it was just the two of us. So we took the little part on the second floor and we rented out the bottom part to a woman and her husband and he had Alzheimer's, and so it was a older gentleman who needed help. He just needed help.
Speaker 2:And so you left on deployment on a Friday I remember this so vividly I drove you to the squadron, I said goodbye, see you in six months, and I drove back to where we lived and I was planning the first activity with these high school kids and being a young life leader. I had always had a partner. I, you know I had. I had a young guy who was my partner. I had an older guy who trained me in young life. I never, I never, carried any of the weight of the responsibility of what went on with the kids. And for the first time I was it. I had a couple of volunteers to work for me, but I was it and I was thinking this is a big responsibility, these high school kids. And so Friday night I spent all night planning.
Speaker 2:Saturday I woke up and the renters called and they said the duplex is flooded, we have flooded it. And I thought, okay, you know, I was 22 years old at the time, I was really pretty young, and I went down and I, you know, I was 22 years old at the time, I was really pretty young, and I went down and I waded through the water. The whole duplex was flooded. I waded through it and it was coming from their washing machine. Now, I am not a mechanical sort, but I pulled out the washer and I sat down in that water and I got out some tools and I fixed it and I put all the hoses back on and I turned on the washing machine. It didn't leak anymore and I mopped up all the water and I cleaned it up and I thought, huh, I'm pretty capable right Girl power.
Speaker 1:I was feeling pretty good yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, going through the day, all the kids showed up for the first young life club and my guitar player was there. Everything was going as it should and I heard the smoke alarm go off in the duplex downstairs and I thought what in the world? And I went down and they had set the duplex on fire. It was the gentleman with the Alzheimer's. He had turned on the stove and he had caught something on fire and it was on fire and I got all the kids out of the duplex, out of the upstairs of the duplex. I got the fire department called, I got the people out of the lower duplex and I remember thinking, wow, I can do so much more than I thought I could do. Like I don't know what's going to come the next six months of this deployment, but I'm pretty sure I can handle it Right. And and obviously there were things I didn't handle so well, like my student loan, but but moment I thought I'm very adult-y, let's not let that one escape shall we?
Speaker 1:Let's talk, Megan, about the student loan payment.
Speaker 2:In the long run it worked out. No, no, I'm talking now.
Speaker 1:I'm on the camera, see me right there. Let's talk about the student loan for a minute. Why don't you tell our audience what you did?
Speaker 2:Is this like the cone of shame? So I had to pay the bills while you were on deployment, which again was a new thing. I had been in college, and so the first paycheck didn't go well. We got a $0.09 paycheck, but we figured that out Very adulty here. And then it was time to pay the bills, the second round, and I don't know how it happened Maybe I had amnesia for a moment or something, I don't know but I looked at my student loan payment and instead of writing a check for the payment that was due, I wrote it for all the money that was in our account, which coincidentally paid off my student loan.
Speaker 1:Okay, now I need to interject at this moment. I remember the first time and it was about $2,800, right, this is back in the eighties. $2,800 was a lot of money, it's still a lot of money.
Speaker 1:I remember the first time as an adult this is another adulting moment I remember the first time as, as an adult, I wrote a check for more than a thousand dollars, right, so you write the date in, right, and then you write the pay to part and then you write the dollar figure in and then you have to write out one thousand two and I'm I'm writing it out. My hand is shaking so hard I can hardly write it out because it's the biggest check I ever wrote. How in the world did you write the next payment of $2,800 and not catch it at some point in that process?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know. I'm pretty well documented for how distractible I am, so I would say I was distracted, but I would also say it was the bounces heard around the world Because the student loan payment went through, but the mortgage and the electric and the phone and the water, because the student loan payment went through, but the mortgage and the electric and the phone and the water and the gas, yeah, they didn't so much. So fortunately, you were thousands of miles away.
Speaker 1:I was 5,000 miles away and we only talked once every 10 days because it was a buck and a half a minute for a phone call which was good, but you know, at the end of it all, 40 years later, we lived through it. We lived through it and our student loan got paid off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah. That was when I first realized that I was a pretty adulty adult.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, okay, well, very good. So that's when we both began adulting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but, steve, you mentioned a phrase in there you said that really is kind of the essence of adulting. So I think that's a good segue into our second segment, which is that most important phrase in adulting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the most important phrase for me, at least in adulting, is the expression you don't have to like it, you just have to do it All right, and let me. Let me repeat that All right, cause that's going to be kind of a cornerstone of what we do here at death by adulting you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. And honestly, 90% of life falls into that category. And now the story behind when I learned that lesson was I was a young Lieutenant and I just love showing this picture. So let's go back to this again. I was, I was an ensign there right in that picture. But now fast forward about four years right now. And I didn't put much weight on in the next four years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have to point out that the wings are so heavy that they're you're leaning. Because you were so skinny they did weigh about as much as I did at the time.
Speaker 1:But so fast forward about four years in my life and now I'm a Lieutenant, I'm at the that fleet squadron, I'm all qualified now and I'm not the new guy, or I've been around for a few years and, uh, I was be giving been giving little bits of responsibility, actually large jobs to do and to carry up. And so one day my supervisor, lieutenant, commander, the guy a rank above me, my boss, calls me into his office and he sits me down and he goes Steve, I want to say something to you. And I go yeah, yes, sir, his name was Jim. And Jim said Steve, you don't have to like it, you just have to do it, you're dismissed. And I literally said out loud, I said what, what? And he repeated it. He said Steve, you don't have to like it, you just have to do it Now, get out. And so I got up out of the seat and I kind of stumbled out of his office and I was just dumbfounded. I was really annoyed by what he said and I went around all day, you know, talking to everybody. I got a gym called me, I was off. I said you don't have to like it, you just have to do it Now, get out. And I was trying to incorporate everything that he said to me and it wasn't. I wasn't comprehending right away. So I came home that night, remember, I came home that night, I do remember, and I walk in. I said Jim called me in his office today and he said, steve, you, you do that knowing smile that a woman has. And uh, and you looked at me and then I thought, oh, two people know something and they're not saying it to me. And Megan was smart enough not to weigh in so I just had to kind of sit on it, sleep on it that night. So I hardly slept that night.
Speaker 1:I got up early the next morning I went into work. I got outside of Jim's office about now six, 30 in the morning, waiting for him to come in. About seven o'clock he comes into the office and I'm sitting there and I said, hey, can we talk about you know what you said yesterday? And he said, yeah, steve. He said I's the deal. He said when you get given a job or a task or an assignment to do, he said when you eventually keyword, all right, eventually get around to doing it, he goes. You're brilliant man. He goes. Nobody can touch you. He said you do an excellent job. Every single time he said but okay, here it is. But in that first five minutes after you're given a job or a task or an assignment, you just kind of go off with how you feel about it. And he said, steve, I don't know if it's a surprise to you or not, but nobody around here cares how you feel about anything.
Speaker 1:And then he said the most profound thing that stuck with me all these years. It is the essence of adulting. He said, steve, you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. 90% of life falls into that category. And when you begin to think about you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. And all the things that fall into that category, it's shocking. Changing diapers, okay, you know, if and when you have kids changing diapers, you don't have to like it, you just have to do it.
Speaker 1:Paying your taxes you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. Setting the alarm and getting up and going to work you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. Paying your bill blah, blah, blah. It goes on and on and on, and and, honestly, what I thought before he said that to me was somehow I either had to think it, whatever it was was my idea, or it had some merit, like you had to prove to me why it was important, or but it didn't have to be any of those things. It didn't. I didn't have to agree with it, I didn't have to find any merit in it, it didn't even have to be my idea. Basically, what he was saying to me and he didn't ever say this, but my application was Steve, shut up and do your job. And you know what Life actually goes a whole lot better when you just shut up and do your job and there's. There's jobs that we can embrace and jobs that we can have fun at. A lot of fulfillment in life comes from getting plugged into something bigger than ourselves, and all of that stuff is important life lessons for adults and in adulting. So the title of this program is Death by Adulting, right, we want you to avoid death by adulting by embracing really the fun that making adult decisions are.
Speaker 1:Because when you were a little kid, right, when you were a little kid and you were four years old and somebody said, how old are you? You never said four years old. You always said to them. I'm four and a half or five and a half or whatever it was why? Because you wanted to be considered older, more mature, more responsible. What happened to that dynamic? At some point you get into your teen years and then maybe beyond, and some of you are lingering into your twenties and thirties and you still haven't embraced that adult world yet, and you don't know what you're missing. Because it is, it's challenging, it's hard work, but it's exceedingly rewarding, and so, again, that's a whole nother thing for another episode We'll. We'll get into that at some other point in time, but you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. Now. Give me some examples from your life of the. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it.
Speaker 2:Sure, and really, children don't live this paradigm. If children don't like it, they don't do it. They throw a temper tantrum. They refuse Even teenagers. If children don't like it, they don't do it, they throw a temper tantrum. They refuse even teenagers. You know, I don't like it and nowadays teenagers doesn't like it. Mom's gonna go in and say to the teacher they don't have to do it. Right, but it is the essence of adulting and it doesn't matter what season of life you're in. So, like now, I work full-time for our ministry and there are things I love to do. I love to write, I love to teach, I love to disciple.
Speaker 2:I love to do, I love to write, I love to teach, I love to disciple, I love to counsel. I hate doing social media, but in this culture, if we want to thrive and we want to reach our audience, I have to do social media. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it Now.
Speaker 2:as a mom, I had the freedom because of how hard you worked to stay home. I was a stay-at-home mom. I homeschooled my eight kids and again, there were things I loved. I loved reading out loud. I loved playing games in the middle of the day Um. I didn't love vomit. I didn't love picking up a child and sniffing their bottom. I, you know I didn't get a degree in college to do that. It felt below me, but you don't have to like it. You don't have to below me, but you don't have to like it. You don't have to do it or you don't have to like it, you just have to do it.
Speaker 1:I think they offer that in college now. Butt sniffing one-on-one yeah, I think that's the thing, yeah um it we'll talk about this in another episode.
Speaker 2:Really, the the core of you don't have to like it, you just have to do it is change a change in attitude to I don't have to do it, I get to do it, I get to do it. Right, I it's not, I have to, because we could have the freedom to say I'm never gonna do another thing I don't want to do. But when we embrace it as I don't have to do it, I get to do it, it changes our whole attitude about it. And so you mentioned we are you know death by adulting, but you know death by adulting. But why are we death by adulting?
Speaker 2:Well, we have seen in our counseling ministry and all of the studies are are bearing it out that this is one of the most unhappy cultures in history. There's more um anxiety disorders, disassociation, people who are lonely, isolated. They feel left out. Um, they, and that's that's across the board. People in churches who feel left out, people in communities, people in school who feel left out, people in in their sports, you know, they go to their kid's sports team and they feel like I'm the only parent that's alone and um, something's wrong and I think, really what it is is this I think we're so busy being the star or the main character in our own drama that we have lost the truth that we are just supporting cast in the bigger picture of what God is trying to do in our world. And when we lose that picture, we lose the impact we can have on the world.
Speaker 1:Okay, so say that again, because that was really profound.
Speaker 2:Repeat what you just said to me again about the supporting Okay, so we're so busy focusing on being the main character in our own drama that we've lost the bigger picture that we are the supporting cast in what God wants to do in the world.
Speaker 1:We're thinking am I satisfied? Am I?
Speaker 2:being taken care of Is. Am I satisfied? Am I being taken care of? Is everyone looking after me? Am I being taken advantage of? Is it fair? What's happening to me? Instead of having that attitude of God, what do I get to do to have an impact on this world?
Speaker 1:Those, those things that you just listed to wear you down. Oh, you wonder why there's so much depression these days, right, always focusing and worrying about yourself. Oh yeah, when the greater satisfaction honestly comes from investing in the lives of others, being others oriented I think the rise in high functioning anxiety has a lot to do with.
Speaker 2:If I'm anxious that I'm not being taken care of. That's a continual thing and it is. It's exhausting and it's stressful and it's depressing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And that's where we are. That's where we are as culture, but we don't have to be.
Speaker 1:Okay, wow, that's really good stuff. We might just quit right there. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So so let me, let me kind of sum it up. Cause. If I could sum up what we really want to do here at death by adulting, it's this we want to help you make decisions today that you won't regret tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Let me say that again because because these me decisions that we're making that are causing such angst and anxiety in our life are not decisions that we're happy about tomorrow, but we want to help you make decisions today that you won't regret tomorrow and Steve. Today that you won't regret tomorrow and Steve. Flesh it out. What does that look like?
Speaker 1:Well, I think for me, uh, decisions that I make today that I won't regret tomorrow as as you get older.
Speaker 1:I think hopefully you get better at that. Um, but not necessarily, I was going to say not every older person. And I think a big part of why you and I wanted to do this podcast is we wanted to invest in younger people. Yeah, not in a placating talk down to you kind of way you know, you kids are all messed up Not that kind of way, but almost in a way of saying what you just said, which helping make decisions today.
Speaker 1:If you could have a fast forward button, or if you could look at, if you could look at you 40 years from now and say the decisions that you made 40 years ago were good decisions and you were satisfied with it, that's great. When we ask people the question a lot, would you go back to being 20 years old? And when we ask that question many times, the answer is, oh, no, I wouldn't go back to it. And then people stop for a minute and they go well, could I keep my 60 year old brain and go back to my 20 year old body? All right. And then the answer is yes, absolutely. Be physically fit, no pains, no aches and pains, but still have the wisdom of age and the vitality of youth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sign me up. Okay, that's what we want to be. We want to be right. Here it is. We want to be your on demand old farts, ok. And if you want to have a old fart moment where you just kind of fast forward in the future and go tune in, right, listen to what we're going to say, and at that point I'm going to say to you this If you've been with us this long and you've liked what you've gotten so far, do us a favor, right, you know what I'm going to say next. Right, hit the like button, subscribe so you don't miss any of our content. And, uh, and share this with other people, right, because we think that the content here is invaluable, and if you've made it this far, you agree. So throw us a bone and do that for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're not just bringing experience. We are bringing a lot of experience. We've had a lot of experience in every area you know military life deployments, adoptions, large families, homeschooling you know all those types of things. We put a lot into our education, but we want to bring you our failures as well as our successes, and I think sometimes what we see with public figures which is what we are is it looks like a shiny utopia.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And the truth is we've had at least as many failures as we've had successes. But the only true failure is if you don't learn from it and if you don't teach it to the younger generation.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So for me, the simplest way to think about what you just described is we're going to invest in a vertical relationship. Okay, and don't get scared off by that, right, because the greatest wisdom of the ages came from God through the Bible. Right, and so we shouldn't run away from that, we should actually embrace it. And so we're going to invest in the vertical so that we're better at the horizontal. Okay, then that's vertical is the up up be honey yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2:When I get tired, I don't go get vertical no, you get horizontal.
Speaker 1:All right, megan has a problem with that. Okay, but and and and. Watch this. So which is left? Honey, show the camera. Yeah, show them left, lefty, loser, right, righty, tighty. Okay, very good, okay, just just want to make sure it's girl, left or boy, right, I don't know. It's something like that. All right, very good. So, um, now we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up in our final segment. Okay, uh, for the podcast today, and we're gonna do something called uh. Who even thought that was a good idea? So let me set you up with this and I'm going to call on you first. Who thought that was a good idea? Meg?
Speaker 2:Daylight savings time. Daylight savings time oh yeah, I have to tell you that's a good one. Thought daylight savings time had been canceled. Like I saw it on the internet, I actually think one of the houses voted to get rid of it and the other just didn't vote. But when it happened again this fall, it was like soul sucking to me. And I don't even have little children anymore, because you know what daylight savings time is right. Daylight savings time is time for children to absolutely destroy the family dynamic for 48 hours.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's awful. Yeah, because they're tired.
Speaker 2:They can't sleep when they should, they're up earlier than they should be. And you know if I could give you an adulty tip, because it's going to happen again. We're not that. Far from it happening again, it is the ultimate. You don't have to like it, you're going to be forced to do it. So just prepare ahead right, try and like get some extra nap times in there, segway that bedtime a little bit so that it isn't quite so devastating on the entire family. Well, there you have it.
Speaker 1:Daylight savings time yeah, put it out man who even thought that was a good idea. Who even thought that was a good idea? I think his name was Ben Franklin, probably. Oh, my word, all right, honey, all right. What about next time?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, before we get to next time.
Speaker 2:I want to leave you with a boss tip way to win at adulting. And there are ways to win at adulting. Sometimes it seems like adulting is going to crush us, but we can win if we plan ahead a little bit. So this is a simple boss tip and, trust me don't't don't hate at me in the comments, because this works. I want you, before you go to bed, to take five, ten minutes and empty your kitchen sink and clean it out. It seems like such a small thing, doesn't it? But it's really not. If you wake up in the morning and your kitchen sink is clean, you're you're ahead of the game and, and especially you moms out there, if you come out to dishes in the sink, you're going to start your day discouraged. So, even if you're tired, just take a few minutes, throw them in the dishwasher, wash out the sink and when you come out in the morning, you're ready to take on the day. You're the winner, not the dishes. So that's your little boss tip for this segment for this week.
Speaker 1:You can be the boss of the dishes, so that's your little boss tip for this segment, for this week. You can be the boss of the dishes. You can be the boss of the dishes absolutely. Yeah, scrub like a boss there you go, there you go. All right, I like that. Yeah, that's good, it's working for me I like that too.
Speaker 2:We came up with so many happy slapper things and we didn't even I know, yeah, it's fun. The slapper jokes are good we were going to be happy slappery ever after. But since we're past that, why don't you tell us what comes next time?
Speaker 1:you know, I would love to, but it has totally escaped me at this moment, so I'm going to punt that back to you. Uh, what are we doing next time? Uh?
Speaker 2:next time.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's gonna be really really good, really really good no, we're gonna, we're gonna talk, we're gonna capitalize on that theme of you.
Speaker 2:Don't have to like it, you just have to do it and I think we're really going to talk a lot about the things we get to do, as opposed to the things we have to do, because you know what? It's a lot of fun to get to do things.
Speaker 1:Right, it's kind of stinky to have. That's a great way. The things we have to do it totally will change your frame of mind, yes, and make those things much more what? Happy, slappy, happy, slappy, happy, slappy yeah.
Speaker 2:But one of the things I have to do now is end the show, and so thank you for being with us here at Death by Adulting. I'm your host, megan, with my co-host, dr Steve, and remember, when it comes to adulting, what doesn't kill you just makes you tired.