29 years old and sitting on the top of giants

Yesterday was my 29th birthday, and I was reflecting on my life and on how sitting on the top of giants isn’t given enough credit. My giants are my parents.

Yesterday I turned 29 years old.

The night before, I was speaking with my dad about how grateful I am for everything he’s done for my brother and I.

I always had everything - food at the table, a roof and education.

I’m the person I am today because of my parents.

But my dad didn’t have it easy.

And so instead of writing about how grateful I am for the life I have today, I want to share some parts of my dad’s life.

I don’t like to share personal information about my family, but I feel like from all the posts I read on success - sitting on the top of giants isn’t given enough credit.

My giants are my parents.

Here’s his story.

My dad grew up with very little in a town in the middle of nowhere in Portugal with 6 siblings.

He did a few years in school and after classes he would come home and watch his parents sheep until it was dark. He did his homework during that time since there was no electricity back then.

If a sheep ran away while he was doing his homework, his dad would punish him with whatever was at hand, a stick or a belt.

Times were different back then.

In school, if he got questions like 7x8 wrong, teachers wouldn’t just say the correct answer. They had a special ruler that was used to hit a student’s hand.

Again, times were different.

After a couple of years in school - he didn’t like it (I wonder why eh) and they didn’t have a lot of money. So he started working at the age of 11 in construction.

An 11 year old kid, taking 2 buckets of cement up and down the stairs to build houses.

At the age of 17 he moved to Geneva (Switzerland) for a better paid job, as a bricklayer but also did painting jobs and similar.

At 18, his mum died. She was run over by a car near our hometown.

At 20, he had to come to Portugal because of his passport and he met my mum.

1 year later, my mum moved to Geneva to be with him. She worked in a factory making boxes for Rolex watches.

At 22, his dad died from a disease.

He kept working his ass off. 6 days a week, starting at 6 am whether it was snowing, raining or extremely hot.

No travelling or unnecessary expenses, except tobacco, it was his only addiction as everyone around him smoked - it was a social thing.

At 24 he got married with my mum. My mum’s family didn’t like his, so they didn’t attend the wedding and they had to cover it with all of their savings.

At 31, he had me.

The week before I was born would be the last he would ever smoke, since my mum said that she didn’t want smoke near us because of our health. At some point he was smoking 2 packs a day, and he stopped from one day to the other which is wild.

At 32 his painting shift had just finished and his boss asked him to give one more painting layer to the outside of an apartment. And he went up the ladder, and it broke. He fell from a 2-story apartment on his foot, and his foot bone got smashed into pieces. (He had actually mentioned to his boss that the ladder didn’t feel very stable earlier that day). 
The doctor told him that he would never be able to do any physical work ever again. 24 years later, and he still struggles to walk for long periods of time.

At 33, he had my brother.

Because of the accident, he stayed at home to raise my brother and I.

A bit after, Portugal joined the Euro. So my dad thought that the living conditions in Portugal would improve overall like other European countries (spoiler alert: it didn’t).

So, he decided to start building a house on the same land where his hometown house was, in Portugal.

They couldn’t afford to buy a house in Geneva, but had enough savings that they could build one in his hometown.

They went back when he was 39 (I was 8), and that’s where I grew up.

My mum struggled to find a job for many years - she only got a job as a secretary at a furniture store - until they went bankrupt.

My dad had depression since he was stuck at home with nothing to do.

Growing up, I wanted to work as a bricklayer in summers to make some cash and my dad forbid me doing so.

He said that it was dangerous and he didn’t want me to have that life. He has seen a lot of young people dropping out of school because they start receiving salaries early and prioritise short-term outcomes over long-term ones.

He didn’t want me to follow that path.

He wanted to give me the opportunities that he didn’t have growing up. And he did.

One day I got home from high school, and commented that someone I knew always had expensive clothes and watches. He happened to know their family and got upset. He was upset because he knew that they owed a lot of money to a lot of people - and kept living a luxury lifestyle. 
So he told me “You may not wear all of that, but you will never hear in your life that we owe anything to anyone. Everything you have has been bought with a lot of hard work from your mother and I, and not by stealing or owing anything to anyone”.

I still think about this often, and how appearances are often just that.

A few years later after I got into university, my parents decided to move back to Switzerland.

My mum still didn’t have a job and we weren’t going home as much (we both studied relatively far from our hometown). It was hard on her to move away from us, but it was the right thing to do.

She found a job as a cleaner, which she has been doing for almost 10 years now.

In the meantime my dad wondered if he could leverage all the skills he had learned growing up to manage a housing project. So he bought land in Portugal, and was heavily involved in the management of the project. Meaning he worked across everything, except the physical aspects of the job.

It was an investment, but after having so many years in real estate - it was hard for someone to have as much knowledge breadth as he did in terms of costs of materials and staff since he had been on the other side of the coin for a long time.

Now he does that every now and then, which keeps him busy. But since it involves being far from my mum, this time he’s hiring an agency to be more involved at the expense of less headaches and a lower margin.

He has a good life now. But he came from nothing, literally.

Most people on his shoes, don’t make it.

Damn.

Most people with more opportunities than him don’t make it.

I often feel guilty because I get to live life in a way that my parents could never.

The best way I can think to repay them is to work hard and show them that their hard life will be the last that the future Lopes generation will have to endure.

That and hopefully buying them a nice car one day.