What Our Son Taught Us
Fair warning, this one gets personal. It is a big part of the story behind our store, and if you have stopped by Men's Modern General Store, there is a good chance you have heard parts of it.
Our son Davin, five years old now, was diagnosed before birth with a condition called Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita, or AMC. We learned about it at the twenty-week ultrasound, and the picture the doctors painted for us was bleak. AMC shows up differently from person to person. It mainly affects the muscles, tendons, and joints in the arms and legs. For some, that means one stiff joint or low muscle tone in a single limb. For others, it means needing a breathing tube to breathe or a wheelchair to get around.
For Davin, it means stiff joints in his legs paired with strong muscle tone, which has meant years of physical therapy to stretch those joints. There is nothing harder as a parent than doing a stretch you know is causing your own child pain. He has gone through several rounds of leg casting, plus surgeries for clubfoot and to release tendons in his Achilles and hips.
His upper body is the opposite problem. His joints are loose, but he has almost no muscle tone in his shoulders or biceps, so something as simple as scratching his nose means swinging his arm up onto a surface first. He has had multiple rounds of hand and wrist splints and several surgeries on both hands. Down the road there is a chance he could have a bicep transfer, where a muscle from his rib cage is relocated to his bicep to give him more independence.
None of this touches his lifespan, which has been a massive relief for us. The doctor who broke the news to us knew very little about AMC and told us our son would never have a healthy life. He was flat out wrong.
How This Connects to the Store
About a year after my wife first pitched the idea of the store to me, we found ourselves talking about how we wanted to raise Davin. We wanted him to keep trying things, even when doing them looked different for him or took more effort. As soon as I said that out loud, it hit me that as his father I needed to hold myself to the same standard.
Anyone who has been in our store or watched our videos has probably noticed I have a stutter. It has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up, it made me painfully shy, to the point where speaking in front of more than two or three people at once was enough to shut me down. It even steered the direction of my career.
I did not have a plan after high school, so I landed a job at Brinks Inc working in the coin room and stuck with it for almost six years, never loving it. From there I moved to another warehouse job, then went through driving school to get my CDL. That decision opened a lot of doors, and I spent the next decade working different driving jobs.
Along the way I realized the drive itself was never the part I liked. What I actually looked forward to was pulling up to a customer's stop and getting to know them. Even so, fear kept me steering clear of anything customer facing.
That conversation with my wife about pushing our son changed something in me. I knew I had to face my own thinking around my stutter the same way. For a solid year after she first brought up the store idea, I went back and forth on whether I could actually do it or even wanted to. That conversation was the thing that finally settled it. Every other piece of the idea lit me up, from connecting with people to talking about the hobbies I love, but the idea of speaking to people all day long terrified me.
Even after we secured funding and locked down a location, the nerves did not go away. The moment I really had to face it head on came when we applied for a business license with the City of Cottleville. The meeting was live streamed, and I had to address the alderman along with roughly twenty other people, more people than I had ever spoken in front of before. It went smoothly, and I made it through.
Then came our ribbon cutting with the St Charles Regional Chamber and Cottleville/Weldon Spring Chamber we had joined. Close to fifty people packed into the store, and the chamber president turned to my wife and I and asked if we wanted to say something. I just went for it. I would not say I sounded confident those first handful of times, but I have settled into it since then, whether I am at the store or making videos with my wife or on my own. The first time she asked me to be on camera for social media, I broke a sweat and tried to talk my way out of it. These days it feels close to normal, though I think that is more about getting comfortable with social media in general than about beating the stutter.
The point of putting this out there is simple: whatever makes you different, you are still capable of doing hard things, and pushing through that feels better than you can imagine.
One more thought worth adding. A lot of us who carry something that sets us apart end up a little too focused on ourselves about it, assuming everyone else is paying attention. In reality, most people are not thinking about what we are dealing with at all. What running this store has shown me is that most people, when it comes down to it, are good people.
Personal growth is something my wife and I both value, and it is reflected in every area of our lives. Our marriage, our parenting, and how we run this store. Even the books in our store are a token to the values we hold. Opening this store is a living testament to my own personal growth.
Stop by for some great conversation. We hope you'll leave inspired.
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