Easter is a wild weekend around here, at least as wild as the Iaconelli household gets. All the kids are here; we go to church and then spend the day together. There’s nothing all that special about it, just a day hanging out with the ones we love.
Maybe I’m starting to show my age but the older I get the more I realize that you have to keep your priorities in line. There are things that are more important than your career. We’ve all heard that no one, while on their deathbed, says they wished they’d spent more time in the office. That’s kind of where I am right now.
It’s not that fishing isn’t important. It is. It’s the way I feed my family and provide for them. I take a lot of pride in my skills. At the same time, though, lots of money and professional accomplishments won’t make up for missing a sporting event or other important days in the lives of my family.
We’ve had something going on here that brought that thinking home in a silly kind of way. Becky has a young woman who comes in and helps her with the kids. She’s an early education major at a local college. We don’t know what to call her.
I know it sounds silly but we’ve actually spent some time on this and had a few laughs about it along the way. It’s not fair to call her a babysitter. She’s more than that. She’s trained and she genuinely works with the kids while Becky works on business matters.
The current term that’s becoming all the rage is to call women like her a nanny. We don’t really want to do that either. She qualifies but it sounds too upscale. It’s like we’re trying to be something we’re not. We don’t live in a mansion; we don’t have maids and butlers. We’re pretty much like everybody else except that I fish for a living.
So, anyway, this has been taking up a lot of our time lately. There’s no doubt in my mind that there will come a day when we look back on the time we’ve spent on this and laugh, thinking we wasted a lot of valuable hours on something that turned out to be unimportant.
But I’m not so sure it’s wasted time. It’s not very productive; I’ll give you that. At the same time, though, Becky and I have had some good times working on it together. That’s not wasted time.
This business — catching bass — is a lot of fun and it’s a wonderful way to earn a living. At the same time, I say that I also realize that it can be addictive. It can take over every minute of every day if you let it. I’m trying hard not to let it do that.
We have a couple of good venues coming up on our schedule. I’ll do everything I can, within the rules, to win or to at least place high. If I don’t, I’ll still go home to a loving family and have a good time trying to figure out what to call Becky’s helper. It’s all about priorities.
Mike Iaconelli’s column appears weekly on Bassmaster.com. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter or visit his website, MikeIaconelli.com.
