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As the author of this history and founder of what has produced Im2be ®, I am in my 70’s now. The most memorable and developmental parts of my “elementary school” days were hunting and fishing with my carpenter grandfather Joe and dairy farming with my Grandpa Jack in northern Minnesota.
Completing the arc of my life our family settled, and we raised our son Benjamin, on a small farm at Stare Zakole outside of Warsaw, Poland through this last millennium, with fish and chickens, dogs and cats and horses.
I will say it right now, if the bond between mothers and sons breaks in the future, and mothers lose their halos in their son’s eyes, all is lost. As a tough, loving grandmother, my mother Romel made a brave attempt at riding one of our horses shortly before she passed on. Romel’s direct ability to speak her truth and offer her simple wisdom is now lost.
My father Tom worked three jobs at the same time and supported a suburban Minneapolis lifestyle for the 6 of us when I was a teenager. My father and grandfathers each raised one solid family, married till death parted them from us and worked at their trades as long as they could stand on their own legs.
With such a perfect American Dream start I became the first Geris that ever earned a college degree of any kind with plenty of scholarships. My first is in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, my second is a Master in Business Administration from the Harvard Business School. The rest of my story should be more of the fairy tale, but it is not.
This is my back story and a big part of the most fundamental belief we bring to Im2be ®: FAITH IN FAMILY.
I have been a driving force to build a product to provide a service that I personally needed and still do. A way to engage more positively and successfully with my own very complicated and extended family.
During my lifetime too many things changed. As I will commit now, and you will find often repeated in our materials, we bring no judgement or exclusive philosophy or theology to our support for your family. So, I will try to keep it simple and not controversial or parochial or political.
During my lifetime, masculinity came to be understood as “toxic”. Men, women and children have been “liberated” from principles of relationships and responsibilities that, to me, seem to have been originally the result of intelligent design. Nobody can deny that humanity has evolved the principles of family and community that insured the “survival of the fittest”. Most fundamentally, if an ancient human woke up alone (isolated) in the dark in the woods, without their family and tribe – they were in trouble (anxious).
My own experiments with the modern rules have not worked out too well. Like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, I have been married three times. In my case, divorced every time. It is not only a western civilization phenomena. In January of 2025 I spent an evening with two displaced Kurdish refugees in a hotel next to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Between the three of us we had been married 9 times and divorced 8 times and we were part of every possible scenario with our heirs.
Among those of you investing your time reading this, I hope that at least half of you will be women, but I can only offer my testimony as a man. As you have flashed back to your own history and consider your future in your own families you will think about love, but also about shattered relationships, kids growing up helpless and becoming hopeless as adults. As a born again Roman Catholic, I am working for a better future for families in obedience, as a duty, as my mission and as a penance. Many members of our team, over many years, pray that our work can help you avoid shattered and irrecoverable relationships and destroyed, or even the surrendered lives of the people you love.
19 July 2003: My own spiritual/social journey to reach this point of releasing Im2be ® 7.0 began seriously when lightning hit a huge old double oak tree in our front yard. It was a Saturday morning and I was having a couple of beers and an argument about work with my wife in front yard. Suddenly the wind came up and the sky got dark and a single bolt of lightning hit an ancient two trunked Oak Tree about 20 meters away from where we were standing. If you have never had a similar experience, you can’t fully appreciate the lights and sound of the explosion. I saw our dog “Lucky”, chained to a metal post in the ground near the tree, hit the top of the chain electrified straight up in the air and bounce back, and survive. Branches and leaves rained down and the sky cleared. Today, the symbolism of what I call the “Marriage Tree” inspires me most mornings. Half of it is preserved as a warning, but dead. The other half is a promise.
This is what it looks like on 22 March 2025. For the next 10 years we tried to do something positive about Marriages. Wedding bed cover presents, a 4 Hands Cook Book but these good ideas didn’t work out. I did not plan this event. God wanted my attention, and He got it.
