Changes

A few times, here lately, and also in the past few years I have had people say to me “You are not the same person”, I even had one say that my mind had been warped because I do not believe the way that they do.

I moved out of my mother’s and in with my father when I was 16, so I am sure my other siblings that stayed with my mother were raised differently and it should have resulted in them being more like her. I am sure that they would say “oh you’re different”, well duh, we have lived separately for almost 30 years, you don’t think there hasn’t been separate growth since then?

Those people that knew me in high school probably wouldn’t recognize me, not just because I cut off all of my hair, but because I am not that person. After high school I became a father and my goal in being a father was to raise good children that would be better prepared for the world then I was. To raise children that would be beneficial to society and not a hindrance.

My beliefs and core values have changed quite a bit over my lifetime. Most people think they are set by the time they graduate college, but I think most people are constantly making small changes throughout their lives. Then sometimes there are major events that alter your thought process or belief system.

I was raised by two parents that had vastly different belief systems and taught me two completely different ways to act. I imagine that this would be confusing to a child, to have conflicting parenting styles.  I am sure that there are parts of my personality that I get from both my parents (good and bad) and I am sure in the beginning my core beliefs were a combination of what I learned from each of them, to a lesser extent I am sure each successive step parent also had some type of influence on me.

One parent believed in hard work and education and one believed in the quick buck, more about how to cheat or scam money if possible.  One parent for lack of a better term had more in common with the criminal element than law abiding citizens. One believed in family values and the other believed that cheating wasn’t wrong unless you got caught and even then you should deny it to the end. I vividly remember his family motto being “Deny, Deny, Deny” and “I do what I want”. I knew after I had children that I did not want to act this way.

By the time I was 20 I was a father to not one but two sons and by the time I was 23 I had three sons. My wife and I were on our own and outside of family holidays we mostly stayed to ourselves, raising three small children is time consuming. After I had children I noticed both my wife and I had to change, we were responsible not only for ourselves but also for the children and each other. Once you are responsible for another life, things change.

While my beliefs and core values had already been changing I think the most significant change in my beliefs system and attitude probably came about when I became a police officer. Many things changed for me then but a lot of the values (if you want to call them that) I was taught when younger no longer held any value, I changed even more as I transitioned into law enforcement and the longer I went in my career, the more I changed. I would venture to guess that the vast majority of those people that become Law Enforcement officers undergo a major change in the way they believe and act.

While I am by no means a perfect person, I do my best to be a good and morally correct person, someone that my children and wife can be proud of. I must have done ok at it because I had a pretty successful career before I retired and my children grew up happy, healthy and work hard at their jobs, they have made some decisions that I don’t agree with but, no one is perfect, all we can hope for is continued progress.

I made some hard decisions not too long ago to distance myself from some people in my life, which has caused some people to try to interject their opinions on the matter. While I can appreciate your opinions on how you feel I should handle such things, I say to you, you don’t know what I lived through. So you do not know the full extent of the matter. Sometimes it is easier to let people run their mouths about you and walk away, sometimes it is easier to let people believe the lies they have been spoon feed rather than tarnish their idols image or expose a truth that is unpleasant.