The Man I Refuse to Become

One does not exist without the other. The future cannot be without the past. Good without evil. Son without father.

The physiological similarities are unmistakable. The biological kinship is undeniable. I cannot look in the mirror without catching a glimpse of him. I hear him in my words. I feel him in my actions. I catch him in my feelings. He exists in my thoughts. I have become everything I am in spite of who he was and is. I have sought a life of morality in the wake of his Machiavellian existence.

I want to be his antithesis. I want to be good where he was evil. I want my future to break free from my past. I want to deny him what he is owed. I want to deny how similar we are. I want to deny that his destruction and chaos made me who I am, that such destruction and chaos inspired me out of spite.

The truth is undeniable. My charisma is his. My memory is his. My tenacity, persistence, and ability to manipulate and motivate is his. I am my father’s son. I cannot deny those facts. My father gave me the slate, but it was I who chose to become who I am. It is I who chose how to employ those skills. I chose to use them for good. It is I who chose how my past would shape my future. It is he who chose a life of deception, manipulation, destruction, and chaos.

On the precipice of fatherhood, I have struggled with how to present him, not only to my future child, but to my own memories. It would be easy if he had been, or is, consumed with evil intentions and actions. The truth is far more nuanced. He sought to escape the history and sins of his parents. He had glistening moments of love and kindness. He was the culmination of his past and kinship. There were moments I wanted to desperately cling to in my adolescence. I wanted him to be a “good” father. I wanted him to choose us over the drugs and alcohol. I wanted him to choose stability over chaos, but what I wanted was burdened by reality.

It is I who must choose to accept his moments of love and kindness for what they were, not what I wanted. It is I who must take what was good and shape it into my future. It is I who must decide what past my child will have so they can decide what future they want.

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Jake Smith is a law enforcement officer and former Army Ranger with four deployments to Afghanistan.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.