Most people who know me well have heard me tell more than a few stories about my father. Some of those stories are funny now. Some were confusing in the moment. Some shaped me in ways I did not fully understand until much later in life.
When you grow up in a split household, you quickly learn that you are living between two worlds. Each parent has their own way of doing things. Their own rules. Their own expectations. Their own culture. Under the best circumstances, those worlds work together. They may not be identical, but they support each other. They create enough consistency that the child does not feel like they are constantly trying to translate life from one household to another.
That was not always my experience.
I loved my father, but life with him could be unpredictable. He had a unique way of looking at business, opportunity, risk, and reinvention. There were career changes, ideas, ventures, and decisions that I did not always understand as a child. Sometimes I saw ambition. Sometimes I saw risk. Sometimes I saw movement without fully understanding the motivation behind it.
And because my time with him was limited, I absorbed everything.
For most of the year, I lived with my mother. She shaped the majority of my daily life, my structure, and my foundation. My time with my father usually came in shorter windows — a few weeks, maybe a couple of months during the summer. So when I was with him, I watched closely. I studied him in the way children study their parents, even when they do not realize that is what they are doing.
But here is the part people do not always talk about.
Sometimes, when you see traits in a parent that concern you, you start wondering whether those same traits live somewhere inside you.
That fear can become heavy.
It is one thing to say, “I do not want to make the same decisions my parent made.” It is another thing to hear adults tell you that you remind them of that parent. Even when they mean no harm, even when they are pointing out something neutral or positive, those words can land differently when you are already carrying concern.
For me, that concern became a quiet kind of paranoia.
I admired my father’s willingness to take risks, but I did not always see the reward. I saw the leap, but not always the landing. I saw the idea, but not always the outcome. And because I was a child, I did not have the full context. I did not know what he had learned, what he had survived, what pressures he was under, or what he was trying to build.
I just knew what I saw.
So I made a decision early in life: I was not going to follow in his footsteps in the ways that worried me.
But even as I made that decision, I still struggled with the fear that maybe I was already becoming what I was trying to avoid. That is one of the complicated burdens children sometimes carry. They are not just watching their parents. They are measuring themselves against them. They are asking, “Is this who I am becoming?”
Thankfully, I had people in my life who helped me challenge that fear. My mother, my fraternity brothers, my best friend, and eventually my wife all reminded me that I was my own man. They helped me see that similarity is not the same as repetition. Having certain qualities, instincts, or tendencies does not mean you are destined to make the same choices.
That took me years to fully accept.
As I got older, I also gained more grace for my father. He was young when I was born. He and my mother were still figuring life out themselves. And the truth is, most of us look back on earlier versions of ourselves and realize we would do some things differently. Growth gives us perspective. Time gives us language for things we once only felt.
I do not begrudge him for being imperfect.
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