My Father

I would like to start off by saying that my father is the reason I am who I am today. We have not always seen eye to eye, in fact we use to argue a lot when I was a freshman in high school. Now when I say argue, I mean that I respectfully disagreed with his decisions and always kept a safe distance from the fine line between respectfully/disrespectfully arguing with him. If you knew my father like I do, you would understand that decision.

I will be the first to admit that I was a little troublemaker back in the day. My friends and I had an infatuation with fireworks, pyrotechnics, and small explosives. We were always pushing the limits in one way or another, but we were lucky enough to stay out of trouble most of the time. Now I am not sure if my parents know the extent of what we were up to, but I think that they had a clue. Its kind of hard not to notice when half of our lawn mower gas tank went missing every week.

Anyways, lets just say that I was grounded a lot when I was younger. So, I would often think that their "rationale" for grounding me was absurd, but the fact of the matter is, I deserved it. All of their punishments taught me the crucial lesson of taking responsibility for my actions. When I messed up, they were on my case immediately and I was usually punished on the spot. My friends on the other hand would often have their grounding sentences shortened due to good behavior, my parents didn't get this memo. If they said that I was grounded for two weeks, then that meant that I was banned from (1) friends (2) tv (3) phone (4) computer for two whole weeks. It was rough at times, but it did teach me a lesson.

When I was in high school, I mowed lawns on our street for money. For a while, my friend Scott and I would do lawn work together and split the money. When we were not doing lawn work, my dad would always have some sort of outdoor project going on, which meant that Scott and I were his hired hands for that weekend. Well, after one long Saturday of spreading a mound of mulch on our flower beds my dad pulled me aside. He chewed me out for "horsing around" with Scott and questioned my work ethic for the day. I was drenched in sweat, covered in mulch, and exhausted from a long day of work and he was standing there yelling at me for having fun. I was irate, I couldn't believe that he had the nerve to yell at me after I had helped him all day.

I am going to just state this for the record, my father is the hardest working man that I have ever known. He says the same about his father, so in this case the apple didn't fall far from the tree. So, after getting chewed out Saturday evening I decided to let this anger fuel me on Sunday afternoon. I busted my tail moving the rest of that ginormous mound of mulch and kept a one track mind throughout the day. So when Scott started to take it easy and wanted to horse around, I yelled at him.

I couldn't believe that I yelled at my friend for trying to have fun during all of this manual labor, but I knew one thing, I didn't want to get criticized anymore for my work ethic. It was funny that a situation that made me so angry could actually help me to do a better job. There was a method to his madness after all. From then on, I decided that if I was going to do a job, I would do it the right way. A life lesson learned from a criticism, he knew what he was doing.

As I grew older, the lectures became few and far between. When I would mess up, my father would express his disappointment rather than his anger. It actually hurt me more to know that my father was disappointed in me than angered by my actions. I couldn't stand the thought of my father disappointed in me, so I have since done everything in my power to make him proud.

It has taken a long time for me to realize that my father shaped me into the man that I am today through all of his "tough love" techniques. He taught me life lessons and I didn't even realize it at the time. He is the hardest worker I know, a devout Christian, and a loving husband. I have grown to admire the man and work every day to make him proud. I have followed in his footsteps to the University of Texas and only hope that one day I can be half the man that he is.