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Essay: "My Family"

Coming from an above average middle class family, my environment is quite abstract to my family, as it was initially to myself. I'd long labeled my crime as one of morals and principle. A rapist reaping what he had sowed. His life for the lives of the women whom he had destroyed.

For the first 10-12 years of my subsequent incarceration, that justification, denial, and reluctance to face reality all played their part in the oh-so-faux sense of peace I had early on.

With something of an identity crisis at "thirty," I at long last took an inventory of who I was, what I stood for, and finally what I had to show for those first 30 years. The only common denominator was my family. Even as it had shrunk in size, the amount of love certainly has not.

The predication of my value as a man, as well as a person, has been and was cultivated and maintained by my family. The value system was instilled, my sense of right and wrong, my parameters of fair play structured by their example and constant display of noble character. My ability to have compassion for others even in this environment (a rarity sometimes mistaken for weakness) can also be attributed to them; further charged and fortified by the compassion and forgiveness demonstrated and offered up even to a convict that continues to incur rough patches.

Sayings and connotations: "Blood is thicker than water," "Unconditional love," "There is no bond stronger than those between a parent and their child." Although well intentioned and in the most declarative terms with hints if adulation, these phrases fail, as do I, to do my family justice so far.

Via my actions, they have run the gauntlet numerous times. While I was invincible, displaying my gunslinger mentality, stricken with a hardcore case of reckless abandoned I struck at every conceivable level -- emotionally, physically, spiritually, even financially.

It was once paralleled as "like being run over by a bulldozer and surviving" I stand ashamed to have done anything to them or others. Acknowledging what a deviant I was for a time is really the only way to offer a glimpse through my eyes, how special and important they are to me.

Once a made man, I am now a drop-out. This is a step towards a second chance. My family's wish through all my felonies, transgressions, and considerable lapses of judgment has been for me to get a second chance to be just a regular guy.

Now, after fifteen years, our desires are common. I too want my second chance. I would gladly and readily forgo/exchange/pawn any and all absolution I might be afforded to prove they were right all along. I am a good, compassionate person with strong morals and the value system they instilled in me! To offer them the opportunity to talk in relative terms of my success after being afforded a second chance opposed to tenuous claims of how much potential I squandered or what I could have been or done.

My family deserves the chance to relish my success with their value system as the foundation of my character -- I just need that second chance.