I used to pour his wine down the sink. Ernest and Julio Gallo, the jug with the handle, heavy enough that I needed both hands. I was maybe eleven, standing at that sink deciding that my father didn’t get to be my father that day. I didn’t call it a verdict. I called it protecting myself.
I got good at that decision. I made it every time he showed up, or didn’t. I made it at my wedding, when I asked him not to drink and he drank anyway, and I spent the whole reception furious instead of standing next to him. I made it years later at a breakfast table with my own kids, waiting on a grandfather who never came. Choice, I told myself. Clean. Simple. He chose the bottle over us, and consequences are what you get when you choose.
I wore a badge for thirty years, and cops love simple. We arrive after the choice is already made. We stand in the wreckage and work backward, and cause and effect becomes the only story we know how to tell. I was quick with a gavel long before I ever carried one.
Then I got handed Drug Court.
As a Commander, my job was to review convicted offenders and answer one question: is this a criminal with a drug problem, or an addict whose crimes came from the addiction? One answer meant prosecution. The other meant a chance.
I walked in with my father’s rules already installed. You pick it up, you choose it, you live with it.
Then the cases became people. There was a musician in that stack—a son, a father, who stole from the family that kept forgiving him and taking him back. I sat with him. I sat with his family and heard about the failed rehabs, the near-misses with death, and underneath all of it a man who hated what he’d become and couldn’t find the door out. I let him into the program. He got sober. I walked out of that assignment telling everyone it changed me—that it taught me to look past the surface and see the person.
I believed that for years. I built a whole professional identity on it.
Then a friend of mine, who works with kids in juvenile detention, wrote to me about one of them. Facing decades for something serious. Struggling. Hard to give him hope.
My first thought wasn’t hope. My first thought was that his choices put him there.
I hadn’t asked for his history. I’d already ruled and moved on to the next thing in my inbox. She had to stop me. “Would it change your opinion if I told you his backstory?” she asked—and only then did I hear it, and only then did the verdict flip.
Nobody ever asked me that question about my father.
He was a cop too. He worked evidence—crime scenes, the aftermath of other people’s worst days, for years. Every day after his shift, he stopped at the same bar before he came home, and kept drinking once he got there. I don’t know what he saw on those calls, because he never said, and I never asked. I just knew the route: work, bar, home, gone. I built a rule out of that—he chose the bottle over us, and consequences are what you get when you choose. I never once considered that a man who spent his career photographing wreckage might have needed somewhere to put it down before he could face us. I had a badge of my own for thirty years and never once turned it toward him.
That’s when it hit me, and it had nothing to do with the kid.
I have spent years learning to see strangers. Kids I’ve never met. Musicians in a file. I sat in rooms with people who had every reason not to trust me, and I gave them the benefit of a story I hadn’t heard yet. I called it my greatest professional growth.
I never once did it for my father.
Not the morning I stood at that sink with the jug in my hands. Not at my wedding, watching him drink and refusing to look at him for the rest of the night. Not at that breakfast table, watching my kids ask where their grandfather was, deciding—again—that it was a choice, and choices have consequences, and I didn’t owe him my attention. I gave strangers the review I never gave my own father. He got the fast verdict, every time, for years.
He died while I was still a Commander. Still mid-epiphany. Still reconciling what Drug Court had taught me with a much older rule I’d installed at eleven, standing at a sink. I was in the process of learning to see him. I just ran out of time before I finished.
It’s not settled. I want to tell you it is—that I made peace, that there’s a lesson wrapped up neat at the end of this. I didn’t, and there isn’t. Some files stay open whether you want them closed or not.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know at that sink: judgment feels like protection. It felt like protection for thirty years. It isn’t the same thing. Protection keeps you safe. Judgment just keeps you finished with someone before you have to feel anything about them.
You have a file like this. Not a stranger’s—you’re good at strangers, we all are. I mean the one close enough to cost you something. The parent who disappointed you in a way you decided was a choice. The sibling you stopped explaining yourself to. The person you closed the case on years ago because it was easier than leaving it open.
I’m not going to tell you to forgive them. I didn’t get the chance to know if I would have. I’m telling you the file is still open on my desk, and it will be for the rest of my life, and that is the cost of ruling too fast on someone you love.
You may still have time on yours. Maybe.
This is your moment of reckoning. Step into it.
🖤 Onward and upward,
Kristen
P.S. I wrote this for you. Tell me if I’m hitting the mark — or missing it entirely. kristen@kristenziman.com
