For most people, their interaction with law enforcement could end up being a funny story to tell their grandchildren one day. You know, those stories that start out “So this one day, Frank and I decided we were going to..”, yeah.. you know the ones. We all have those stories, all of us.

The problem is, if you are actually part of the law enforcement family, you are constantly searching every day for a story to tell your children, period.  You surely can not go home and tell them all of the stories of you running into dangerous situations or someone being in a wreck so bad that you spent the day calling the coroner and LifeStar.  Not a single of us wants to relive that more than they have to after spending hours on scene, behind the console and typing reports.  But mostly, our child doesn’t need to worry more than the ongoing media already makes them.   Your life, like it or not, becomes consumed by the sometimes downright evil force that has become your career in law enforcement.

When you enter this world, you no longer get those moments each day for funny stories with your kids sitting on your lap, snuggled in close.  You don’t get to see the camaraderie with their team mates out on the basketball court, or hear the latest news about the girlfriend that doesn’t even know your son likes her.  The math homework that sits on the table gets forgotten or done without you while tears stream down her face trying to figure it out.  Time is limited when you work 50 hour weeks, not including the time it takes you to relax mentally when coming off of your shift.

For my 3 year old, law enforcement life is all he knows.  He understands that daddy goes off in what his bright and shiny mind lovingly calls the “woo-woo”, and his mommy sits at that desk with a million screens just waiting for the phone to ring. He has no idea what I actually do, day in and day out, but he does remember that one time I let him talk into that microphone and someone else said “hello” through the radio.  He runs in the building for visits to show all of his “best friends” his new shoes, unaware that mommy is mentally exhausted from working the suicide that just took place. His eyes light up driving by the ambulance barn and seeing the fire trucks leave the station, totally clueless that they may be going to a scene where their help wont do much good.

This is our life, consumed by moments of deep sadness, as well as tears of joy.  We spend hours upon hours helping people that have funny stories to tell their grandchildren while sitting back and wondering what our children are doing at home.  But for us, this is all we know. Our time is spent more with the people in our community than our own families.  When we get older we won’t have our own stories to tell our grandchildren, we will have memories of your families running through our minds.

Your family becomes our family. Your lives become our own.  Your funny stories, make up every minute of our time.

But for us, this is all we know. We hope that our children grow up understanding why mommy and daddy couldn’t make it to the baseball game.  Someday realizing that we had to rush out of Thanksgiving dinner to help someone who may have hurt themselves if we hadn’t, and no life is not worth saving.  We pray that our children can make it through life without too many scars that we have created by being absent.

Our family and our funny stories will come from those not only in the community, but in the Law Enforcement world.  There is no one on this earth that quite understands this life the way we do, so we bond as a family.  A family of officers, dispatchers and jailers, just spending our days being part of your stories.

Someday down the line, when I hang up that headset and he sets down that badge for a final time, we are going to have stories to tell our grandchildren.  Let’s just hope we can have some of our own.