Letters to My Children

In the near future, Lori and I will travel to New Orleans – my favorite city in the world.  We will have dinner, quest for the perfect Sazerac, and catch a football game at the Superdome.  The boys and our home will be well cared for by our awesome friends and family members.  That is, if everything goes as planned.

As an alumnus of the National Outdoor Leadership School, I know nothing goes as planned.  My 10+ years as a founder or partner of three Silicon Valley small businesses has done nothing to dispel this belief.  I expect that all hell will break loose and am never caught without a Time (and Travel) Control Plan.  I prepare for the worst case scenario and this has led to one of the strangest of all my parenting habits.

Before every trip, I write a letter to my children.  Even if I’m gone just for an evening, I’ll write them at least a short note.  These letters are all over the house.  They’re scrawled on notepads or sealed in greeting cards.  The premise of these letters is this:  What if I never make it back to them?  What if this is the last thing they’ll ever have of me?  It’s a little wacko, but I leave them fatherly notes about chores, responsibility, loving their momma, and pursuing their dreams.  I emphasize what makes them unique and special.  I remind them of the things that they need to work on.  Mostly I want them to know how much I love them and how thankful I am that they’re in my life.

Because I thought writing letters to my children was super weird, I’ve never admitted to doing it before.  But one of my favorite blogs, Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.org, often publishes letters from parents to children.  I’m reading one such anthology now:  Dorie McCullough Lawson’s Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children.  In the forward to his daughter’s book, Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough writes

“That so few of us write to our children any longer, that we so rarely write personal letters of any sort, is a shame.  I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words…we’re denying ourselves the pleasures and benefits of putting our thoughts and feelings down in words of our own.  Nothing so focuses the mind as writing.  We’ve all known the experiences of a new idea or insights coming suddenly, almost miraculously to mind, as we write, and as probably they never would were we not writing.  Working your thoughts out on paper, it used to be called.”

So much of fatherhood is “working your thoughts out”.  Years from now, I hope my collection of letters suggests a coherence they can be proud of –  a worldview they can find entertaining at worse and convincing at best.  My wife would submit it is probably just a vain notion that memory is immortality.  McCullough suggests I’m in good company:  ” …many of the authors here are writing as much for themselves as for the recipients of their letters.”  In a letter to his son, Ansel Adams expressed the wide breadth of a father’s sentiments:

“…I have spent a good part of my life trying to understand the obligations of a parent!  The conventional idea of a parent is very obnoxious to me.  We gave you considerable freedom of being–it was a pet theory of ours.  I think it worked out quite well; I see nothing about you that I am not proud of!

…I have never talked much about ‘morality’ because I trusted your innate sense of values to carry you through and I distrust words written or spoken about wordless things.  I have had quite a lot to do with the external world–and quite a lot with the internal world, too.  I am wondering, in the afternoon of my own life, just what your day will be.  It will take much effort, devotion and compassion–something beyond the thin skin of morality–to bring you to a full realization of what it is to be a man in the face of the world as it now is and in the face of a perplexing future.  You cannot be misled by the obvious ‘easy’ way–there isn’t any!

…you take on a whole new world of experience–and you carry a lot of the experience of your mother and father with you–which is there to help you if you need it.  You are entering a bright new world of your own.  The skies are the new land–I envy you, and if I were younger I would like to be up there, too.

We cannot grasp the full meaning of your new life to you, but we would like to share just a little of it with you.  Please make a special effort to write us often–to your mother especially.  I don’t think this is too much to ask.”

Whether you think it’s weird or morbid, it is indeed not too much to ask to occasionally put pen to paper.  We say so many things to our children – some mean, some mundane, some meaningful.  But as McCullough noted: nothing distills our thoughts like the focus of writing a note or letter.  If you had the chance to tell your children “one last thing”, what would it be?