A Letter to the Boy Who Changed My Life
For National Sons' Day a father reflects on four years of love, growth, and imperfection.
To my son,
I was the first person to hold you in my arms. I was the first person to look into your eyes. I am forever grateful for that. In that moment, I had never been more present and more filled with joy.
It didn't take long before anxiety and fear devoured the joy.
I was scared to be imperfect. I was scared to show weakness or give you any sense of my vulnerability. But then I remembered: my dad was 21 when I was born and 25 when I was as old as you are now. I've never known a 25-year-old that wasn't an absolute mess in some regard, and yet, I don't remember seeing my dad as anything other than a hero through most of my early childhood. And he wasn't around for nearly as much of my early years as I've been for yours.
I know now that my job isn’t to shield you from my mistakes but to model how to handle them. No one is infallible, and the goal in life isn’t to never fall—it’s to never stay down.
I also feared not having the answers. I wanted to learn everything so there would never be a question you would ask that I wouldn't have an answer to. But then I realized it's not my responsibility to have all the answers. It's my responsibility to be honest about my ignorance because it's better to admit my blind spots and seek answers with you than to try to hide my ignorance by giving you wrong answers.
These are lessons I've known deep down, but you brought them to the surface. You taught me to not only know them but to live them.
Before you were born, I had been a rock, stuck in place, unable to digest lessons that could've been so helpful. But when you came into my life, I became a sponge, absorbing and applying lessons that had failed to permeate my stubborn shell my entire adult life.
I had read the Stoics for years, but it wasn’t until you came into my life that I truly understood what they meant. Suddenly, words like these from Marcus Aurelius began to mean something:
"Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being," he writes in *Meditations.* "Remind yourself of what nature demands of people, then do it without hesitation and speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility, without hypocrisy."
Right now, you can't read, and if I read these words to you, your eyes would probably glaze over before you asked me something completely unrelated. But when you're old enough, I hope you can understand how much you've changed my life in only four years.
I hope you come back to these words often. Life has a way of making familiar things feel new again, because we are constantly changing. Heraclitus said, *"We never step in the same river twice."* It means that we never experience the world the same way, even if it's something we've experienced before. We're always changing. Our perception shifts, and at times, information can find a way into our being easier than it could at any other time.
If you remember nothing else, remember this: when you fall, get back up. When you don’t know, keep searching. And no matter what, you will always have my love, and I will always be proud of you.