Dear Kids

There is a version of me at fifty who never started this blog.

He kept meaning to. He told himself he would start when the words felt ready, when the morning was quieter, when life calmed down enough to think properly. He waited years for the right moment. The right moment never showed up. Neither did the blog.

That man scares me more than almost anything in this world. He is the reason I am writing to you today on my 31st birthday instead of next week, next month or the year after, or never.

"I have been meaning to start this for a long time" might be the most honest sentence I write all year. It is also the most damning. Meaning to is the cemetery where most of a man's life gets quietly buried. So I am putting the shovel down and digging the other way.

Here is the deal.

This blog is for you. All of you. Your eldest brother who is already here, asleep down the hall as I type this, and the kids who have not arrived yet but who I already love in some strange pre-emptive way. It is where I will write down everything I have learned, been passed down by life, your grandparents, things I have figured out, everything I am still figuring out, and a generous helping of the things I got embarrassingly wrong along the way. The good ideas. The bad ideas. The ideas I thought were good at the time and aged like milk.

Treat it as a map. Burn the parts that do not apply to you. Keep the parts that do. Pass it on to your own children if you think it will help them. Show it to a friend who is lost. Email it to a stranger you will never meet. The whole point of writing things down is so they can outlive the person who wrote them. Reflected upon. Remembered.

If I do my job properly, some of these words will be more useful to you long after I am gone than they ever were to me while I was still here.

A few things I want to be straight with you about, upfront:

I will not get everything right. I am, statistically and spiritually, certain to embarrass myself in these pages. That is the whole point. A father who has never been wrong is a father who never tried anything worth trying. If you catch me being a hypocrite somewhere in the archive; congratulations, you have grown up.
I will not pretend to be calm. Some of these posts will be written in moments of clarity. Others will be written at 2am after a deal collapsed, a meeting went sideways, or I just could not sleep because the brain would not shut up. You will probably learn more from the messy ones.
I will not edit out the parts where I was afraid. Fear is one of the main characters in my story. Most of my biggest mistakes came from listening to it. Most of my proudest moments came from acting anyway despite the fear. If you take one inheritance from me, let it be that: be afraid, and do it anyway. It is worth more than anything I will ever put in a will.

It is only fitting that I start this on my 31st birthday.

31 is a strange age. Old enough that you can not pretend you are still figuring out the basics. Young enough that you can not pretend you are finished. It is the age where the runway behind you and the runway in front of you finally feel about the same length. The boy is gone. The old man has not turned up yet (at least on the outside, hopefully). Whoever stands in between, this version of your father, here, today, is the one who decided to start writing to you.

I am building things right now that you will one day inherit. Some of them are businesses. Some of them are habits. Some of them are quieter; the way I love and adore your mother, the way I speak to and respect my own parents, the way I try (and sometimes fail) to be an example of a man worth being remembered as. The blog is just another one of those things. A small, stubborn act of building and working on project worth working on, made on a Friday night, because the alternative is to keep "meaning to" until there's nothing left to mean.

So. Welcome to it.

I love you.

Dad