A Christmas Note

I sit here blessed beyond all recognition, surrounded by family. My kids with their spouses, and their kids (my grandkids). I can’t complain about anything. Our relationship has never been stronger. My kids are a joy to be around. I even co-founded a business (Peluva) with my son and we work together every day.

It took work to get here though. Years of effort, moment after moment all strung together to form a cohesive narrative of “Dad was there when it mattered.”

At the time, I wasn’t sure I’d make it. See, I’d thrown myself all-in to entrepreneurism when the kids were both very young. My wife didn’t work. I gave up a pretty good paying gig that wasn’t satisfying me, but it was comfortable. I could have “maintained” and had a perfectly adequate life. A comfortable life. This was a big gamble. I risked a lot.

One thing I saw many of my peers do was sacrifice family in the pursuit of greatness or professional/financial success. Go all in and hope the kids would understand when they were older. Or forego kids altogether until they “made it.” Fuck that. Not for me. That’s another kind of risk, a much bigger one. Besides, the kids were here already!

Kids were my fuel. I truly believe that I never would have been able to achieve what I’ve done without my kids. However, sacrifices did occur. There’s only so much time in the day. Weekends aren’t enough. What’d I sacrifice?

Well, I didn’t play golf. Never got into it. Couldn’t justify entire days being swallowed up.

I also missed out on a lot of strong male friendships. I had a lot of acquaintances, I relied heavily on the gym for my social network, but “fellas nights” were few and far between.

Peace of spirit eluded me. My weakness and my power is that I’m a Type A who can handle a lot of stress, but that just means that I take on a lot. And stress is stress. I have the strange inclination to desire and accept stress, and I can handle it in the moment, when it’s pressing, but I keep “dealing with it” after it’s over. In the moment, I rise to the occasion. But things stay elevated when things have passed. The problems remain foremost in my mind. I can’t turn it off. Mentally, I knew I was doing the right thing. There was peace of mind. Emotionally and physiologically, it was hard to deal with. My nervous system didn’t always cooperate.

You don’t get much “time to yourself.” There’s always something you need to be doing, or should be doing to keep building those moments and laying the groundwork for the future. Time to yourself is mostly a lie though. That’s for young men (before you have responsibilities and people depending on you) and old men (after you have responsibilities and people depending on you). In time, you come to realize that coaching your kids in sports or teaching them stuff is time to yourself. They are you, in a quite literal sense. They continue to be you long after you’re gone, and “you” continue reverberating into the future as long as your offspring keep reproducing. That all starts with you and what you’re willing to give.

So it’s not exactly easy, but it pays off big-time.

The fact that my kids are now 31, 35, and every Father's Day, every birthday, every Christmas, they write the greatest cards that basically remind me that it was the time that I spent with them rather than even the big family vacations or the shit I bought that mattered to them. It was the time I spent with them coaching little league and soccer. Or boogie boarding, hiking, snowboarding. The drives to school and back from games. Road trips to the snow. That’s what they remember most and it’s also what formed their foundation of what family and parenthood means as they enter that phase of their lives themselves. And so, that stuff that you're doing right now will resonate with your kids for the rest of your life and their lives (even when you’re gone). It will help carry you into the future by giving them the tools and, most importantly, desire to have kids and raise them themselves.

Merry Christmas, everyone.