From May 14, 2008, to December 20, 2015, I wrote to my children (and future children) every single day.
On May 14, 2008, I realized that Elysha was pregnant – even before she knew that she was pregnant – when she left the table at a restaurant to use the restroom for the second time.
This had never happened before.
I turned to our dinner companion – who happened to be my ex-girlfriend – and said, “Elysha’s pregnant. She’s never used a restroom twice like this.”
Funny, huh? The first two people to know that Elysha was pregnant were me and my girlfriend.
A day later, Elysha peed on a stick, and it was confirmed. That day, I began writing.
2,782 days later – 7 years, 7 months, and 12 days – I finally stopped writing. With everything that I had going on in my life at the time, I decided that it was finally time to quit. Though I don’t write to my children every day anymore, my blog Grin and Bear It – which I have been writing every single day since May of 2005 – still captures much of their life, as does my Homework for Life.
All of this writing to my children was done on a blog called Greetings Little One, which still exists on the Internet today.
Since 2015, I have lived in mortal fear that something might happen to Greetings Little One. The platform – Typepad – might go out of business. I’d forget to pay my yearly fee, and they would delete the thing without warning me. Some disaster would strike, and I would lose thousands of posts to my children.
Enter Kathryn Gonnerman.
This year I added “Convert Greetings Little One into a book” to my list of new year’s resolutions, hoping to find a way to move the blog into a physical form to prevent the loss of the content and make it accessible to my kids, who are now old enough to read it. I post these resolutions online, and several months ago, our friend, Kathryn, contacted me, expressing a desire to do this work on my behalf and refusing to take payment.
A labor of love.
On Tuesday night, I took Elysha and the kids to dinner, where we met Kathryn, and I presented the books to them for the first time. It turns out that the single book I had envisioned ultimately became 5 volumes, complete with all of my words and the photos embedded in the blog. The layout and design of each page – hundreds of pages in all – were done by Kathryn, and the results are extraordinary.
Elysha knew about Greetings Little One when I was writing it, but she certainly wasn’t reading it every day, and the kids had never been told that it even existed, so it was a huge surprise for them all.
I can’t express enough thanks to Kathryn for what must have amounted to more time than I dare imagine. In lieu of paying her, Kathryn agreed to allow us to make a donation in her name to a charity of her choice.
There just aren’t that many people as generous and thoughtful as Kathryn Gonnerman in the world.
Last week, in the midst of telling some folks at a library about how important it is to write – not only for yourself but your future generations – a woman asked, “Do you write for your children?”
She asked the question quite sarcastically, not expecting me to say, “Actually, I wrote to my children and future children for the first seven years of their life. Every single day. Never miss a day.”
“Oh for God’s sake…” the lady responded, rolling her eyes.
But it makes sense. When it comes to the artifacts from my childhood, I have about two dozen photographs, a partially completed baby book, and a stuffed animal. That’s it. My mother has passed away. I don’t see my father very much. The memories that I have from when I was little are few and far between, and the sources of that knowledge are now gone.
Even if my mother was still alive and my father was in my life, how much would they really remember?
When you become a parent, you either repeat the things that your parents did, or you do the opposite.
I did the opposite.
I gave my children a memory from every day of their lives for the first years of their lives. It meant sitting down every day for a handful of minutes, recording my thoughts, advice, or the events of the day, but in the end, I get to watch my children read about their first steps, their first words, and moments that would be otherwise lost to them and to me forever.
That’s one of the best parts,. When you write something for seven years, you don’t remember a fraction of it, so when I read these books, it’s like reading about our lives for the first time.
I’m very pleased with the former version of myself. He did a good job. Spent his time wisely.
He gave our family something that we and hopefully future generations will treasure forever.
