Yesterday I watched our oldest son graduate, and twice I had to look up at the sky for a moment so no one would catch my face.
We drove two hours south to be there, back to the part of the country where my life with my wife began. The reception was at his father's house, which sits about a kilometer down the road from the castle where his mother and I first met, all those years ago. When the party had wound down, the two of us gathered our own five children and walked them down to that castle, the long way, all the way around the grounds. I am not from there. It has never been my hometown. And still, every time we come down that road in early summer, it feels like coming home. It is the most beautiful time of the year there. Everything is green, everything is loud with growth, the air is heavy with lilac and cut grass, and the light does not leave until late. I stood on the grass where the whole thing started and watched five of my children run across it, while a sixth, the oldest, had just stepped into his own life a kilometer up the road.
I need to tell you about him. He taught me most of what I now believe, about being a father and about the work I do, and somewhere along the way the two turned out to be the same thing.
He is not my son by blood. He came to me when he was four, when I met his mother, and being let into his life is one of the great undeserved gifts of mine. I am not writing a word of this to take anything away from his father. That is not my place and never will be. I only had the blessing of being there too.
The first real memory I have of him is in the water. It was that first summer, and we went swimming. He was a small thing then, bird-boned, the kind of child who is cold even in July. Out past the shallows he wrapped himself around me and held on for dear life, shivering, pressing in close to steal whatever warmth I had. And at the very same time he was having the time of his life, shrieking and laughing, completely alive in my arms. A little sparrow who would not let go. I can still feel the grip of those small cold hands. I did not understand it yet, standing chest-deep in that water, but I had just been handed something I would spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of.
Because I did not become a father the gentle way. I did not get one baby and a few slow years to learn on. I met my wife and became, more or less overnight, the father of three: four, six, and almost eight. No warm-up. No practice round. Three children already halfway through their childhoods, looking up at me to be something I had no real idea how to be. If you had told me, twenty years before, that this would be my life, that one day I would have eight children, I would have laughed in your face and told you that you had the wrong man.
Here is the part I would rather not write, except that a letter that shows you only the water and the summer light is a lie, and I do not write you lies.
For a long time, I was not the father those three children needed.
You have heard me say I worked too much, and I did. But underneath the work there was something heavier, and it is harder to set down on paper. I carried a temper I did not know how to hold. When something went wrong in the house I could go off. Loud, sharp, far past anything the moment deserved. I did not invent that out of nothing. I learned it at home, from my own father, a warm and genuinely loving man who, when the pressure rose, reached for one tool, and the tool was anger. I grew up inside that, so I simply assumed it was how a man dealt with these moments. It is not. But a boy does not know that when it is the only thing he has ever been shown.
I will give you one I am not proud of. Early on, the children knocked over a full glass of cola, a big one, straight into the middle of the couch. An accident. The most ordinary thing in the world for small kids to do. And I came down on them for it. Hard. About being careful, about paying attention, about all the things you are supposed to do, at three little children whose whole crime was spilling a drink. My wife and I still talk about that couch. We talk about how it could not happen now, not in a hundred years. But it happened then. I had come up through the military, where there is a hierarchy and a method and a correct way to do every last thing, and without quite seeing it I was running a house full of small children the way you run a unit, with my father's temper already sitting in my hands.
It cost more than a couch. That same anger emptied chairs around me over the years; friends drift away from a man who is like that, and they are right to. I did not want to be that man. I just did not yet know how to become a different one. And the worst of it was the shame. The quiet certainty, on the bad nights, that the little sparrow who once held on to me for warmth was going to grow up remembering the cold instead.
I learned how to be a father from a man I love. And some of what he handed me, I had to refuse to hand on.
So I went and did the work. The lesson underneath all of it was simple and hard: you deal with this, or you end up alone, because no one stays with a man who won't. My wife walked that whole road beside me, which is more than I had any right to. And this past year I found God, and that has helped more than I know how to say.
I am a changed man. I want to be clear about that, this is not some battle I lose every day. The work took. But I am not going to tell you the thing is finished, because I have come to believe a cycle like this is not broken the day you stop. It is broken when your children do not do it to theirs. That is the only proof that counts, and it is a generation away. I have done my part. Whether the circle is truly broken is something my kids will answer, long after me.
Which brings me back to yesterday, and to why I kept having to look up at the sky.
Because the young man in front of me, this steady, capable, twenty-year-old, did not turn out steady because of me. He turned out that way alongside me, often in spite of me, mostly through his mother, who gave him and his sisters the best of what they carry. He lived with us full time for years; we homeschooled him; at my best I was a supporting part of a story whose hero was always going to be him. All three of them have a drive and a backbone of their own that is the finest thing I have ever watched take shape in another person. And standing there watching him cross into his own life, knowing how close I had come to being only the cold in his memory and not the warmth, I felt something I can only call grace. I do not get those sixteen years back. But I was given the chance, before the time ran out, to become a father he could be glad of.
There is a circle in all of this that I did not arrange and could never have. He went to the same school I did, almost twenty-five years ago. So did his oldest sister, the same town, the same halls. And a friend who walked those halls beside me when I was a boy was standing at the front of the room as my daughter's teacher by the time she arrived. Life comes all the way around. Some of those circles are pure gift, the places that made you turning round to make your children, and you do nothing but stand inside them and give thanks. And one circle, the heavy one, the one that ran out of my father's house and into mine, you take in both hands and refuse to hand on. That is the most important work a man ever does, and he does not get to see it finished in his own lifetime.
Maybe you came to me for the business and not the family. Maybe for both. Norhaven was always about both, because your business and your life are one system, or they are not a system at all.
The unbuilt business that keeps you at the desk at nine at night is the same unbuilt life that has you snapping at the people you love over nothing that matters. The fear sitting under the overwork and the fear sitting under the temper are the same fear, and a drowning man provides badly and fathers badly for the very same reason. They get healed in the same hand, or they do not get healed. I did not begin to become a father worth having until I began building a business that could carry the weight I had been holding in my chest.
And the clock does not stop for any of it. Sixteen years passed between that cold little sparrow in the water and the young man I watched yesterday, and not one of them is available for a second attempt. Yours is running too. The childhood standing in your house tonight is being spent whether you are in the room for it or not. That is the whole reason I build what I build, in the open now, for other men who keep finding themselves in these letters. This summer I am taking a small founding group through the build with me. That is all I will say about it here.
If you do one thing after reading this, let it be this. Sometime this week, when the house is finally quiet, ask yourself honestly what you carried out of the home you grew up in and are handing down without ever having decided to.
Which of those would you be glad to see come round again in your children, and which one has to stop with you?
You do not have to answer tonight. Just let the question be asked.
Because what I actually want is simple, and I would give it to every one of my children and to every one of yours.
You can. You can do far more than anyone has told you, far more than you yet believe. You are free; you get to choose your road and the destination you were made for. And when you fail, and you will fail, the door is open. It does not matter how broke you are: call me. It does not matter how sick, how lost, how ashamed you feel. Shame is the very thing that keeps a man from the one phone call that would have saved him, and I will not let it stand in that doorway. Not in this house. The door is always open.
You came to me a small cold bird, all blonde hair and noise and laughter, holding on in the water. That bird has wings now, and he is flying out into a life of his own. I am past my pride; you are only stepping into the beginning of yours. My work from here is the next ones, to stand behind them and make sure they never once doubt that nothing and no one stands between them and the road they were put here to walk.
The work will still be there in the morning. He only graduates once. I am so glad I did not miss it.
