Write This Down
When each of my kids were born, I immediately secured their Gmail addresses using their names. Because our surname is less common than most, I was able to get their full names, without additional punctuation, numbers, or symbols. When my daughter was two and my son was just born, I thought it would be meaningful to begin emailing them once a month with little thoughts and memories. I was diligent for a couple of years, creating a sort of online journal for them to read in the future.
After over 100 emails each, I realized this was a waste of time.
A friend from high school who had lost her mother early in life posted something on Facebook that revealed to me a much better way to provide my kids with something in the future that they could look back on to help them see their childhood through my eyes. I believe this friend lost her mother to a long term illness when she was just a child, and one day she chose to post on Facebook about a few letters she had from her mom that were written to her before she passed. She described how it was not only meaningful to read thoughts and ideas shared by her mother through text, but just having pages her mom had touched, with her handwriting preserved for my friend to cherish long after her mother was gone, had become priceless. Like a sort of time machine, she was holding items held by her mother, covered physically with her thoughts and ideas expressed through the pen. Each time she reviewed the letters, she was able to go back in time to the moment her mom physically transcribed her thoughts onto paper.
And all my kids had were some emails written in Gmail’s default sans serif font.
Immediately I began the tedious process of transcribing two year’s worth of emails into journals for each of my children. Now, once a month, I write out memories and thoughts that I hope my kids will cherish one day. Not only do I want them to have a tangible record of their childhood after I am gone, but even when I am still around and they have left childhood behind, I hope we can all use my handwritten messages to catch a glimpse of what life was like when they were little.
There is something about handwriting that is truly special.
Each person has a unique style, and I believe that, like a fingerprint, no two people write exactly the same way. Handwriting is so special to me that I even got my children’s names tattooed on my arm in the handwriting they had when they first started writing their names legibly. I noticed over the years that the papers that got sent home from school had names that were starting to become more neat, reasonably sized, and mature. I knew holding on to their work from pre-k and kindergarten for the rest of their lives would be tough, so after digging through some old boxes of their early work, I had an artist trace each of their names on my forearm. Taken from pages they wrote on when they still wrote in all capital letters and couldn’t be bothered to slow down and scrawl neatly, these signatures captured a precious moment in time, and were permanently placed where I could see them each day for the rest of my life.
When my 2nd grade daughter saw her name on my arm taken from her kindergarten worksheet, she said, “I write in cursive now. You’re going to embarrass me everywhere you go.” What she didn’t understand is that is exactly the point of the tattoo. Well, not to embarrass her, but to capture the fleeting moment in time when she was first learning how to express herself through letters. As she grows up, her signature will continue to develop, but her name written as a child when she was first learning how to use a pencil is the version I never want to forget. Handwriting is special, and I wanted to commemorate her childhood with her own script.
The discipline of writing down my thoughts and memories for my kids has become one parenting routine that I will do everything I can not to give up on. I have previously made commitments to spend a certain number of minutes a day with my kids without interruption, or made grand plans to create a meaningful one on one outing regularly with each child. I have told myself I will always do such-and-such with my kids, or that I would never do this thing that my parents did. There is a long list of commitments I have made as a parent that I have let slip away, but writing a brief note to each of them once a month is something I have yet to abandon or forget, and I will do everything I can to keep it that way. I grabbed a couple of journals from Amazon, set a recurring calendar alert on my phone, and spend a few minutes each month writing out what life was like for each child over the last 30 days or so. Funny things they said, milestone moments, and just basic recaps of what went on are written down, always signed with the same complimentary close. One day they will have hundreds of examples of the perfect handwritten memory to give to the tattoo artist to honor my memory:
