What a Handwritten Postcard From My Daughter Taught Me About Twenty Years of Parenting.

What it means to build a forever family

(Photo: My daughter and her friend Tali, myself and my dog, Apollo)

My daughter Madison and her friend, Tali, from grad came to visit me in Lisbon recently.

They flew in from London, where they are both studying, and we spent a week doing what I love most when my kids show up here. Good food. Long talks. Movie night and a bit of spoiling.

When they left, Madison put a postcard on my guest bed for me to find.

I want to share it with you in full, because I have been carrying it around in my head ever since and I think it says something that took me twenty years of parenting to understand, something I tried to articulate in Puddle Jumpers but that she said better in a few handwritten lines than I managed in an entire chapter.

Here is what she wrote:

Dad, [Friend, Master Matcha Maker, Yoga Buddy, Ect.]

You’ve created a home in Lisbon, and how lucky am I that you’ve been making a home in places all around the world my whole life. Jealous you get to live out the NYC one soon!

You always go above and beyond to support me, the older I get the more I see and appriciate it. Thank you for helping me live out my dreams in London. I am so happy and passionate about what I do and study, and I owe the privilege to you.

Thank you for always welcoming my friends and treating them like family. You’ve taught me to find good people!

Love you so much and thanks for letting us hang! You’re the coolest.

I read it standing in the kitchen the morning after they left. Read it twice. A third time, maybe a fourth!

Then I put it down and looked out my front window at the Atlantic ocean for a while.

Twenty years of being present.

That is what that postcard represents.

Not one conversation or one decision or one grand gesture. Twenty years of showing up, of making calls, of getting it wrong and going back and trying my best again.

There is a line in that note that I keep coming back to. “You’ve been making a home in places all around the world my whole life.”

(Photo: Having some fun with my daughter in my airplane over the Portuguese coastline, north of Lisbon)

She is not talking about real estate. She is talking about something that I think is one of the most underrated ideas in parenting, which is that home is not a place. Home is a feeling that a child either has or doesn’t have when they are around you.

And that feeling is built, brick by brick, through thousands of small moments of presence and welcome and genuine interest in who they are becoming.

I have lived in a lot of places. Lake Tahoe. New York. San Diego. Puerto Rico. Mexico City. Lisbon.

Now, New York and Lisbon.

Home isn’t just a house. It’s a relationship. A feeling.

That is the forever family.

I write in Puddle Jumpers about a dinner at my favorite French restaurant, Grenache, here in Lisbon. Madison was visiting during her summer break from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was finishing her design degree. She sat across from me and said, “Dad, I just want you to know I am exactly where I want to be in my life, and I appreciate you allowing me to be myself.”

I have shared that moment in a few different pieces because it hit me as deeply as anything in my adult life has. But the postcard adds a layer to it that the dinner conversation didn’t have. Because the postcard includes her friend.

Look at that line again. “Thank you for always welcoming my friends and treating them like family. You’ve taught me to find good people.”

That is the thing I am most proud of in all of it. Not the degrees or the accomplishments or the moments that look good on paper. That she learned how to find good people.

That she brings them home.

That she feels confident enough in the people around her to extend the circle outward and let others in.

In Puddle Jumpers I write about the years I spent in New York deliberately curating my kids exposure to high-functioning, positive people.

Every chance I got, I’d bring one of my kids along to a dinner, an important meeting, or an event if I thought it would leave a mark. I wanted them to see what it looked like when people were doing their thing and doing it well. I wanted them to have a sense, built from real experience, of what good people actually look like in the wild, so they would recognize them later.

Madison recognized them. Then she went to London and found more of them. And now she brings them to Lisbon and they sit at my table and are welcome like family.

That is the compounding return on twenty years of work. You invest in the child and eventually the child invests in the world. The circle keeps growing.

The line that stings a little, in the best way

She also wrote this: “The older I get the more I see and appreciate it.”

Every parent needs to hear that sentence. Especially the ones in the thick of it right now, the ones whose teenagers are rolling their eyes or whose twenty-year-olds seem more interested in their friends than in anything a parent has to say.

The work you are doing is being absorbed. It is being registered. It is going somewhere, even when there is zero evidence of that from the outside.

Trust me, eventually your kids will come to notice this when they go out into the great unknown and have the space to compare and contrast.

Madison at fifteen did not walk around telling me she appreciated me. She was fifteen. That is not how fifteen works. But the appreciation was accumulating quietly, the way interest accumulates in an account you forget you have.

And one day you get a postcard and it makes all the hard work and sacrifice all the more meaningful.

“There’s no greater mission, as a parent, than raising a child who knows who they are and has the tools to thrive and become the captain of their own life.”

I wrote that in Puddle Jumpers. Madison’s postcard is what that looks like when it actually works.

On welcoming the friends

I want to spend a moment on the friend piece because I think it is more important than parents realize.

One of the things I did consistently as my kids got older was make my home, whatever city it happened to be in at the time, a place where their friends (and romantic interests) were genuinely welcome. Not tolerated. Welcome. Interested in. Fed.

Treated like family.

This is not a small thing. Teenagers and young adults are watching how the adults in their lives treat the people they love. If a parent makes a child’s friends feel like an inconvenience, the child notices.

I see so many parents putting terms and conditions on their older kids. Who they can bring, when and how.

Do that and watch your kids visits taper off.

Do the opposite and watch them reach out for more visits.

The forever family is built, not given

I came from a complicated family. My dad kicked me out at 16.

I write about that in Puddle Jumpers without going too deep into it because the point was never to relitigate the past but to be honest about what shaped me and what I decided to do differently.

What I decided, somewhere along the way, was that family was going to mean something in my house that was very different to how my father raised me.

It was going to mean welcome. It was going to mean consistent. It was going to mean that no matter what was happening out there in the world, or between the adults, or in the general mess that life tends to produce without much warning, the kids were going to feel it.

Warmth. Interest.

The sense that they mattered more than any of the other noise.

I’m proof that you can have an incredibly challenging career and still be present in your children’s lives.

Quality always wins over quantity.

I was a deployed dad in the Navy SEALs, then a divorced dad, then a dad rebuilding from a business failure, then a dad navigating a life that kept moving across cities and continents.

None of that is the ideal backdrop for consistent parenting. But consistency, I learned, is not about circumstances. It is about intention. You can be consistent in your love and your interest.

That is what Madison is describing in that postcard. Not a perfect childhood in a stable home with all the conventional markers of security.

That is the forever family. It is not something you inherit or take for granted.

It is something you build, one meal and one welcome and one genuinely present conversation at a time.

I keep that post card propped up where I can see it from bedroom.

Some days that is enough to remind me that the whole thing was worth it.

Every hard call, every missed moment, every imperfect year that somehow added up to a kid who knows who she is and how to find good people and how to make a home anywhere she goes.

Worth it. All of it. Worth every bit.

Thanks for listening and please consider ordering my new book, Puddle Jumpers here.