Letters from a father to his son.
Thirteen years late.
The Unfinished Letter is named for the letter most parents never get round to writing. The one you compose in your head, mean to say out loud, and then your child is thirteen and you still have not said it. Mine stayed unwritten. This is what I wrote instead.There is no advice in it. It was written for one thirteen-year-old boy who has not read it yet. You are welcome to read it over his shoulder.It is a record of what I tried to be for him, how I struggled to get it right, and what I got wrong. If you are a parent, I think some of it is yours as well.
Letter Zero
If something you read somewhere else brought you here, it came from this book. I wrote it for my son over four months. He is thirteen and a half and has not read a word of it.Letter Zero is not one of the twenty-eight letters in the book. It is extracts from seven of those letters, which is why it feels like it jumps. They are the parts I would read out loud if you asked me what the book was like.A three-minute read.
FROM THE DIARY I NEVER WROTEOn the desk in front of me is a leather-bound book. It has a leather strap that wraps twice around the cover and threads through a small loop at the front. I bought it the year my son was born.I unpacked it from its plastic for the first time this afternoon. It is thirteen and a half years old. The leather is pristine. The strap has never been untied. I have not written a single word in it.
FROM THE BOY WHO DID NOT WANT TO BE HUGGEDHe’s thirteen and a half now. He studies in the room next to my office. The doors face each other across the landing. It is not unusual, in the middle of an afternoon, for him to shout I love you across that landing six times in one hour. He expects a response every time.If I don’t say it back, or if I’m distracted and only half-say it, he’ll shout it again until I do.He’s not testing me. He’s just keeping the line open.
FROM THE PALMS OF MY HANDSHere are your statistics. You did not need oxygen to survive being that premature, which was a very good sign. You weighed one kilogram and seven hundred grams.A normal baby is around double that. You were forty-one centimetres long. You fit roughly in the palms of my hands. After everything we had been through to get you here, after the IVF, after the twin, after seven months of careful, that is what we were looking at. A child the size of a hand.Normally a baby is born and after three days you take it home. We could not do that. And every night after that we had to leave you in the hospital and go home to a house with no baby in it. In the morning we would go back. That is the wrong way around. That is the order being broken. You have a child and then you have to leave the child behind in the hospital every night, because the child is not strong enough yet, and the nurses and the doctors are trying their best, and you have to trust them with the thing you have been waiting for.
FROM A KILO OF SALTI would take out a kilo pack of salt and put it in your hands and say, this is a kilo, feel it. Then I would take a spoon and put a few grains in it and say, and this is a gram. Look at the difference. Feel the difference.So I lost my temper in that kitchen. More than once. I shouted.I got angry with you for not understanding something that was easy for me and was not easy for you. And every single time, maybe half an hour later, once the session was over and you had gone off somewhere, I felt terrible. Not a small guilt. A real one. I would sit there and think, you did that to a child, over grams. A little silver lining is that I apologised each time but that’s not what kids remember.
FROM CRYING IN THE HALLWAYI had been walking you for the better part of an hour. You were crying into my ear. I had counted my own steps.I had stopped counting. And at some point, with no plan, no decision, no thought, I walked you into your room.I put you down in the cot, I looked at you, and I said you want to cry, do it on your own terms. I don’t care anymore. Fall asleep on your own. I have had enough of this.Then I walked out, closed the door behind me, and went downstairs.Two minutes later, you were asleep.
FROM THE WILD WEST RESTAURANTYou honestly said something that gave us a big shock. You said you felt guilty. You felt guilty for the other embryos. The ones that didn’t make it. Almost responsible, you said.It worked for you and it didn’t work for them.
FROM 13 REASONS I HOLD BACK TEARSI do not know if I have been a good father. I say I am doing it on purpose. I do not always know if I am doing it right.What I actually know is that every day I try to love you like it should be done, and every day I get some of it right and some of it wrong, and every day I get up and try again.It is not certain. It is durable.
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