For divorced dads, generational patterns show up before you even realize they are running.
If you are in the early days of this, still trying to figure out how to function across two homes and get through a week without it costing you something, this one is for you too. Maybe especially for you. This is about divorced dads and generational patterns. What gets passed down and what gets broken.
Stay with me.
I still have the letters from my mom. Without fail, there it was, a summary of the year I had just lived.
Not emails. Letters. Written by hand, once a year, every birthday, without fail. I have every single one of them. I could not tell you where I put my keys this morning but I know exactly where those letters are.
My grandmother was the same way. Notes left in places you would find them later. Small artifacts placed with intention, designed to say something that outlasted the moment she was standing in.
Neither of them ever sat me down and explained what they were doing. There was no conversation about legacy or intentional parenting or the importance of documentation. They just did it. Quietly. Consistently. Because it was in them.
I did not think about any of this consciously when my kids were born. I did not make a decision to be the father who records everything. I did not write it into a parenting plan or read it in a book. I just started doing it. Pictures of the ordinary Tuesday. Video of the small moment that does not have a trophy attached to it. The thing nobody else thought was worth capturing.
And about two years ago I was going through old photos on my phone and I stopped on one. Just my oldest doing something completely unremarkable. And I thought about why I had taken it.
Then I thought about my mom.
I realized I had not decided to document my kids’ lives. It had been decided for me thirty years ago by two women who loved me and had no idea they were handing me a roadmap.
There is a door frame in my house.
Every six months (their birthday and half-birthdays) I stand each of my three kids against it and mark their height. Date, name, how tall. I do not remember the first time I did it. It was not a grand moment. It just happened and then kept happening because some part of me understood that the measurement was never really about how tall they were getting.
It was about stopping time for thirty seconds and paying attention.
My kids are young enough that they do not fully understand what those marks on that door mean yet. But they will. And when they are grown and they find themselves doing something with their own kids that they cannot fully explain, something they never consciously chose, I hope they trace it back.
I hope they find the door frame in their memory and understand where it came from.
This is what I have come to understand about generational patterns.
We talk about them almost exclusively in the context of breaking the bad ones. The anger that gets inherited. The emotional distance. The patterns that damage and repeat. And that work is real and it matters and I will talk about it too because I have done it and it is hard.
But there is another side of this that does not get said enough.
The good things get passed down the same way.
Not through instruction. Not through intention. Through repetition and presence and the quiet accumulation of small consistent acts that your kids absorb without knowing they are absorbing them.
Your kids are not watching your highlight reel. They are watching what you do on a random Wednesday when nothing important is happening. They are watching how you treat the people you love when it would be easy not to. They are watching whether you show up for the small moment or only for the big one.
And somewhere in the back of their developing minds, in a place they cannot access yet, they are filing it.
Thirty years from now one of them is going to do something they cannot fully explain. Something they never consciously chose. And if you did this right, they are going to trace it back to you.
If you are reading this from the middle of the hard part, from the place where a door frame feels like something that belongs to a version of your life you are not sure you are getting back, I want to say this directly.
You do not need stability to start. You just need one small act done consistently. One picture taken on a Tuesday nobody else thought mattered. One moment where your kids saw you paying attention when it would have been easier not to.
That is the first mark on the door frame. Everything else gets built on top of it.
That is the inheritance worth building.
That is the standard.
#IllCarryIt
If this is sitting with you, Week One is where it starts. One reset, free, no list to dig through.