A letter from my dad:
I often talk to people my age about their relationships with their parents. It’s not my opening line at a party or anything but usually the conversation comes up. I’m always surprised when people in their 20’s say “I haven’t talk to my parents in weeks” or “I text them every so often”. I come from a very small family riddled with problems but protected in love. It might be because I’ve been through a lot with my family that we are so close (addiction, abuse, instability) and it has certainly affected my relationships with my parents in different ways. Recently, I’ve been going through a difficult time and I was out to dinner with my father. This man, a retired police officer, who served two tours in Afghanistan, who has been through the ringer and back, is the person I go to for advice. This dinner though, was different. We chit chatted about my life, my dreams, my problems and then sort of moved on. We discussed my grandfather’s upcoming 80th birthday and how excited we are all to be planning it and then about other family members and other stuff. I left dinner thinking I didn’t get the advice I really I wanted. I wanted him to tell me “We will work it out” or “Everything will be all right” because that’s what I’m always used to hearing. When I asked him about on the phone later on, he told me to check my mail. For some reason he knew the letter he mailed to me the morning after dinner would arrive that day and I opened it. I nearly burst into tears. He took the time to handwrite one of his favorite poems in a letter to me. It was IF by Ryard Kipling and I wanted to share it with you:
If –
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
At the end of the letter he wrote “Everything will work itself out…it always does”
Just one more reason I love my dad.
