Why I Started Writing Annual Birthday Letters to My Kids (And Why You Should Too)

I want to tell you about the night I started writing letters to my child, because it wasn't some beautiful planned moment. It was 11:30pm, Soren was finally asleep, I was sitting on the kitchen floor with a beer I wasn't drinking — I'm sober — and I was looking at a photo on my phone of my son at nine months old, pulling himself up on the edge of the couch and grinning like he'd just climbed a mountain.

And I thought: I'm going to forget this.

Not forget it happened. I'll remember the broad strokes. But the specific grin. The way his hands looked so small on the couch cushion. The particular quality of the afternoon light. The way I felt in that exact moment — proud and terrified and overwhelmed and so completely in love with this little person I'd only known for nine months.

I'm going to forget that. And so I wrote it down.

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The Year Everything Changed

Soren Thomas Sweeney arrived on June 21, 2025, and reorganized every priority I had without asking permission. I'd heard people say that about having kids — that it changes everything — and I'd filed it under the category of things people say that are technically true but not quite as dramatic as they make it sound.

I was wrong.

What I didn't expect was the grief. Not grief over my son — he is perfect, he is the best thing I've ever been involved with — but a quiet grief over the version of time that was now moving differently. He's growing up in real time, every day different from the day before, and I am watching it happen, and I am already forgetting it.

That's what started the letters. Not some grand tradition I'd inherited, not a parenting book I'd read. Just the fear that this — all of this — was going to slip through my fingers the way so much already had.

So on his first birthday, I sat down and I wrote him a letter. It took about forty-five minutes. It wasn't eloquent. It was honest. And somewhere in the middle of writing it, something shifted — I realized I wasn't just writing for him. I was writing for both of us. I was trying to hold onto something I didn't want to lose.

I've written one every year since. I plan to write one every year until I can't anymore.

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What the Letters Look Like (Mine Aren't Perfect)

I want to be honest about this, because I think the idea of "writing letters to your children" sounds intimidating in a way that stops people from doing it.

Mine are not elegant. They're not the kind of thing I'd want to publish. Some of them ramble. One of them is basically a rant about how much I love his mother and then a segue into something I'm worried about with the business. One of them has a paragraph about a road trip we took that goes on too long.

They are imperfect in the way that anything real and personal is imperfect.

And I think that's the point.

The letters I'm writing to Soren are not for me. They're not for Instagram. They're not for anyone who might someday judge my prose style. They are for him, at 18, sitting somewhere I can't picture yet, reading about who I was when he was small. The imperfection is the proof that it's real. A polished letter that sounds like a greeting card is a letter written by a character. A letter with a crossed-out word and a tangent about my dad is a letter written by a person.

My annual birthday letters to my kids don't look like literature. They look like the truth.

What they do have: a date at the top. His name in the first line. Something specific about who he is right now. Something about the world. Something about me. Something about us. And somewhere near the end — always — something I want him to know, clearly and directly, about how much I love him.

That's enough. That will always be enough.

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What I Write About Each Year

The structure evolved naturally, but here's roughly what makes it into each yearly letter to my child:

Who they are at this age. What are they obsessed with? What do they hate? What's the specific Soren thing that only people who know him right now would understand? These details fade fast. Write them now.

Something about the world. What's happening? What are people worried about? What did this year look like from the outside? Context matters. He'll read these letters in a world we can't fully imagine, and knowing what his parents were navigating will give him something to locate himself against.

Something I'm afraid of. This is the vulnerable part. The part where I tell him what keeps me up at night — about him, about the future, about myself as a parent. I include this because I want him to know that I was not serene and confident. I was a person doing my best with real fears. That matters.

Something I'm proud of. About him, about us. What happened this year that made me think: yes, this is going right. The small things count here. Actually, the small things are the only things worth writing.

What I love about him. Specifically. Not generally. Not "everything about you" — that's true but useless. The specific things. The thing he does with his hands when he's concentrating. The way he laughs. The face he makes when the dog does something unexpected. Specific love is the only love that lands on the page.

What I want for him. Not instructions. Not prescriptions. Just honest, open hope. I want you to be kind. I want you to find work that doesn't feel like work. I want you to know that you were loved before you knew anything, including yourself.

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What I'm Afraid Of When I Write Them

I'll be honest about this part too, because it would be easy to skip over.

Every year when I sit down to write the letter, there's a moment — usually right at the beginning — when I feel something that takes a second to name. It's not quite dread. It's something closer to the feeling before a hard conversation you know you need to have.

Part of it is what if I'm gone before he reads this. That thought lives in every letter I write, even the ones where it never surfaces explicitly. I'm writing to an 18-year-old version of my son who may or may not know me in person. That's a strange thing to sit with. It makes the letters feel urgent in a way that's hard to describe — not morbid, but important. More important than most things.

And part of it is something different: what if he's disappointed. What if he reads these letters and thinks, that's it? That's who my dad was? What if they're not good enough, not loving enough, not wise enough?

I've made peace with that fear by deciding I'd rather disappoint him with the truth than impress him with a fiction. He gets me — the real me, the imperfect me, the trying-his-best me. That has to be enough, because it's all I have.

The other thing I'm afraid of, and I'll say it plainly: I'm afraid I won't write the letter one year. I'll be busy, or tired, or I'll put it off past his birthday and then the moment will feel gone. This is why I build systems. This is why the letters live in Our Fable, sealed and dated, not in a folder on my desktop where I could quietly delete one and pretend the tradition continued.

The accountability of the vault is part of what makes the tradition real.

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The Reaction I'm Imagining When They Read Them

I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

Not in a morbid way. In a hopeful, cinematic, embarrassingly sentimental way.

I imagine Soren at 18. He's tall, probably. He has opinions about things. He's in the middle of becoming whoever he's going to be. He sits down and he opens Our Fable and he sees seventeen letters — one for every birthday — and maybe one or two voice recordings, and some photos I chose carefully, and notes from his grandparents, and something from his mom.

And I imagine him reading the first letter. The one where he's one year old and I'm thirty-two and I'm on the kitchen floor taking notes on my phone, terrified of forgetting.

I don't know what it will feel like for him. I hope it feels like being loved. I hope it feels like knowing, at 18, that someone was paying attention to the specific person he was becoming, every year, without ceasing. I hope it feels like a hand on the shoulder from someone who can't be in the room.

I hope it makes him laugh a little, at the parts where I was clearly anxious. I hope it makes him cry a little, at the parts where I meant every word.

Mostly I hope it answers the question he doesn't even know he's asking yet: Was I seen? Did someone notice me, really notice me, when I was small and the world was big?

Yes. Every year. Every birthday. Every letter.

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How to Start Your Own Tradition Tonight

I want this to be as simple as possible, because the perfect is the enemy of the started.

Pick a date. Their birthday is the obvious choice. So is yours. So is a date that means something to you both. The date matters less than the consistency.

Write one page. Not more. If you write more, that's wonderful — but commit to one page, front and back, and let that be the floor. One page of honest, direct, specific writing is more than enough. It's more than most people will ever leave.

Answer these three questions: Who are they right now? What do you want them to know about you? What do you hope for them?

Store it somewhere that will survive. Not a folder on your desktop. Not a journal that can be lost. Somewhere sealed and safe and specifically designed for this. Our Fable is where I keep mine — sealed, dated, set to deliver when Soren is eighteen. You could also put a physical letter in a fireproof box with instructions for delivery. The medium matters less than the guarantee.

Don't wait until it's perfect. The letter you write tonight, imperfect and honest and a little rambling, is infinitely more valuable than the perfect letter you never write.

Start the tradition this year. Your child will have the letter.

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The letters I'm writing to Soren are the most important thing I do as a parent. Not the only thing — but the most important. They are the clearest record I will leave of who I was, who he was, and how much I loved him before he was old enough to understand what that meant.

Our Fable keeps every letter safe until they're ready. Write the first one tonight. Seal it. Trust the vault.

The tradition starts when you start it.