Hey B,

It’s back to school on Tuesday, and yesterday I shaved half your head in the backyard. You’re rocking an asymmetric bob right now, the right side buzzed down to a #3 clipper fade, with rainbow titanium captive-bead earrings and a new pair of baby blue Chuck T’s. You’re so much cooler than I was at your age and, by most reasonable measures, also much cooler than I am now.

Last week in the car you were making a list of your all-time favourite movies. In my last letter I talked about how you’re much more able to sit through movies now, and as a result we’ve instituted regular movie nights. It’s rare to find something that you and your sib both find acceptably cool, but as long as you each get to make some of the choices, you’ve really gotten into it. I don’t remember the whole list because you were calling several audible edits while listing them off, and I was driving, but I know that Ferris Bueller, Back to the Future, and Groundhog Day are all near the top. Every once in a while, out of nowhere, you’ll start re-enacting groundhog day scenes and chuckling to yourself.

We did our summer trip to Quebec that has become a tradition for the last several years. Every year your mom and I wonder if it will still work for everyone, but this year it really did. You built yourself a 5-hour playlist for the drive, and thrifted an excellent jigsaw puzzle for us all to do on rainy days. One of the best things about being your parent is seeing the way your brain works when you’ve got a thing you’re excited about. There was an old foosball table where we stayed, and at first you weren’t sure about it. But once you got the hang of it, you couldn’t get enough. We went to a water park that, last year, was a bit intimidating for you, but this year you were all over.

You have this push-pull all the time, kiddo. The uncertainty about trying new things, the fear of failing at them, but also this profound curiosity and joy once it starts to click in. Everyone has some version of it, but yours is particularly loud. I put off writing this letter for a while because it’s the last one (those are the rules!) and I wasn’t sure what to say that would to really close them out properly. But I think it’s this: don’t give up on that push-pull. Sometimes the uncertainty really grabs you, I see you wrestle with it, and want to just shut down on whatever the new thing is. But you don’t. Lots of people would, most adults would, when the worry got that loud. But you stick with it, and talk it through, and then it clicks and you unlock some new amazing bit of the world. And you’ll have to decide for yourself as you get older whether each struggle is worth it or not, but I hope you’ll decide that most of them are, because there are so many amazing bits out there. And when you find one of them, it’s just the best.

We’re letting you sleep in a bit before school starts tomorrow, but you’re gonna be up in a minute so I’ll close this out now. I can’t believe it’s already been nine and a half years. Hell, I can’t believe how much has happened in the six months since my last letter. We’re clearly in a part that goes very fast. Can’t wait to see where you take it next.

I love you, B.

Daddy

Hey B,

It’s been rainy all day, so right now you’re sitting just over there, still in your tie-dye PJs, reading. It’s a dragon book. Part of a very long series of dragon books that Lily read before you and that, by the iron law of little siblings, you therefore think is the pinnacle of cool.

We’re still deep in that phase, in case you were wondering. Lily, who starts high school in a few weeks, remains your favourite person in the world. As the kids in your classes and camps start to break out more adolescent internet slang, you bring it home like you used to bring home acorns and rocks. “The boys in my camp call everything skibidi ohio rizz now.” You’ll say. And then Lily will wince, and groan, and tell you they need to touch grass and you will laugh and agree and it’s perfect.

One of the things I always think about when I write one of these letters is how you two will be as adults, whenever it is that you read them. A fixture of our life, since you were born, is that you are sometimes the littler kid at the table, and sometimes the only kid. You have one home and Lil has two, and you have both had to figure out what that means for sibling-ing. But you contain dualities and multitudes of your own. You have multiple citizenships, multiple languages, multiple cultures, in a way that is different than anything I, or your mom, had growing up. Right now you flit around and between them and mostly just need little reminders. “Remember the American cousins play rougher.” “Remember that you’ll have to throw some elbows to get into the conversation, here.” For now, we work as the bridges, the interpreters, the gravitational centre to help it all hang together. But over time you’ll make your own sense of it and I am fascinated to see what shape that’ll take.

This letter’s a bit late, it’s been more than six months since the last one. This happened with your sis, too. See, I decided for both of you that nine and a half would be the last one I’d write, at least publicly. 20 letters, from infancy to middle school, or near enough — any older than that and I worried that I’d be writing about things in the moment that your super-online friend group might find. Once you’re big enough for that to be a real possibility, it doesn’t feel fair to you. But it means there are only three more — including this one! — and so I end up putting them off waiting for the right time to write them. Which is, I know, foolish. There isn’t a righter time to write a letter to your kid than the moment you have the time and think to do it. So here we are, on a rainy, dragony Saturday.

You did sleep-away camp for part of this summer and we wrote you something every day, and you wrote us, too. I loved that. Posting these ones online is a tradition I have loved, and I will finish the batch, but I will also be keeping all the postcards you sent us. My favourite, from your very first day of camp, in your careful rounded penmanship, said “Today we had a lice check and a swim test. I passed both!”

The house is still filled with art. Art and books. Your bedroom filled with art, so is your studio, so is our office. The coffee table is full of books, and so is the front hall. There are two (two!) papier-mâché pumpkins sitting on the stereo speakers, and the upstairs landing is covered with still-lifes. You did a series of prints of a high-top converse shoe in various colours for a print-making class, and no one who sees them can believe an eight-year-old did them. To be fair, you’re eight and a half.

You’re already on to the next book. Time flies.

I love you, B.

Daddy

Hi B,

You’re playing Animal Crossing as I write this. There’s a whole world of stuff you can do in that game, and you’ve sampled all of it, but for the most part you just design clothes, and complain about your mortgage. And then after a while you’ll switch to minecraft, where you’re working on a scale model of our office. Whatever a game is supposed to be about, you find a way to bring it back to art, and design, and testing out your ideas. On your iPad right now your favourites are procreate (an art/drawing app), and goat simulator. It would be hard to summarize that last one except to say that (a) it is utterly chaotic, (b) it has equipped you with a strangely broad array of millennial cultural references, and (c) you love it.

What’s interesting to me when I think about it is that all of your favourites are infinite gardens. None of them have a single “best” way to play, none of them are competitive, none of them involve winning or losing. And that’s not intrinsic to the game — minecraft can be played to win, and there are plenty of Animal Crossing perfectionists out there. But for you winning isn’t interesting, and the closer a game gets to having that competitive vibe, the less interesting you find it. Partly because you don’t like the feeling of losing, but also because you don’t really like the feeling of beating someone else, either. You have the tenderest of tender hearts, kiddo.

You’ve grown a lot since my last letter. Physically, yes (you’re free of your booster seat!) but also in a dozen other ways. Your feelings are still huge, world-shaking, gigantic and they sometimes run away from you — especially when life interferes with your ability to finish whatever art you’re working on in the moment. But the way you talk about them and reflect on them after the fact is something I wish more adults were capable of. It’s heart-achy to watch you work through it, though maybe for reasons that won’t make sense unless/until you’re a parent yourself. I think every parent feels a kind of pain at seeing their kid upset, and I do have this strong desire to protect you from hurt, but also a pride in how you’re working it through, and a wonder that you’re able to do the things you’re doing at all at eight years old — all superimposed and washing into one another. It’s complicated but it’s amazing and your mom and I are right here with you for all of it.

It’s funny because there are still people in your life who think that you’re quiet. You can be, at times, especially in unfamiliar situations. But honestly kiddo, from the time you wake up until the time you fall asleep, I feel like you never stop. More than once we’ve had to ask you to pause long enough to chew, to let someone else in before your food gets cold, because otherwise it’s not clear you ever would. You’re voracious.

Which planet is that near the moon and can we get the skyview app that lily mentioned and why does golden hour light happen and how does goo gone work and why do you use manila folders inside a hanging file for a filing cabinet and are you sure a peregrine falcon is faster than a cheetah and why is acrylic paint harder to wash off and why would anyone use tempera paint and why do some erasers work better than others and why would you move the bishop there if his pawn can capture it and why does tissue paper stick up out of a gift bag and are there banana-nutella crepes in Paris and is burlap made of sisal and why do filing cabinets have locks and should this dragon be a rainwing or a seawing and desert has one ‘s’ right and is that a downy woodpecker with the red patch on the back of his head — I think those were all in the last 24 hours and that definitely wasn’t all of them. It’s exhausting but it’s also so over the top it’s hilarious, and I love it about you. And when we, your parents, momentarily overspent, answer with “I don’t know, B,” you reply without missing a beat, “Well then let’s search it up!” Indefatigable. Spelled the way it sounds, B.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m writing these letters wrong. They are very you-focused, which seems appropriate on the surface. But I don’t know, whenever you read them, if that’s what you’ll want to hear about. Maybe you’ll want to know more about what was going on in the world. Or how your mom and were thinking about things in 2024, what we understood and what we were still trying to figure out, and what we hoped for you. I don’t know. We talk about what’s going on in the world a fair bit at home. Even when it’s hard, we feel like it’s our job to prepare you for the world, not curate the world to your liking. And as for me and your mom, we’re the best team I’ve ever known. We’re working pretty hard, we’re proud of the ways we get to help people, and you and your sis keep us on our toes. But, you know, in your precocious eight year old way, I feel like you understand a lot of that, too. So anyway I hope these letters aren’t frustrating for you when you read them. There’s no grand system to it, kiddo. I write about you so much because, when I sit down to write, that’s the thing I feel like I want you to know.

You go through the world with so much wonder and all you want is to understand it and to share it with other people. You slept in this morning, and when you woke up, you shouted for us to come up right away. When we got up there, it’s because you wanted us to see the sunrise out your window. You sat there with us and declared, “It’s really pretty.” And then you asked if you could have some screen time to play goat simulator before breakfast.

I love you kiddo. I love your big feelings and I love your questions and I love how you see the world. Thanks for sharing it all with us, B.

Daddy

Hey kid,

This letter is late. I kept thinking that a good time to write it would be after this thing or that thing was done. When there would be a little bit of space. But the end of the school year, the start of summer camps, some travel mixed in there — there kept being a next thing after the next thing. Anyway, I’m sorry I’m late.

Re-reading my last letter to you, what hits me is how much has changed in the last six months. In the world around you, sure, but I mean specifically with you. Six months ago you were worried about kids and their gender nonsense, worried about being weird. Now you are so clear on all that, which pieces you have time for and which pieces you absolutely do not.

You’ve grown a lot. Not enough to be free of your booster seat, which you resent. But somewhere along the line you formed the idea that it wasn’t cool to be walked to a friend’s house by parents and, like a light switch, that was over. There have been several of those, where your mom and I are caught off-guard by the quickness with which you outgrow a thing. You came out of your room a while ago with a pile of books saying, “these can go to the little library, they’re too young for me.” And as you make each of those decisions, there’s no hesitation or second-guessing. They’re final. That’s new.

Speaking of new things, if you’re wondering when we, your parents, became mortifying, it was about 3 months ago. If we must walk you somewhere you ask us to stand on the sidewalk, or behind a tree or something. And last month, when we were walking downtown and you realized that the shortest path to get where we were going was past OCAD — the art college — you stopped dead on the sidewalk and refused. Refused! Those people were artists. The idea that you would be seen, being walked by your parents, in front of artists was an unmitigated horror. We went around.

Art. Kiddo, I don’t know what you will be when you grow up and I don’t think you do either, but the degree to which art infuses your every day is intense. We’ve noticed that all the arty adults in our life gravitate towards you. They talk with you, and then make eye contact with us like, “are you aware?” Oh yes. We’re aware. As a parent, it’s always a treat to have other people really see your kid. And you — we always tell them you’re like a cat. You can’t force B to engage with you, all you can do is hang out and put out vibes and see if B comes to you. The art people get it right away, and chatting with you brings out the art in them, which is really… well it’s just beautiful, B.

The other thing the adults in our life love about you is your unrelenting, deadpan dunks on your parents. You’re a funny, funny kid, but you’re also unafraid to say so when you disagree with a parent, and it’s a brutal combination. Earlier today we were in a thrift shop and I tried on a denim jacket. You said, “No daddy, that doesn’t look right. It looks like a rock star.” And I said, “I could be a rock star!” And you, flat affect, like you were commenting on the weather, hit me with, “No. You’re more… management.” I think I heard the cashier snort. Brutalized. By a seven and a half year old.

You took your first ever trip to Europe because RSG had work in Spain. I wonder, as an adult, what you’ll remember from that trip. We didn’t have formal childcare, but half a dozen friends and colleagues and strangers all helped out. You told them all that your name means “traveller.” You made them art, and they made you art back. I think you loved it.

I feel like a lot of this letter is about the community of adults around you. Maybe that’s what happens when an adult is writing it. There are plenty of kids in your life, of course, to say nothing of your sis (whom you adore, and who is still permitted to walk you places). But right now your mom and I both have this sense that communities need some repair and reconnection — that we need that, too. And so it’s been really special to feel them around us, and around you, and I guess — whenever and wherever you are when you read this — I just want to remind you of how essential and simple and amazing community can be.

Goodnight B. Love you. Even from the sidewalk, or behind a tree.

Daddy

Hey B,

You’re sitting across from me in the living room, folded up in the pink chair, playing Animal Crossing and sniffling. Not COVID, just the kind of boring cold kids get. Or at least the kind that was boring, before all this.

You’ve got 4 days left of school this year. In most ways, it’s been a really great year for you. After the last two years with so much virtual school, this one has been almost… normal. You have friends you run around with, and school work that you love, and friends who bring a bunch of grade 1 drama, and school work that you don’t love, and you come home every day chattering about all of it. Every dinner takes half an hour longer than it otherwise would because you’re so busy catching us all up that you forget to eat. It’s good to take time with your food, we don’t want to rush you but, if I’m honest, the phrase, “B, we’re all still waiting on you kiddo,” is a pretty common occurrence.

Just after my last letter to you, your teacher got sick, and stayed sick for several months. While she was out, you had a long-term supply teacher. You and he almost went to war. You might not remember why, by the time you read this, but here’s what we learned. Your regular teacher had made a deal with you: once you did all the math or spelling or whatever that she wanted you to, you could do art. You kept up your end of the deal and she kept up hers. But the supply teacher didn’t. He felt like, if you were done your work, he would give you extra work. You would ignore that work, and do art. He would remind you to do your extra worksheets. You would more secretly do your art.

It escalated to where he actually confiscated your art at some point, and put it in his desk. And B, my otherwise emotional little critter, you didn’t melt down, you just got serious. You waited until he was helping another kid, snuck up, stole the art back out of his desk, and – this is my most favourite part – smuggled it home in your boot so he wouldn’t steal it again. Incredible work, kiddo.

We didn’t find out about this back and forth until near the end of his time in your class, but it explained why you were starting to talk about not liking school. Why you’d even started faking symptoms to avoid going. We knew that art was important to you, but it took us a minute to connect the dots on how the loss of art was impacting you. Your mom found an afterschool art program for you that week, and the woman who runs it talked to us about how she feels like her goal is to help every kid take all of the feelings they bring in and get them out into the art. And then your mom and I cried a little bit.

The war of art notwithstanding, you’re doing great. You’re still curious about everything. You’re swimming. You’re biking. You’re reading everything you can get your hands on. You’re shy about making new friends but brave, braver than a lot of adults, at sticking up for a friend if you see them treated unfairly. A few months ago you saw some transphobic protesters out on the street, and read their signs, and told us that we should go back and stand across from them with a sign that said, “DISAGREE.”

Okay, you need help collecting some shells and fossils in the game, so I’m gonna wrap this one up. Tomorrow we might take a family bike ride down to the beach where you like to look for beach glass. I love those trips, and so do you. I’m excited for the summer you’re gonna have, and that we’re gonna have together.

I love you kid,

Daddy

Hi kiddo,

You actually turned six a few weeks ago but it’s taken until now for me to be able to sit down and write. Happy new year, B!

It’s a lazy New Year’s Day Saturday morning. This morning you helped me spot a Northern Flicker, and now you’re in the basement playing Just Dance. We had a conversation over breakfast about school starting up again this week. About how there’s much more COVID going around than there was when I wrote my last letter to you. And how it’s possible that you, or your sis, or your parents will catch it this time. You are taking it in stride.

You’re a really analytical kid about this stuff. Which is funny, because you are also so full of so many feelings. It’s such an adventure to parent you right now. Because everything. Everything from a big achievement to, like, a loud noise, is cause for feelings. Big feelings. Huge feelings.

(You just came back up to let me know you scored Superstar on Water Me, by Lizzo. The pride on your face is another one of those feelings. When you’re proud of yourself you stand there with a half-smile and hope we’ll recognize how important it is to you. Then you’ll collect a fist bump or a hug and run back to whatever it was you were doing.)

Anyway. Huge feelings. Those are a normal part of being a kid, or being a human. But what I find so special about you is the way you talk about them. You don’t hide them or mislabel them. You have this assumption that, whatever they are, they’re valid and you’re allowed to feel them and you just want to talk about them so that other people will understand you. I love this about you very much.

You’re in the midst of a bunch of medical stuff lately that I hope you won’t even remember by the time you’re reading this. Nothing serious. Dental stuff. Allergist stuff. Your own first COVID shot (you wore a cape). With another one coming soon. Two years of pandemic precautions means that you just don’t have a lot of practice with normal medical stuff. So we’re making up some time there.

There’s more time we want to make up. We got to see all your grandparents when the case counts were lower, but we didn’t get to see your great grandma before she died. The farthest you’ve travelled in the last two years was Quebec, once, by car. Your mom and I are trying to work out how to bring more travel, more visits, back into our life as a family. We think there will be more of that in 2022. The latest COVID variant is driving a huge wave right now which makes us pull in our risk tolerances a bit, but we feel like we have a better ability to see through that noise now. We’re both boosted, (a phrase I hope will be meaningless by the time you’re reading this) and we think that opens up new possibility, too.

I wrote letters like this to your sis every 6 months, too. I stopped when Lil turned 10, and I plan to do the same for you. But, when I let it in, I’m really struck by how… altered yours are by what the last two years have been. Your mom and I have tried to make them loving and rich and as full of adventure as we can. But I hope 2022 gives you more space to adventure without needing to be a 6 year old epidemiologist.

There’s this old Elizabeth Stone poem I quote all the time. I’ve never found a better way to express what it feels like to watch you and your sis move through the world. It goes,

“Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

I love you, B. I’m proud of you. I’m gonna go see if you need any help on Just Dance now.

Daddy

Hey kiddo,

You’re five and a half, you’re 4 feet tall, and you’re a grade 1 kid in the fall!

School wrapped for you and your sis ten days ago, and since then we’ve been in a block on the calendar just marked FAM TIME. Ten days of day trips, new foods, swimming, and minecraft. Whatever it took to wash off the remnants of virtual schooling, and get you into a summer mode.

Your school experience during COVID was better than most, but it was still really hard. My last letter to you was when you were still doing in-person school, but most of the last 6 months has been virtual. You did your best, doing crafts and singing French songs by yourself with headphones on, as we worked in the next room. Sometimes you’d come in very proud of something you’d made. Sometimes you’d come in frustrated and crying because you couldn’t hear what the teachers were saying. Because you’d cut your headphone cable. With your safety scissors. Again. (This happened 5 times. When we went wireless, you broke the charging port instead.) You had a better year than many kids have had, we were very lucky. And still you were ready to be done.

We started FAM TIME at a fire pit. Each person burned one thing that reminded them of virtual school that they wanted to be done with. And then we made smores. It was our way of giving you a clear transition. And probably our way of giving us one, too. You burned a picture of COVID that you’d drawn. It’s so strange that a 5 year old knows what a coronavirus looks like. But it continues to be a strange time and I’m just in awe of how well you have rolled with it.

What’s not strange, though, is that you would have art to burn. You have art everywhere. Everywhere. We have to barter with you now, about cleaning up the loose paper clippings and cardboard slivers before we get more paper. The going rate is 10 things in the recycling bin for each new page, and still we can’t keep up with it all. I don’t even want to talk about your tape consumption.

But it’s wonderful, and creative, and expansive art, B. Sometimes you retread the same ground over and over again, and then all of a sudden branch off somewhere new. Last month you were building a cardboard dog house for someone else’s dog. Last week you became utterly fixated on our need for a piñata. Right now, you’re unstoppable on the subject of halloween decor. Sometimes I’ll just sit with you and scroll through an art gallery’s website and listen to your running commentary.

If you’re marking time as you read these, your mom and I are now double-vaccinated. Almost 80% of Toronto adults have at least one shot, and about 55% are done. For now. There are new variants that are looming, and talk is picking up about annual boosters. The thing about living through a pandemic, B, is how tricky it is to balance. You have to find a healthy place between paying enough attention and not paying too much. If you tune too far out, you put yourself and those you love in danger. If you tune too far in, you will struggle to ever feel fully safe again. That’s true about a lot of scary things, honestly.

I’ve been trying to think about what I can say to you, in this moment, that distills what we’ve learned in the last year and a half. I don’t have enough distance from it yet to be able to see things clearly. The best I’ve got right now is that when things go really sideways, it matters a lot who’s in charge and what they value. We have seen some horrendous things in the last year done by leaders – political, corporate, community – with the wrong values. We have seen heroism and generosity too. But so far the best I have for you, B, is that you should choose leaders very thoughtfully when you’re choosing, and lead compassionately when you’re leading. The consequences reach further than you think.

Right now you’re not too fussed about that, though. You’ve asked us five times today whether day camp starts tomorrow. (It doesn’t, that’s Monday). You are excited to be hanging out with other kids, and to have camp counsellors other than your parents for the first time in a long time. I don’t blame you. I’m excited for you, too.

I love you, B. I’m so proud of you. Goodnight,

Daddy

This letter is a few weeks late. Your mom says that’s the fate of second kids. First kids get the diligence of parents who don’t know any better, and second kids get the rounded edges, hand-me-down version. As a kid who grew up eldest at one home, and youngest at the other, I am ready to believe it. But the important thing is that you’re five and I’m here and I love you.

A lot has happened since my last letter to you. We’re now about 10 months from when the first COVID lockdowns hit. 296 days, give or take. In some parts of the world, it’s been eradicated – they’re close enough to zero cases that people can eat in restaurants again, have guests for dinner again, hug their families again. But not here. Not most places. Canada’s climbing a mean second wave, and your family in the states are staring down a truly monstrous third (though their second never really ended).

You had in-person school in the fall and it has been so good for you and your sis. I have journal notes from those days in the late summer where we were trying to decide what was most right for each of you – it was so hard in that moment to see clearly. And no two families had the same math to do on it. But for us, having you both back was utterly correct. You have flourished. Your teachers are amazing, despite being dealt a very hard hand this year. You come home singing French songs and catching us up on kindergarten drama and telling us who you’re going to marry.

We can’t know what would have been different in a universe without COVID, but in this one, you go nonstop. From the moment you wake up to half an hour past bedtime, it’s a running narrative, interspersed with science facts and correcting us when we misidentify a colour.

Seriously, the colour stuff, B. I dug out my old psych textbooks to see if there was a reliable way to detect human tetrachromacy because I swear you see it differently than the rest of us. You always have. When you were really little, I’d say, “Look, a yellow school bus.” And you’d say, “Orange. Not yellow, daddy, orange.” And you were right. I was calling it yellow as a convention, but in this instance it was clearly orange. I chalked it up then to you being literal, which you are. But the colour stuff keeps going and so I just want to put it here in case the adult you ever wonders if that was always a thing. It was.

You play minecraft with your sis and build rainbows and tree-houses and tell me when the server needs to be reset. You love canned peas, and you eat dessert like your mom. I’m writing this in January and you’re not halfway through your halloween candy. You are also the sloooowest eater and we try to build healthy relationships with food so we’re not giving you shit about it but I swear to god Beatrix it can take you an hour to eat a grilled cheese sandwich.

They’ve started rolling out the early vaccines here to healthcare workers and folks at high risk. Your mom and I figure it’s late spring/early summer before our turn in line. And then however long beyond that for second shots, and enough uptake that case counts drop. We’re not out of this one by a long shot. It makes me sick to think about how much worse it’s been than it needed to be. How many people in a position to make things better failed to rise to the occasion. But my hope is, that by the next time I write one of these, I’ll have better news to share.

Tomorrow you start school again, but virtual. For a week, they say, but your mom and I are braced for longer, if need be. Among the ways our work has changed in the last year is that every RSG child has been part of a management program at one point or another. As have the kids of many of our participants. Last month we taught a toy dinosaur how to think about building a career path. They are beautiful moments in a very hard year.

Thank you for so many beautiful moments. I can’t believe what a big kid you are. I love you, B.

Daddy