Having a kid transition into adulthood in late 2025 and through 2026, this last year as I write this, has put a lot of perspective on my own life—as both a parent and as a creative soul endlessly seeking personal meaning through art and words.
Kids are, often by a kind of cynical definition, a kind of legacy that demands a legacy.
We parent for a million different reasons, but not the least among those reasons is the biological imperative to pass along a bit of ourselves. That’s not selfishness or ego any more than it is the raw organic chemistry of life.
And the physical passing of genes is the (relatively) easy part: simply having a kid, as difficult as that is for many, is step one in a lifelong process of a notion wrapped up in a word that often fails to do the effort justice: parenting.
I reflect on these things and notice more and more each day that the Kid, for all her uniqueness, has embraced a kind of creative legacy from me: she dabbles in art, she writes about film, she plays with music, and she looks at the world through the same quirky lens that I tend to find distorts my perceptions of everything I see and do.
This is modelling, sure. This is biased opportunities, of course. This is parenting, always. But eighteen years of effort has also led to a kind of creative legacy of self that I have, probably as a side effect of just being open and transparent, have instilled on the next generation.