Dear Liz.

Everything I know worth keeping, set down before you grow into needing it.

Dear Liz,

As your father, you keep asking me to write something about you. So, with you starting high-school next year, and knowing how fast the teenage years make a woman of a girl, here it goes...

Title: Dear Liz.

You love people without flinching. It spills out of you in every room, both on the ones who deserve it and those who never will, and you never worry about the burden. It is the best thing in you. I would not trade it for anything. But I owe you the other-side of the coin too. Warmth like yours is rare, and rare things draw thieves. Some people can smell it on you from across a room and reach for it with cold bare hands. Not everyone who takes what you give means to reciprocate.

Someone will teach you that the hard way and what that pain leaves behind is the urge to build a wall, to hang a nicer facade in front of it, a version of yourself in the window and lock the real one in a back room. I know that urge from the inside. It looks like wisdom. It is not. It is a slow surrender, a whole life spent behind a pane of glass, lit up and visible and touched by no one. That life photographs well, yet is as lonely as a lighthouse. So here is the only advice I have. Stay cautious and lean in anyway. Keep the door open, be open to the rare connections you meet randomly on the street in the city during peak-hour. The eye-contact that draws you in. Just be better at who you let walk through it.

Now, this is the part I find hard to talk about as your father. You will be wanted by men. When they come, watch, be alert. Closer than feels polite/normal. A man shows you who he is in the moments he thinks do not count. Watch what he does with a waiter who brings the wrong plate or forgets the order. Watch whether he makes you laugh or makes the table laugh at you, and whether he as the emotional/social intelligence to even tell the two apart. A good one stands taller when you win at something and cheers you on. A bad one goes quiet, and an hour later finds a small clever way to cut you down. Maybe it is a joke, or a correction given in front of the others. Learn to feel those moments. Learn the shift, which shows up in your gut a breath before your mind has the words, as that feeling is trying to tell you the thing your manners are talking you out of.

Truthfully, some men are simply bad. Not wounded. Not a project, and not a good heart buried under a rough week. Bad for you, conditioned by a manospheric algorithm. So, when you meet one, you owe him nothing. No explanation. No soft landing, and no second look. You are allowed to kick him square in the nether-regions (if it is warranted) and walk away and never give him another hour of your life. Your safety was never up for a vote.

The reading, though, runs both ways, and this half is your responsibility. Do not go vague or lead someone on. I know there’s a pull of it, the little throne you sit on being the one who has not decided, which way a relationship should go. The warmth of watching someone wait on you. That power is fake, it spends like monopoly money, and the person it robs in the end is you. Speak the truth, even when it is the harder words to say. You may feel afraid about sharing your true feelings, but the ones worth keeping will love you for it.

Here is what I want for you, and it flies in the face of nearly everything the world will shout in your ear. The world only measures you by what it can see. The marks. The title. The diamond ring, the house, the room on its feet applauding you. They pile it up and call it success. I want more than that for you. I want you fulfilled, and almost no one is, as fulfilment never is portrayed in a pile. You cannot stack it or hold it up to the light. It is taking the one thing you were built to give and laying it down in front of the people you love, and the people you are learning to love. Chase that one. The clapping is forgotten the next morning, it is vapour. Fulfilment you keep. And you get to hand it on.

And you are built to give, Liz. I say it as if it fell on you out of the sky. It did not. Everything you were made for was put in your hands, in values, through love as you were growing up and as you continue to grow.

But, be careful what you think I handed you, because two things came down bound in one parcel. There is what I meant. You know it already, even where I never found the words. Like, not cutting a corner on people, whatever it cost me, and keeping my word beyond what it deserved. Staying when leaving would have been simple and the whole room would have forgiven the going. That is the real cargo. That is what I was trying to press into your hands the entire time, on the good and the bad days.

And then the way I carried it. There were rooms I walked out of with the truth I could have said, but didn’t. There were doors I stood at with my hand flat on the wood, a better life humming on the other side, and I told myself a reasonable story and turned around. Every turn like that, I called it being a good person. It cost me anyway, not in one loud crash but in a slow bleed, a little every year, the rooms I never entered and the braver life I could see right through the glass. My fear took one life quietly. Do not let it take yours. Take the love I gave you. Leave the fear early where I should have left mine.

The values are the load underneath all of it, so many people skate over them, without really grasping what they are. Character. Honesty. Loyalty. A kindness that actually costs you. And holding the floor up like the footings you never see, your people, the ones still in the room when the music dies, lights come on and the crowd has wandered off. Do not skim those words. Sit down inside them. Spend real hours on why they matter, as a value you cannot explain to yourself is one you will give away far too quickly.

These values, they run back further than me. Your name, first. You are Elizabeth for Maria Elisabeth, your Great-Oma, a girl of Friesland who grew up under an occupation you will only ever meet as a photograph in a textbook. What our family carried through those years, the forced labour, a river swum in the dead of winter to escape a concentration camp, the cold, the hunger, the going without, is not just a museum we walk through. It is not a weight strapped to your back. It is fuel. It is why the tank is full before you turn the key. You come from people who were pushed lower than you will ever be pushed and did not stay down. Do not let that go quiet in you.

People talk about generational wealth as if the money is the transfer. It is not. Money handed down with nothing under it is gone inside a lifetime, as the numbers displayed on your internet banking were never the inheritance, only the receipt. What survives the crossing, from those Dutch hands to mine to yours to your children's, are the values and the live-wire back to where they came from. That wire is the only road the stewarding travels. Think of a chef with his grandmother's dish. He does not repeat her recipe until he dies, faithful and hollow. He takes what she meant by it, feeding people as the clearest idea of love she had, and carries that into food she never dreamed of. The method is all his. The reason is hers.

One day, if the world is kind, you will have children, and small faces will turn up to you the way yours turns up to me now. Tell them where they came from. Give them the Dutch in their blood, the name that came down the line, the old woman in Friesland who would not break. Set the table with it. That is how a family keeps its spine, not in discretionary trusts or a will, but in what gets said over dinner and lived in front of small watching eyes.

Some seasons the colour will go out of everything. Some mornings the ordinary things, the shower, the sentence you owe a friend, will ask more of you than seems fair. Hear this from me now. That heaviness is not a flaw in you. Sometimes it is the most honest thing in you, refusing to keep hauling a version of yourself that was never you. It is not weakness. It is a message, and it is worth paying attention too. You will not think your way out of it, and anyone who tells you to keep your chin up has never stood in that dark. But it moves one way only, back toward the real, toward one true thing you can set your face at and walk into. The people who look happy are not the ones spared all life’s challenges. They are the ones aimed at a north-star. Do not go looking for a better mask. Turn, however slow, find that one true thing, and start walking.

And dream, Liz. Absurdly. Ridiculously. The way you did at the kitchen table when you were small, glue drying on your fingers, scraps across the whole floor, building the life you wanted out of egg-cartons, empty weetbix boxes and whatever was in reach, as no one had leaned down yet to tell you which parts you were not allowed to want. Keep that girl. The world will come for her with scissors. It loves the sensible dream, the one already cut to fit the box, and it will press the scissors into your hand and call the cutting maturity. Refuse them. Fear will knock, and it will be sold to you as ‘good sense’. Do not read it as a red light. Fear is rarely the sign you are lost. More often it is the sign you are alive and standing close to something that matters…

People will try to make you smaller, and some of them will mean every cut. Some of them will be from your own family. It will not arrive as an attack. It comes as a joke at the dinner table that lands a half-second too hard, disguised as as worry for your own good, which somehow leaves you smaller than it found you. On their worst days the people who love you will want a smaller version of you, because your growing holds a lamp to the rooms in their own lives they never walked into, and a smaller daughter, a smaller sister, grand-daughter, is easier to sit beside. It is not always cruelty. As often as not it is fear wearing a face you have kissed goodnight. It changes nothing. You do not fold yourself down to keep a room comfortable. Love them, and do not shrink. Then find the ones who grow when you grow, who lift you without needing to be told why they should, and let those ones all the way in.

And do not save your living for when no one is watching. Sing in the car with the windows down, even if you have someone who barely knows you in the passenger seat. Be the first one on the floor, dancing alone before anyone else has the guts to do so. Find a couch in a bar, hold hands in a loud crowded room even if you feel like you are in a fishbowl. You will spend years sure the wall keeps you safe, and one normal day, you will wake up and understand it only ever kept you from being reached. So be reachable. Let people catch you loving things out in the open. It is infectious.

Lastly, none of us are here on this earth long. I am not saying this to scare you or be morbid. I write it to cut you loose. One day, far off, if the world is kind, on a warm, spring afternoon, surrounded by loved ones, maybe it all ends for me, and in time it will for you. We have no second take. So do not spend the one life you were handed too scared to live all the way inside it. When you are old and you look back down the whole road, I want you to find a woman who came as herself. Who loved out loud and got on the plane. Who said the truest thing her heart knew while it was still hard, and never once folded herself small in a room that was quietly killing her because leaving was frightening. Time is short. That is the sum they read at the end. Not success sized up by the pile’s height. But who you were the whole time you built it.

You are eleven, and already more than I was at twice your age. You will move mountains, and I do not say that like I would in your birthday card. I say it as something I have watched take shape with my own eyes. When the days go hard, come back here, and hear me saying every word of this.

I love you, Liz. To the moon, and back.

Dad.