Caught

I just got off the phone with my eldest, N. Sometimes it takes longer than I would like it to for me to learn important things. One of my sponsors in the programme, S asks me to leave a daily voice note. I do this almost every day, one or two minutes, talk about what’s going on, share the things I don’t want to talk about, what are the challenges I’m facing, how am I feeling and so on. We have a call whenever it feels like a call is needed.

This is quite grounding. It means every day my attention is moved to how I am doing, what’s going on, how am I feeling, and what do I want to communicate to someone who’s there to help me look out for myself. It’s crazy in a way. I have this person, it’s like still being a child when you have a parent who’s there in the background to look after you, to share their thoughts and opinions with and who tries to give you good advice and tips. And then suddenly, here I am as an adult and I have this stranger who’s willing to give his time, to listen to how I’m feeling and I can talk really about anything. You know, dreams I’ve had, thoughts, depression, energy, lows, highs. It’s fantastic. The value is very real.

One of the things which took me a while to learn, but I did eventually start doing, is I started leaving voice notes for my daughters. I’ve got a little WhatsApp group, the three of them are in it, and so am I. Almost every morning I leave them a little voice note and say, hey, I’m proud of you and I love you and I’m thinking about you and here’s what I’m going to do today. And what are you up to today? And can you tell me a bit about it? And that’s it really, Nothing crazy. I don’t live with them, else I would say these things in person.

This morning I got out of bed, made a coffee, some scrambled eggs, left a voice note for my daughters, and then I left my voice note for my sponsor. And then my eldest messaged back and said, hey dad, I’m still up. Do you want to chat? I can chat now if you if you can.

So I gave her a call. And of course, it’s 2026, so that’s a video call. I get to see her face and I can see how she is. And she was just relaxing in her room. It’s one in the morning where she is in America. And she told me about how things are going. And she’s not enjoying calculus so much, but she’s doing well in her other subjects. And the midterms in American politics are this crazy thing that’s happening right now.

I asked her how driving is going and she said that she still only just had that one lesson and I encouraged her to think a little bit about it.

We looked at a couple of videos together. And we talked about memories, and she told me that she’s been thinking about when she became conscious, and she figures it’s somewhere between 11 and 13. And my instinct was to disagree, but then I thought, Oh no, maybe. Maybe that is when your sense of a continuous self really emerges.

The past is such an interesting thing. I mean, I’m confident it exists, that the experiences I’ve had so far all happened. I’ve got photographs to show me they did. But it is this sort of vague thing where relationships, time, and experiences all get compressed into a single moment from which I can draw information. Classes I’ve attended, conversations I’ve had good and bad experiences. It’s all just sort of a bundle of things which exist in the same moment.

We talked about a couple of key moments from N and the girls childhoods and I said one of my favourite moments was when we were all on a slide together and when we got to the bottom my left foot struck the ground and so my knee bent to absorb the energy of the four of us sliding down the slide and P was ejected from the bundle. She was the person sat on the knee which flexed. So she got sort of tossed out and she made this little noise and went “whoo”. N found the little video clip and watched it a couple of times and then shared it with me and I watched it a couple of times and it’s just one of those high density clips. It has all four of us in it. We’re all together and close, they’re all in matching outfits, they’re all teeny tiny girls. When P pops out and falls, instead of it being a bad moment, it’s a funny one, she doesn’t cry or complain, we all laugh.

And in the background, their mother is laughing. She’s the one holding the camera. It was a happy moment. And I’m glad it was captured, because would it have still been the memory it is now, had there not been a recording of it, if I hadn’t had that ability to snap to, to keep it?