Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom,

and insights from parents just like you all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

This will haunt you.

We parents are collectors. We have the photos from the day they were born. We have the first drawing that they did, the first pair of shoes, the tickets to that first flight. We have their high school diploma and their baseball t-shirts. We have their trophies and ribbons. Our garage, we have said, is a graveyard, a graveyard of strollers and high chairs and bikes and boxes of outgrown clothes and toys.

Why do we do this?

We do this because this stuff means so much to us.

We do it because we can't bear to throw it or give it away.

We do this because we know that one day our children will

no longer be with us, that they are constantly growing up and moving on, and we think that it is a way

to keep them with us. We do this because we don't want to lose them. But it's worth thinking sometimes

about what those mementos will actually feel like to us when they move out and on, or if God forbid, something

tragic happens. Joan Didion has written movingly and beautifully about this in her books, a year of

magical thinking and blue nights, because that did happen to her. She lost her husband suddenly,

she lost her adult daughter suddenly, and then suddenly she was left in a house filled with the momentos they had kept.

She thought this would be comforting that it would keep them with her, which they did, but it also made her feel something very different.

In theory, these mementos served to bring back the moment, she wrote.

In fact, they only served to make it clear how inadequately I appreciated

the moment when it was here. It just hits you. Just as it does when we hear Johnny Gunther's

mother say, I wish I loved him more. We only get so much time with our kids. There are only so many

moments.

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