Dear Parker and Ellie,
There are things I’ve wanted to tell you both for years. Some of it I’ve tried to say in cards and texts and voicemails, some of it I’ve been writing into a book, and some of it I’ve just carried. I’m putting it here in one place, plainly, because you deserve the real story from me — not to excuse anything, but so that when you think about the years I wasn’t around as much as you needed, you know what was actually happening. You deserve to know the man behind the father you may not have always recognized.
First, the only fact that matters: I never wanted to be anywhere but with you. When I was a kid and people asked what I wanted to be, I said fighter pilot — but the honest answer, the one underneath everything I ever built or chased, was that first and foremost I wanted to be a dad.
Parker — you were born January 26, 2008. I was 24 years old, and I remember standing in that room in complete awe thinking, I’m a dad — holy crap. Your mom had a hard recovery after you were born, so for those first weeks it was you and me — I was on 100% baby duty, feeding you every 45 minutes, around the clock. You’re named Darrin, after me, and you were conceived on my birthday. From day one you were mine in every way a son can be.
Ellie — you were born August 15, 2010, and you came into this world quick and fast, exactly the way you’ve done everything since. My beautiful daughter. And here is my first hard truth, the one I will regret until my last day: I barely remember your birth. Not because it didn’t matter — because I was two weeks into the most brutal drug withdrawal a human body can go through, and my mind was somewhere I couldn’t pull it back from. You deserved a father who was fully there in that room, and I wasn’t. I’m sorry, Ells. That one is mine forever.
So let me back up and tell you what happened to me, because you were too young to understand it then, and nobody ever laid it out for you straight.
In May of 2006 — before either of you existed — I was at the river on Memorial Day weekend, bent over to turn a jack handle, and my spine gave out. Snap. An ambulance took me off the dirt, and I left the hospital with hundreds of pain pills. Two years later a doctor put me on the fentanyl patch. You’ve probably heard about fentanyl by now. It is the most addictive substance on earth, and a doctor handed it to a 24-year-old with a broken back and a brain problem nobody had diagnosed yet. That was the moment I stopped being a guy with an injury and became an addict. I want you to hear that clearly: I never chose drugs over you. I was prescribed a monster, and it swallowed me while I was trying to be your dad.
The other half of the story is my brain. I have bipolar 1 disorder. Nobody figured that out until I was 27 — after the damage was done. What it means is that my mind runs in extremes: manic highs where I don’t sleep for days and my brain is a buzzsaw I can’t shut off, and depressions where the whole world literally goes grey — I used to call it wearing grey goggles. I spent years drawn to opiates because they were the first thing I ever found that slowed my brain down. If someone had caught it earlier, I would have saved myself — and you — an enormous amount of pain. That is the single biggest “if only” of my life.
Those two things together — the broken back and the broken brain — are why I kept disappearing. In November 2010, when you were almost three, Parker, and you were just months old, Ellie, my family staged an intervention and I went to a treatment center in Pennsylvania for 30 days. I came home three days before Christmas. And I want you to know what got me through the withdrawals that everyone said would kill me: Parker, I wore your little shirt tucked in my waistband, and Ellie, I wore your baby headband around my arm, through every hour of it. I lived because of you two. That is not a figure of speech. You were the reason.
When your mom and I split in 2011, everything collapsed at once — the marriage, my job at the family company, my whole plan. I lived in a travel trailer and started over from zero. In the beginning I only got to see you on Sundays, at a park downtown. Then it became every other weekend, Friday to Sunday at 7 PM. I did the math once — 52 nights a year. Fourteen percent of your childhood. I used to sit with that number and ache. Later, when I moved to Arizona, I told myself it would pencil out to more time with you — long summers at the river. I was wrong, and that decision cost us time I can never get back. That mistake is mine too, and I own it.
There were more hospitals over the years — psychiatric holds when the mania broke me, spinal surgeries in 2009, 2013, and 2024, and a treatment stay just this past winter, where doctors finally, after fifteen years, got my medication truly right. 2017 nearly ended me: medical leave, losing time with you, losing a friend, Mimi’s cancer diagnosis, all in one year. And in the middle of all of it, I flew around the world, sat on the other side of the earth, and had the wake-up of my life. “Know Thyself” — it’s tattooed on my forearm now. I came home, got sober, hit the gym and never stopped, and I have fought for my health every single day since, mostly for one reason: so that I could be a dad you’d want to know.
If you ever wonder what all of it looked like from inside, look at the tattoo on my right arm — a tree, half grey and colorless, half vivid and alive. That’s the illness. That’s also the truth: both halves are real, and I spent your childhood fighting my way from the grey side to the color side, over and over.
But please don’t remember only the grey. Remember Baja and the desert and Glamis at Thanksgiving, all four of you kids on the machines. The river at Hidden Shores — still my favorite place in the world, because it’s where we were together. The Chargers game, boys’ day out. Disneyland, go-karts, Top Golf. Parker, working on your permit and looking at trucks, sitting beside you in the ICU after your crash. Ellie, our dad-daughter dates, lunch and a movie, the nails, the music. Those weren’t the exceptions to who I am. Those were the truest version of me.
I’m not writing this to ask you for anything. Not a call, not forgiveness, not a visit — though my door, my table, and the seat next to me on the boat are yours, always, no questions asked, no explanations required. I’m writing it so you never have to wonder. My absences came from crises, never from apathy. There was no version of any of it where you weren’t loved beyond measure.
Parker — I have loved you since the second I knew you existed, and nothing you do or don’t do will ever change that. I will love you forever, bud.
Ellie — there is no limit to my love, nor to what I’d do for you. There never has been.
You two were the reason I survived things that should have killed me — more than once. Whatever else you take from this letter, take that.
I love you forever, no matter what.
Dad