My daughter Katie wrote the foreword to my memoir.
I gave her a questionnaire. A structured set of questions about who she understood me to be, what it was like growing up with me as a father, what she wished other people knew about me. I approached it the way I approach most things — with a framework, a process, a system for extracting the information I needed.
What came back wasn’t the answers I expected. It was better. It was her — unfiltered, generous, precise in ways that surprised me. She saw things I didn’t know she saw. She named things I hadn’t named for myself. And reading her words, I understood something I hadn’t fully understood before: she had always known me better than I knew myself.
That’s one of the gifts of late diagnosis that nobody talks about. It doesn’t just change how you see yourself. It changes how you understand the people who loved you before you understood yourself.
I spent years being a father who loved his kids completely and was, at times, genuinely hard to reach. Not because I didn’t care — I cared deeply, about all of it — but because the way I processed the world didn’t always translate into the emotional fluency that parenting requires. I was better at solving problems than sitting with feelings. Better at building systems than navigating ambiguity. Better at showing up in a crisis than in the quiet ordinary moments that turn out to matter most.
I know that now. I couldn’t have told you that then.
What I want my kids to know is this: the distance they sometimes felt wasn’t indifference. It was translation. I was always there. I was always paying attention. I was always working, harder than they probably knew, to be the father I understood how to be with a brain that didn’t come with instructions.
I also want them to know that writing this book was, in part, for them. Not as an explanation or an apology — though there’s some of both in there — but as a record. A true account of who their father actually was, underneath the career and the competence and the performance of holding everything together. The real version. The one that struggled, and survived, and didn’t always know why.
Vicki has read every word. She was there for the parts that were hardest to write. She is, as she has always been, the reason the ice held as long as it did.
I have seven children and five grandchildren. I didn’t get everything right. I got some things right that I’ll never know were right. I showed up in the ways I knew how and kept learning new ways for decades. That’s what parenting is, I think — not a performance of competence but a sustained act of presence, imperfect and ongoing.
It made me cry because she saw me. Not the resume. Not the MVP awards or the published books or the decades of technology leadership. Me. The actual person underneath all of it. And she wrote about him with love.
That’s what I want my kids to know about who I really am. And now, thanks to this book, they have it in writing.
Thin Ice: Survival, Identity, and Learning Who I Was All Along — with a foreword by Katie Santry. Get the book →