Our new President is a writer, which focuses national attention on trusting in the power of words. It helps those of us who write from personal experience re-invest in the importance of what we do as we write, hoping to contribute our part in the song of human experience.

Newly sworn in, President Obama ended his inauguration speech with these paragraphs:

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: “Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations. (Complete text is posted here.)

Using words to unite the lessons of the past with the present and future is the very task of the writer. Last Sunday’s Parade Magazine published Barack Obama’s letter to his daughters, in which he ties his past to his family’s present and his daughters’ future by describing the reasons he ran for the presidency:

Dear Malia and Sasha,

I know that you’ve both had a lot of fun these last two years on the campaign trail, going to picnics and parades and state fairs, eating all sorts of junk food your mother and I probably shouldn’t have let you have. But I also know that it hasn’t always been easy for you and Mom, and that as excited as you both are about that new puppy, it doesn’t make up for all the time we’ve been apart. I know how much I’ve missed these past two years, and today I want to tell you a little more about why I decided to take our family on this journey.

 After this introduction, he talks about changing his outlook after his daughters were born, changing it from big plans for himself to focusing on what he could do to ensure that his daughters had every opportunity for happiness and fulfillment. “In the end, girls,” he writes, “that’s why I ran for President: because of what I want for you and for every child in this nation.” Then he lists what he wants: for every child to go to schools worthy of their potential, to push the boundaries of discovery they will live to see new technologies and inventions that will improve life, for them to understand the great privilege of living in our country, and for them to know, as his grandmother helped him to see, that our country is great because it can always be made better. He wants his daughters to take up the work of righting wrongs.

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What would you like to have written to your children about an important event in your life? What would you like to have heard from your own parents at an important transition in the life of your family?

Each of us has at least one personal essay waiting to be written on this topic. Even if what we must talk about is something no one would want to experience, there is another side, one of triumph over difficulties, hurt, and danger. Whether our parents or we failed or succeeded to offer guidance as Obama does his girls, if we sit down to write today, we’ll find something to discover in attempting to offer our best.

Think of a time in your life when you were moving homes, changing jobs, losing a partner, being given an award, facing punishment or a downfall, or making an important life decision. What would you have wanted a parent to write to you? What would you as a parent have written to your own children (whether they are future, or little, or grown children)?

Think of a time in the life of your children when they were facing change, disappointment, illness, punishment or success. Or think of a time when you were a child facing those circumstances. What would you as a parent have written upon this occasion?

No occasion is too small, too unfortunate, or too large to consider. Whatever topic you choose, write as if you are in the moment again, writing from the incident and time you are remembering. If you wished to hear from your parents when you couldn’t afford to come home from college for the holidays and spent your first Thanksgiving or Christmas away from family, you might write a letter in the voice of your father or mother, even a sibling, urging you to understand the situation and make something valuable from the experience in terms of what your legacy is–what character traits you are learning to cherish and bring forward.

If you carry the wounds of having parents who drank and abandoned raising a family in favor of partying and fighting, write the letter of apology you wished to have received. If you never understood why a parent left or never took action about something important, write the letter that explains it. I believe you will find that in the belated letter there is not only an apology but also a statement of what is hoped for you the child, despite the failings.

If you wish you had written to your own children, it is not too late to explain situations they might not have understood or might have disliked or, even if they liked them, not fully understood. Write in your own voice to your children and you will discover that you are articulating a belief in something you want to see carried forward. Perhaps, making allusions to what is or was going on nationally will help you tell what the person who is writing the letter thought and felt.

As I considered President Obama’s words and digested the commentators’ remarks about the President and inauguration day events, I heard one commentator say that the President’s half sister talked about how their mother would wake them at night to watch the stars together. What is something a little unusual you or the parent you are writing the letter from believed would hearten the spirit? You might begin right there.

When you feel you have written your way to the sign off and signature, stop and write a statement of how you feel just now having written the letter and why. Then insert your statement before you sign off.

President Obama ends his letter to his daughters this way:

I am so proud of both of you. I love you more than you can ever know. And I am grateful every day for our patience, poise, grace and humor as we prepare to start our new life together in the White House.

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Here is what I wrote today:

January 20, 2009
President Obama’s Inauguration Day

Dear Emily and Seth,

Remember when I took you with me to the University of Washington’s Denny Hall those Friday evenings to attend poetry readings? And sometimes to post-reading gatherings? As a single mom on a very limited budget and aspiring poet enrolled in a Master’s degree program in Creative Writing, I was thirsty to listen to poetry. I had all the inspiration I needed from your lives and love and brilliance; what I needed was to learn the craft to unleash my poems, to hear the sounds and rhythms in the words of those further along their way to accomplishments in the poetry world, to meet them and become part of trusted writing groups. I couldn’t afford a baby sitter and I couldn’t afford not to go.

You were both tired after a week of school and didn’t understand much of what the poets were reading. I was asking a lot of you to sit in the old hard wooden auditorium seats where your legs couldn’t reach the floor and you had to sit still to avoid making the seats squeak. I felt like I had no choice and I am so grateful to you for coming with me. How can I forget your little kid jackets over the back of the seats, the powder blue one, Emily, with a white fleece-lined hood and a pattern of little snowflakes, and the red one, Seth, padded like a quilt, the one we had to go back one Saturday afternoon to retrieve from Gas Works Park after you’d forgotten it following kite flying with a friend’s family? How can I forget the honey-colored hair straggling outside your ponytail and white barrettes, Emily, the red Healthtex dresses and the way you’d listen to my poem drafts and tell me what you liked? Seth, your pockets were always full of garden snails and twigs. When you could no longer keep from wiggling, you asked to sit just outside the auditorium doors, and between poets reading, I’d let you, sometimes asking Emily to go too, thinking you’d be better off with her company, warning you to not make noise that would disturb the audience. How can I forget what it felt like to be a family in support of my dream?

As I parented you, I was also parenting myself–nurturing the poet that had been in me early but hadn’t found a way out until after you were both born. I was writing about what we did and what made us happy–cleaning the house and shopping together, attending city festivals, hosting late night Charades games with actors from a local theater company when their plays had ended. We cooked our own Playdough, wrote our own books sometimes, walked to the pet store to learn about gerbils and parrots, adopted kittens.

We had a library two blocks away and a Tex-Mex restaurant with a tree that grew up the middle of the dining room. There was poetry in everything we did–afternoon walks to gymnastics classes, weekend cobbler baking from the cherries our two trees bore, and morning arrivals at your school where teachers wrote a note on butcher paper every day and posted it for the older children to read to the younger ones. I always stayed to listen, touched by the teachers’ way of informing their students about the day to come, of entrusting knowledge, of fostering everyone’s involvement. Most of all, I cried seeing the younger children admiring the older children’s reading, feeling eager to learn themselves.

I am writing to you 29 years later when so much has happened: I have published many poems and books. Emily, you are a professor with an office in the very building where my advisors had their offices. Seth, though you are no longer with us in body, I live in a house you designed when you were 17. I had the joy of seeing you become an architect and collect accolades from many. I am getting to know my two grandsons and missing the children you would have had, but, always, I am sure that poetry is the heart of my life, the very reason I succeeded in raising you both well and in coping with the grief of losing you, Seth. It is the way I celebrate our family continuance in the beings of Emily’s two boys. I have never said thank you, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of you in those hard auditorium seats and feel grateful that you could manage.

Today I watch our new President Barack Obama and his family on television. I see his ten and seven-year-old daughters glisten with joy and pride. I know they will do great things as their father is leading by kind and inspired example, urging all to service. I think of the bus stop shelter you built, Seth, while you were in architecture graduate school at Berkeley–the satisfaction it brought to you as you spent weekends heading up a team of fellow students driving to the Central Valley to build what would provide shade for the migrant workers who waited in hot sun each day for transportation. I think of you, Emily, using grant money that would have been income for you to bring your graduate students to an international conference so they would be part of the inner circle of the field they are entering.

There is so much more I think about, too, image after image after image, word after word after word. You were my team as I learned to write poetry, as I parented myself as well as you. On this inauguration day, when so many are expressing their gratitude, I want to express mine. Thank you, you two. How could I love you more tremendously?

Your mom, always

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Write your first draft without worrying about how it all goes together. Just concentrate on harnessing your tide of emotion to specifics from your experience–picnics, state fairs and junk food or auditorium doors and winter coats–you will find yourself writing from all that is within you.