I think that what people think changes a lot as time goes by, and also memories change, so I can remember the same event in different ways in different period of my life.
That's why many people use to write letters to their future themselves, letters written to be read after 10, 20, perhaps 50 years. Just to start a discussion between two different yourself: the present and the future one.
I've always loved this kind of things, and maybe one day I will start to write to my future self, but what I already started to do, and I'm very glad of it, is writing letters to my daughter, letters to be read when she is eighteen.
When my wife got pregnant, before knowing the sex of our child, I opened two different email accounts, one for the name of the male, the other for the female. When we figured out that we were waiting for a little girl, I dropped one address, and went on with the other. I gave the address of Anna to my wife and to our parents too, so she will have a way to better know her grandparents.
The first times I wasn't even a father yet, she wasn't borned yet, and for a lot of time, even after that, I wasn't able to sign the letters calling me father, or daddy, I only starter after several months, I started writing her calling me Omar, like a friend.
I share the password of this account with my wife, I just know half of the password, she knows the other half, so that no one is able to read messages that are just for our daughter Anna. This is a very important point. It makes you think very well of what are you writing, because it's like a spoken word, there is no come back, and it's very difficult because there are a lot of variables you don't know.
She's one year old now, and I think I will be very different in 2029. I know sometimes people becoming older begin to forget how it feels to be young, starting to have different views, maybe more conservatives one, or just more judicious.
I just have little idea of how I will be in seventeen years, I haven't the faintest idea of how my daughter will be by then, and above of all, I can't even guess how our relations will be. I remember my teen age years, and I know it wasn't easy to deal with me then.
Today I'm already very different from how I was when I was eighteen, so maybe by 2029 me and Anna will have run into some difficulties in communication.
If it will be the case, I hope that reading what I'm thinking now about her, about my life, could be useful to understand better each other, finding out that we are more similar than she expected, for example. If it's not the case, and we'll perfectly understand each other, I just needn't have to worry about it, and if so, I think it will be in any case just a good present for a girl on the beginning of her adult life.
Did you ever find a letter or a diary or letters written by your parents in the past? How did you feel reading it?