What you say, and how you say it, and why it’s everything to me.

Dear Thomas:

When I sat down to write this triennial letter to you, I closed my eyes to think of all things Thomas, and one thing quickly sprang to mind: your voice.

Your voice, I’ve decided, comes from the Williams side of the family. Much like your Mom and your Poppy, yours is a voice that rarely struggles to be heard. It booms, even if it comes from your young frame; it cuts clear above the rest of the family’s chatter. From time to time, we will remind you to use an inside voice, but it doesn’t matter. Your volume switch bottoms out somewhere around “indoor voice, but as if one is in a crowded arena.”

How you use your voice to speak, and what it sounds like, are the products of hard work. As we marked your ninth birthday, we were mostly convinced that soon you would need surgery to correct what we had found was a physical gap in your throat that caused you to have a slight speech impediment.

That discovery was a relief in many ways. Your years of working with a speech therapist weren’t seeming to amount to much, and it was becoming easy to blame you, to think that somehow you weren’t trying hard enough, that the lazy-Rrrr sounds you made were the product of not caring. But they weren’t. You couldn’t make the sounds you tried to make because a tiny flap of skin hadn’t grown enough in the back of your throat. That’s all.

I have the benefit of writing this long after your ninth birthday–forgive me for being late–and so I have the privilege of knowing now that sometime in between that initial visit with the surgeon and when we moved to Sylva, that little flap of skin showed up. And though it was harder for us to hear it at first, your new classmates and teachers here in the mountains didn’t even notice that you had much of an issue speaking whatsoever. We dutifully enrolled you in speech therapy at your new school, but the therapist quickly surmised that you didn’t need much help at all. (She did enjoy working with you, though.)

Now, your Mom and I can hear how hard you work to shape your words. Your big, loud, wonderful voice continues to pronounce your thoughts and ideas with intention and care.

It gives sound to your wonderful laughter and an emerging sense of humor, and it also emits perfect pitch to the times when you are disappointed, or jealous, or angry. Having two sisters will almost always ensure you’ll live within a full range of emotion.

Having written this long after I’d originally intended, I also have the benefit of knowing more.

We celebrated your birthday in our house in Statesville, where we had mostly packed our entire lives into boxes. We had made the decision to leave your hometown and venture out into the mountains. We uprooted you from everything that you knew and brought you into a foreign and strange land.

This was the biggest challenge you’d ever faced. You were no longer Thomas Hogan, son of the popular music teacher; instead, you were Thomas, the New Kid. And though it didn’t take long for you to showcase your identity to your new schoolmates, I know it wasn’t easy for you. I could see when you were lonely, when you missed your friends, and how you longed to just hop on your bicycle and ride around. There were times when your heart clearly ached, and mine ached with it.

But you are making it through, finding a way, toughing it out.

The scariest part of deciding to move here and change our family’s lives was the worry that somehow we would mess up your life in an unfixable way. I will admit to you that there were times when I wondered if I’d made a mistake, that perhaps this whole experience was causing you harm. It was easy to second guess myself.

But sometime after we moved here, you began to say something every night before bed: “Best Dad in the world.”

At first, I have to admit I felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure if you needed to say it to me, or if you really believed it–after all, it was my fault that you were having such a rough go of it. I wasn’t sure if I believed it.

One day, though, I realized that what you were saying echoed something my Nana always said to me: I have the best family in the world. I’ve thought about it for years.

Soon, when you would say “best Dad ever” before bed, I’d reply with “best son in the world.”

I should note here that it wasn’t long before Julia and Annie caught on to this. They would repeat your “best Dad” line, but then I was stuck when it came to responding–I couldn’t say “best daughter” to two different people.

So now I say this: “Best Thomas in the world.” And I mean it. You are a blessing to me and to all of us in this family. Your voice–your loud, Williams family voice–fills me with pride. And when you use it to tell me that you think I’m somehow the best Dad ever, even when I don’t deserve anything near such an accolade, I get another reminder of what a good heart you have.

There’s so much more I could say–about how you’ve become a reader, or a real Minecraft aficionado, or a Cub Scout-certified carrier of pocket knives–but just know that you are, without hesitation, the best Thomas in the world.

I love you, buddy.

Dad

(Note: this is listed as published in December 2021, but in reality, I wrote it much, much later.)