You created these wonderful little people. They came into the world because of you. Take the time to consider the many wonderful things you can do to make their life a little better for having been here.
I don't care whether you are still with their other parent, and what happened between you along the way. To a large extent this does not concern me, except that it does as the father of two children myself. In fact I get riled when I hear people say that a single parent, regardless of whether they are raising the child or not, is of less value than two parents who raise their children together. You created a child in love and you have a responsibility, no matter the distance that may exist between you today.
Leaving an emotional legacy does not mean something that they only consider or discover after you have gone, though that in and of itself could be a nice thing for them. Instead I mean that your child would one day feel they know you better if you can tell them what it was like for you when you were a kid, that they could derive confidence and knowledge from understanding how you got through the tough times, which ones made you want to give up and how you overcame the challenges that allowed you to be who you are today.
Does your child know what it was like for you to grow up in the street where you lived?
Do they have any idea about the crush that you had on that other child in the second year at school, or the way your class teacher would tell funny jokes and make up crazy stories on the school bus when you went to the swimming baths with your whole form from school?
Have they ever heard the songs that your own parents would sing you to sleep with at night, or seen the words to that song written down for them? I know I have and I am so much richer for the experience.
What about the plays you were in at school or the friends you had in the youth club, or the choir, the cadet force, the community walking holiday or the summer camp, or whatever story you have to tell them?
Can you remember that time when you learned that the world was not just the place where you lived, and that there was even more out there than you had ever dreamed possible?
How about the time that your grandparents showed you some piece of their own history, and you sat and listened to them telling you about how you were a part of that history yourself? It could have been a photograph, a map, a medal, a uniform, a programme from a play that they were in or an ancient playground game they had enjoyed as a child themselves.
Take the time to get this down and shared with your own children because one day they may well want to have a sense of belonging to the family and need to tell the story to their own children.
I remember a walk in the countryside with my Dad Peter, my Grandad Tom and my great Grandpa Charlie. For years it was a sort of imagined color movie scene, vague and blurred in my mind. Then when I was in my forties and had two sons of my own, my father found and gave me a photograph of that day and made it seem more real and more special than ever before. It also showed me that my memory of those happy times as a toddler had been right.
Just writing about that discovery brings tears to my eyes again today, but do you know what? The fact that the picture existed and my Dad gave it to me in an electronic or digital scrapbook of family pictures meant so much to me and I have shared these images with my own boys, explaining to them who was who in each picture and hoping they may one day be motivated or interested enough to do the same.
So get on with it soon. Put that scrap book together for them to have something special to hold onto, to look back at and know where they came from. Include in it some pictures you drew as a kid yourself, a photograph, a few pages from an old school report, some stories about your parents and the places you have lived, a diary extract, a letter from a relative, or a joke from an old school friend.
Leave them with something that reveals more of you and allows them to know what a wonderful human being they came from.
Take a chance and spend some time simply being yourself with them. Allow them the chance to see the open, friendly, loving and caring person inside you and they might just remember that moment for the rest of their lives.
And always, always, no matter how far you may be from them, remember their birthdays, for the day they came into the world was then and always will be truly special.
Just like them.