Everyone is writing to the new mother. Does the new father get a card of his own?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nYes, and put his name on the envelope rather than both of theirs. The flood in the first two weeks goes almost entirely to his partner and to the baby, which is right, and it leaves him holding a phone full of congratulations meant for somebody else. A card addressed to him is not competing with hers; it fills a gap she does not have. Keep it about him \u2014 the phone call, the drive home, the fact that he sounded different \u2014 rather than about the birth, which he will have recounted forty times. Then send something to her separately, so his card does not read as a household card with her left out. Two envelopes, one trip to the mailbox, and nobody has to interpret anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have never written each other anything. Does a letter from his father come out of nowhere?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nIt comes out of nowhere, and that is most of its value. In families where the men communicate by errand and by phone calls about the truck, a written page is the strongest signal available precisely because it breaks the pattern, and he will know what it cost to produce. Two things keep it from being uncomfortable. Keep it short \u2014 five or six sentences is a full letter in a family like this \u2014 and put something concrete at the end, an offer or a date, so he has an ordinary thing to answer instead of having to match the register. Then do not hand it over and wait. Mail it, and never raise it again. A written page that gets referred to afterward stops being a gift and turns into a debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her parents are grandparents too. How do you write without it reading as a claim?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nKeep the card entirely inside your own relationship and it cannot read as a claim. The trouble comes from the comparative register \u2014 first grandchild, the family name, who he takes after \u2014 because each of those quietly puts two sets of grandparents on a scale, and it gets read that way even when nothing of the kind was meant. Write about your son, about your history with him, and about what you are offering. The useful move is not in the card at all: decide between yourselves who visits first, who takes which weekend, and who asks about the holidays, and settle it with the other parents directly rather than through the couple. New parents should not be running that negotiation in their first month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The timing was hard \u2014 he is young, it was not planned, or the year has been rough. What do you leave out?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nLeave out the verdict, in both directions. That includes the reassuring one \u2014 you will be fine, the two of you can handle this \u2014 because a card that delivers a judgment has still delivered a judgment, and the next one could just as easily go the other way. It also includes anything that names the difficulty as difficulty. He knows the circumstances better than you do and does not need them summarized on a day that belongs to him. What is left over is plenty. Say you are glad the baby is here. Say what you think of him as a person, which is a separate subject from how the timing looks. Then make an offer specific enough to be accepted or turned down, and stop there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do we sign it Mom and Dad, or Grandma and Grandpa?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nMom and Dad, for this card at least. The first thing he reads from you after becoming a father is the one place where being his parents outranks the new title, and signing it the other way reassigns everybody in a single stroke: he becomes the father, you become the grandparents, and the relationship actually doing the work goes off the page. There will be years of cards signed the other way, most of them addressed to the child. Save it for those. If you want the new word in at all, drop it into the body as an aside rather than the signature \u2014 that version reads as amused instead of as staking something. The exception is a card written to the baby to be read years later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Your son just became a father, and the card in front of you is harder than it has any right to be. Everybody else in the family gets to be simply delighted about the baby. You are the one who has known him since he was the one being carried out of a hospital, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":592,"featured_media":4534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2650],"tags":[],"moimportance":[],"motype":[],"moformat":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4533","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-greetings"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/592"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4537,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4533\/revisions\/4537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"moimportance","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moimportance?post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"motype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/motype?post=4533"},{"taxonomy":"moformat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queens.name\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/moformat?post=4533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}