It's the biggest shocker to come out about Steve Jobs in the days since his death. The uber-private former head of Apple doesn't just have a biography coming out about his life, but it's one he authorized. We shall pause while you hit Amazon for pre-order. Back? OK, well this isn't really that shocking. Not when you look at his reasons.
Jobs told TIME he wanted his kids to "know him." Specifically, for Reed Paul, Erin Sienna, Eve, and Lisa to understand that although he wasn't "always there for them," he had his reasons: "I wanted them to know why, and to understand what I did."
It's quite a gesture coming from a man so private, it's almost impossible to track down any information about his parenting, aside from that released by Lisa Brennan-Jobs. She is his daughter from a relationship with his high school sweetheart, who he didn't acknowledge until her teen years (despite giving a computer the same name the year she was born). And I think all of us hold onto the hope that when we die, our kids will have an appreciation for who we were when we were here, a greater understanding of the things that made them rush to their rooms and slam the doors in the teen years.
It's something I confess I think of more often than most. The birth of my child changed my writing career dramatically. It made me more introspective of my role in society, and soon I was moving from a traditional journalist's life of writing about other people to something more in between. I still freelance in the traditional sense, but I've found my heart is in the blogging world where very often I am looking at life through the "mom lens." In the process, I'm creating a written record for my daughter to review. I may hold back on intimate details for both privacy and security reasons, but there's much of my essence now available for her to peruse.
The irony of the age old "stop blogging and parent for crying out loud" criticisms isn't merely that for many of us, blogging is what funds our parenting, but that what we're doing may not seem like it's a role of Mom or Dad now, but it is the role of one later. We are throwing out a landline for our kids to grab on to when we're not there to physically place it in their hands.
For Jobs, the adopted child whose biological father refused to reach out even after speaking publicly about his decisions, this biography decision could mean a lot of things. We'll never know. But as a parent, I can understand why it was important.
Do you have anything written out, any sort of history for your kids?
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