What We Really Inherit From Our Parents
Every summer, I come back to my dad’s house in the Adirondacks. It’s a place that has been part of my life since I was eleven years old. But these days, it serves another purpose, too. For the summer season, it becomes the Adirondack branch of my law practice.
From here, I meet with clients over Zoom, draft Wills and trusts, record podcast episodes, attend court hearings, and do all of the other things that come with running a law practice. And sometimes I think about just how different this version of me is from the version of me in this photo, taken fourteen years ago at my law school graduation. My legal career was just beginning, and I had absolutely no idea where it would eventually take me.
There have been a lot of stops between that photo and today. I’ve worked at large and small law firms. I earned an LL.M. in Tax. I spent years working with families on estate planning, probate, trusts, and taxes. I left private practice, started a podcast, and eventually took the leap into running my own law firm.
While a lot has changed, my dad’s support hasn’t. Today, that support looks like letting his adult daughter turn part of his house into a law office during the summer. It looks like sharing his space with computers, microphones, client calls, podcast recording, and the general chaos that comes with running a small business remotely. My dad has given me a place where I can keep building something that matters to me while also spending a summer with my family. And I don't take that for granted.
As an estate planning attorney, I spend a lot of time talking about what parents leave their children. Usually, we're talking about the tangible things: a house, an investment account, a family camp, a piece of jewelry, or whatever else someone has accumulated over a lifetime. Those tangible things do matter, and planning for them matters, too.
But they're only part of what we inherit from the people who raise us. We also inherit the ways they supported us, the opportunities they gave us, and the confidence they had in us before we necessarily had it in ourselves. And we inherit all of the phone calls, advice, encouragement, places to land, and countless ordinary acts that don't appear anywhere on an inventory of someone's estate. Those things can shape a life even more profoundly than anything that passes under a Will or trust.
When I look at this photo now, I see two very different versions of my career. Then, I was a new law school graduate standing at the very beginning of it. Now, I'm an estate planning attorney and business owner who gets to spend the summer practicing law from the same Adirondack house I've been coming back to for years. I couldn't have known any of that when this picture was taken. But one thing connects the person I was then to the person I am now. My dad has been there for both. Thanks, Dad, then and now.
