Taylor Branch’s incredible series on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement spans three volumes. It’s almost three thousand pages with hundreds of footnotes. It won awards like the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Undoubtedly, Branch is quite pleased with this masterwork of historical scholarship, which he spent untold hours researching, writing, editing, and talking about. But there is a note tucked away in the acknowledgments of the final volume that truly captures both the experience and the family effort such an achievement required. Branch writes, Our son, Franklin, who was born weeks before my first trip to the Lorraine Motel, finished college in time to help me with my final research.
Your kids are with you on this journey, whatever it is. It can be so easy to see your career as something that is you-centric. It’s not. It’s a family affair. The same is true of the ambitions of every member of your household. And the more you can be involved with each other on these personal journeys, the better. It makes the accomplishments sweeter, the work more complete . . . and the sacrifices less painful. Because all of them have been done together.