What poker can teach us about relationships
Of all the hands a man is dealt, the one he gets from his father may be the hardest to look at honestly. We tend to play it one of two ways: we copy it card for card, calling that honor, or we spend a lifetime playing against it, calling that freedom. Every so often, though, a life comes along that shows a third way — studying the hand, taking its measure, and then deliberately dealing a different one to the next generation. The most famous American example of that third way is Abraham Lincoln.
The facts of the father are not flattering, and Lincoln never softened them. Thomas Lincoln was a frontier farmer and carpenter, a man of the fields with almost no schooling, who by most accounts could not see the use of the books his tall, strange son was always reading. Worse, in the custom of the time, the boy was hired out to neighbors for farm work, and the wages he earned belonged to his father until he came of age. Abraham was, in a real sense, another man’s labor — a card in somebody else’s hand, played for somebody else’s benefit.
The adult Lincoln kept his distance, and when the end came, he kept it still. Thomas lay dying in 1851, and Abraham did not make the journey to see him. He wrote to a stepbrother that a meeting would be more painful than pleasant for them both — a sentence that is honest to the bone and sad in the same breath. He did not attend the funeral. Whatever reconciliation the story seems to want, Lincoln declined to perform it. He would not pretend the hand had been other than it was.
And then look at the father he became, because it is the mirror image of the father he had. Where Thomas saw a son and reached for the plow, Abraham saw his boys and reached for nothing at all — he let them be. William Herndon, his law partner, complained that Robert, Willie, and Tad were permitted to overrun the Springfield law office, scattering books and turning the place upside down, while their father looked on unbothered. In the White House, the younger boys treated the seat of government like a farmhouse kitchen, and the President of the United States, mid–Civil War, indulged them. When Willie died in 1862, Lincoln was undone by it. He had given his sons the open, delighted attention he had gone without.
I am a lawyer, and I have watched this pattern in ordinary families for forty years, in estates and divorces and quiet conversations across my desk. The son who was criticized relentlessly either becomes a critic himself or becomes the father who cannot bring himself to correct his children at all. The daughter whose mother was cold either repeats the coldness or smothers. The pattern runs one of two directions, and both are reactions — the hand playing us. What Lincoln did was rarer and harder. He neither copied his father nor simply inverted him out of spite. He seems to have decided, consciously, what a son actually needs, and then supplied exactly the thing that had been missing. That is not reaction. That is judgment.
It is worth noticing what he did not do. He did not rewrite Thomas in his memory into a monster, and he did not perform a deathbed reconciliation he did not feel. He supported his stepmother in her old age. He carried the truth of the relationship without flinching from it, and then he refused to let it set the terms for his own boys. Honesty about the hand you were dealt and freedom from it turn out to be the same move: you cannot play a card well until you will look at it as it is.
A marriage runs on this same principle, by the way. Every spouse brings a father’s example to the table, and the first years of parenting tend to be played on instinct — which is only another word for inheritance. The couples who fare best are the ones who, like Lincoln, stop mid-hand and ask: is this the father I mean to be, or only the one I was shown?
Here is the takeaway. You do not owe your parents a copy, and you do not owe your children a reaction. Take one practice of your father’s — the criticism, the distance, the silence, or for that matter the warmth — and decide about it on purpose, the way Lincoln decided about attention. Then deal that one card differently, deliberately, starting with the next ordinary evening. The hand you were dealt is fixed. The hand you deal is not, and your children will play from it for the rest of their lives.
