You Don't Get to Choose Your Inheritance

A Father's Day reflection on what we're given versus what we build.

I spent most of my childhood wanting a different last name.

Hammons.

Oh, how I hated having that name.

I grew up with two fathers. My biological dad battled alcohol and gambling for much of his life. My step-dad walked into our lives having already endured profound loss of his own. Upon marrying my mom, he set out to build something quieter, something centered on family and less work, which was the reverse of the life he had lived. Both were imperfect, but as a child I only saw one thing: one father seemed present, the other absent. One felt dependable, the other disappointing. It took me years to understand that life is rarely that black and white.

By the time I was ten, I had already undergone more than twenty surgeries thanks to complexities from a rare type of dwarfism. Childhood, for me, was a rhythm of hospitals, recovery rooms, and uncertainty, and my biological dad never quite seemed to know what to do with a child who required so much from the world around him. I understand that now in a way I couldn’t as a kid.

I have four children of my own today, two of them with significant medical needs and surgeries of their own due to dwarfism. I know what it’s like to carry fear into a doctor’s office, to sit with uncertainty through a sleepless night, to watch your child suffer while wishing you could trade places with them. What I’ve learned is that we don’t all respond to that kind of pain the same way. Some of us lean in. Some of us avoid it entirely. For years, I resented him for choosing the second.

Then, for years after that, I did everything I could to prove I wouldn’t become him. I chased stability, consistency, presence. I wanted my marriage to look different, my fatherhood to look different, my whole life to stand as proof that I was not my biological dad. Somewhere in that chase, my determination quietly attached itself to my last name.

I hated what I had experienced that last name Hammons represented.

Years earlier, my mom and step-dad had offered my biological father a way out: if he voluntarily terminated his parental rights so I could be adopted, they would forgive years of unpaid child support.

He refused.

My mom and stepdad had recently gotten married and were looking to build a life of their own. My stepdad was 17 years older than my mom and now living on a fixed income following an injury on the job that ended my stepdad’s 30+ year career in road construction.

I believe that deep down, they wanted to utilize legal processes to pressure my biological father into giving up his rights. But with their lives ahead of them, they had little appetite for a years-long legal battle.

I didn’t care about the legal logic of any of it. I just wanted a different story than the one his name seemed to be writing for me. To my stepdad, I talked about it often. If only I could shed myself of this name.

One evening, after another rant about changing it someday, my step-dad sat there and listened patiently before rendering his verdict.

“Just because you don’t like what your dad has done, or what the Hammons name has come to stand for, doesn’t mean you can’t change it.”

I stared back at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

He continued.

“You get to decide what that name means now. You can be like the other Hammonses, or you can build your own legacy.”

I never brought it up again.

Not because I suddenly agreed with him, but because something about what he’d said lodged itself somewhere deep inside me, and stayed there.

What my stepdad was actually telling me had nothing to do with a last name. He was telling me that a different name would never make me less like my father, only my decisions could do that. A name wasn’t going to determine who I became. My habits would. My character would. The choices I made when nobody was looking would. He was trying to free me from something I didn’t even know I was carrying: the belief that inheritance was destiny.

It isn’t. We don’t get to choose our inheritance. We do get to choose our legacy.

I’ve come back to that distinction often as a father myself, because my own children won’t inherit perfection either. They’ll inherit me. My strengths, my shortcomings, my unfinished work. The same way I inherited pieces of the men who came before me.

That’s the work of fatherhood, I think. Not perfection. Stewardship.

Taking what we’ve been given and deciding what gets carried forward. No matter how broken the road behind you, you still get to build the one in front of you. It’s a fitting lesson, I suppose, coming from a man who spent thirty years building roads for a living.

Maybe that’s why Father’s Day feels different to me.

For a long time, I thought it required choosing. Celebrating one father, resenting the other, holding gratitude in one hand and disappointment in the other. I don’t think that’s what it’s about anymore. Father’s Day was never meant to celebrate perfect fathers. It was meant to honor imperfect men who left us something worth carrying forward.

And that, I think, is the real distinction worth naming: inheritance is what we’re handed: the name, the wiring, the wounds, the patterns we never chose. Legacy is what we build with it.

Resilience doesn’t come from getting a better hand. It comes from the gap between the two. The daily, unglamorous decision to take what you were given and build something sturdier.

You don’t get to choose your inheritance. But the legacy your kids inherit from you is still being written, one ordinary day at a time.

Happy Father’s Day.

Keep showing up to the inheritance.
Keep building the legacy.