January 16, 2026
Dear Sophia,
You’re three days old today. Even smaller than when you were residing inside of another human. (Still learning to latch properly to breastfeed, you’d lost about 12% of your birth weight as of this morning).
I was looking at photos of your mother’s birth and first year or so of life this evening and then thinking about how that little girl became the woman I met a few decades later. It made me wonder what you’d be like at your mom’s age – surely an extraordinary, beautiful young woman, but the details are too vague – and that, in turn, led me to think about all the drafts of you, the versions of you at different ages and phases of life, that I would not get to know.
There will always be a kind of dull ache for what I will not experience with you, or what I won’t experience of you. I can feel my way into this feeling only because (1) you came along, forcing my imagination into new places and (2) I vividly recall my mother’s sadness about leaving me, and I imagine her sadness about all that she would not see – whether I became happy, whether I found a companion, whether, even, I ever had a child. Did she wonder about that?
Did she think it was possible, and therefore a source of pain? Or, perhaps worse, for her, did she worry none of those things would happen to me, for me, in the first place?
Love,
Dad
