January 18, 2026
Dear Sophia,
Marielle and Amanda came over this afternoon. They were just beside themselves at how adorable you are. Marielle brought a stuffed rabbit and a card signed Auntie Marielle. “Can you believe it?” she said to me. “Did you think during the pandemic this could happen?” She gestured toward your mother sitting up in the bed and you at her breast and shook her head. “It’s unbelievable. It makes me emotional.”
When I met Marielle we lived just a block apart, in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington DC. She was from The Netherlands, and therefore quite tall — and very kind and friendly. We lived across Connecticut Avenue from each other, but we met on Match.com. We quickly became friends. She began attending the weekly happy hours I had begun organizing in August 2020, near the height of the pandemic. In the mornings I would often jog through Rock Creek, wearing my laptop in a backpack, and then emerge from the heat and humidity of the forest to join her outside at a coffee shop in the Van Ness neighborhood. She was working for a Netherlands-based AIDS non-profit and I was writing about talent and working on a technology idea and looking for jobs.
In May 2023, the same month your mom moved to Washington, D.C., I met Amanda at a legal conference in DC. She was from New Zealand, but after raising several kids she’d become a lawyer. This was in Nevada. She decided she’d rather live in the DC area, and she attended the conference soon after. She met your mother that same day, when a Ukrainian lawyer named Constantine joined us for dinner. Amanda was voluble and unfiltered (your mother said she trusted Amanda because she always knew what Amanda was thinking), and she was one of a small group of my DC friends to read Ordinary Magic (her mother, visiting from New Zealand, did too). Amanda was immediately absorbed into the happy hour group.
Your mother Leah told them about the labor and then the switch to the hospital, and the epidural, and watching you emerge in the mirror. Amanda relayed stories of the births of her own kids, and of nursing them.
I knew her for ten months and felt like I knew her, your mom said. An intimate stranger, she said.
All the clichés. Bundle of joy. Happiest man in the world.
It makes your mother sad, already, to think of you growing older. Even two weeks old! “I don’t like it,” she says, wrinkling her nose. She looks at you. “I want to meet the future yous, for sure, but I also want to stop the one on my chest in time forever.”
You’re not liking the bottle. When we first introduced it you were keen on it. Maybe it flows too fast and you don’t like the indigestion and spit-up. Maybe you just know it lacks all the dynamic qualities of breast milk.
You’re hungry a lot now. About every hour instead of every two or more. Your mother will unlatch you and try to take a shower and brush her teeth and whatnot and you’ll sleep on me for a bit but then you start head-banging on my chest, like a heavy metal fan or anyone else with poor motor control, and you grunt and eh-eh and so I’ll put you between my sloping thighs, facing me, so that the instinct to root is dampened. But once you tire of that only picking you up under the butt and head to swing you back and forth in great arcs can still your cry for a while. It works surprisingly well, while it works. Then your little face contorts through frustration and a mask of pain and the cries begin. I then have to get your mother in place and deliver you to her.
