I put my hands on my daughter’s face, brushed hair out of her eyes and asked her to look at me. I said “you will not know, for a long time, how much I really love you. One day, when you are grown up, maybe you’ll have a daughter and you’ll look at her and you’ll wonder ‘is this how my mother felt about me?’ and the answer to that question is ‘yes. that is exactly how I felt about you.’

Right now you know that I love you but you won’t really know how much I do until you’re older. So never forget that”

She looked at me the whole time I was speaking, letting my words sink into her skin, her eyes, her mouth, and she said “but will my daughter know?” and her face crumbled with fear and sadness and I knew what she was thinking. She leaned forward into my smile and I pulled her close and stroked her hair as I said quietly into her ear “maybe I won’t meet your daughter, I hope I do someday, I know I really want to, but if I don’t, you can tell her the same thing and *you’ll* know that I would have loved her as much as you do”