On beauty

During our first pregnancy, she suggested we each write out letters to eventually gift to our as-yet-unborn child. She described it as a kind of journal-keeping, articulating self-portraits through our accumulated hopes. It was a solid idea, but one difficult to maintain. I spent two months sketching out paragraphs, regularly dipping into the file on my laptop, but then ran out of steam. During our second pregnancy, neither one of us wanted to even bring up the idea, embarrassed by how little we’d accomplished the first time around.