09/02/2026
My baby girl is 12 🌼
There is this weird thing about time when you’re a mother.
Motherhood can feel incredibly long and endlessly abundant while you’re living it, and impossibly short and unmistakably fleeting once you look back.
Our children are growing into people while we are quietly collecting versions of them we’ll never meet again.
There’s a line in Interstellar about parents becoming memories for their children. But the older I get, the more I realize it happens the other way around too.
All these versions of you that I loved so completely — and somehow had to say goodbye to without ever realizing it was the last time 🥹
That may be the strangest thing about motherhood: while you’re busy living your ordinary life, time is quietly turning it into the memories you will one day miss the most.
And then, every so often, you look up.
And your baby is 12.
Ariel, you were the first baby to make me a mother. But more than that, you are a big part of the reason I became a mother of many. Loving you made me fall in love with motherhood itself. You showed me a kind of love so endless that, somehow, instead of feeling complete, my heart wanted to experience it again and again.
And still — there will only ever be one you.
My first baby.
The beginning of everything.
Watching you grow is the greatest privilege of my life, even if a tiny part of me will always be reaching backward for all the little versions of you I wish I could love + hold just one more time.
Happy 12th birthday, baby girl 🤍
#12
