A Letter to My Daughter — the one I could not send

My love — I have started this letter forty-three times. Each version begins the same way: with a sentence I cross out, because no sentence is ever soft enough to hold what I want to say.

I want to tell you that the world will hand you a script before you are old enough to read it. Smaller. Quieter. Kinder. Useful. I want to tell you it is not your script. You did not write it. You do not have to perform it.

I want to tell you that there will be a winter — perhaps many — when love arrives wearing the wrong face. When someone calls you difficult and you mistake it for a diagnosis instead of a compliment. When someone calls you too much, and you spend a decade learning to be smaller, only to realise the room was always small.

I want to tell you that the women in our family carry a long silence inside their throats. That this silence was given to them, and they were told it was love. That you may also be handed it, in a teacup, on a Sunday afternoon, by someone who means well.

Do not drink it.

I want to tell you that there is no version of becoming a woman that does not involve loss. But there is a version that does not involve self-abandonment. And that is the version I want for you.

If I could give you anything, it would not be advice. It would be the years it took me to stop apologising for taking up space.

I am still writing this letter. I will still be writing it the day you read it. That is the strange permanence of mothers — we are always, somewhere, mid-sentence.

With everything, always —
your mother.