Letters to my daughter — journal prompts for the unfinished letter

I keep a separate notebook for the letters I cannot send. Some of them are to my daughter. Some are to the mother I never quite had. Some are to a younger version of myself who is still, somewhere, waiting for permission.

If you would like to begin your own, here are twelve prompts. Use one a week, or all of them in a single afternoon, or none of them at all. The notebook will not mind.

1. Tell her about the room you were standing in when you found out she existed. Be specific — the light, the wallpaper, the sound from the street.

2. Write down the thing your own mother said to you that you have decided not to pass on. Then write what you will say instead.

3. Describe one small inheritance — a phrase, a recipe, a way of folding sheets — that you would like her to keep, and one you would like her to set down.

4. What did you believe about love at seventeen? What do you believe now? Tell her, without protecting her from either.

5. Write a letter as your seventy-year-old self, looking back. What do you wish you had told her sooner?

6. Name a fear you have for her. Then turn the page and name a courage you have for her that is bigger.

7. Write the apology you wish someone had given you. Give it to her.

8. Describe the kind of woman you hope she becomes — not the achievements, just the weather of her interior.

9. Tell her about the first time you felt fully yourself. How old were you? Who was in the room? What were you wearing?

10. Write down three sentences you never want her to apologise for.

11. If she ever becomes a mother — what do you want her to know that no book will tell her?

12. End with a blessing. Not a wish. Not a hope. A blessing — said out loud, into the room, with your whole chest.

The letter does not have to be finished to be true. It only has to be honest in the moment you wrote it. Begin anywhere. Begin again tomorrow.