Dear,

Dear future daughter,

Admittedly, I don't think about you often, save for a few times when I ponder what your name might sound like paired with the last name of my future dream husband (how does Arosina Baker Gosling sound?). I'm sorry I'm shitty and obsessed with Ryan Gosling. I promise to care a lot less about myself(and boys) once you come along.

Nonetheless, when I do think about you, they are the coolest, most exciting thoughts I have. I'm really looking forward to having you in my life. I think you'll be a fun girl--street-and book-smart who likes to paint her nails and scrapbook but who also likes to climb scaffolding and go fresh-water fishing. I have a feeling we'll have the same nose and the same olive skin, and we can share stories about how this has both helped and hurt his in the middle-school-boy-department.

I'm looking forward to meeting you at each stage(s) in our lives. When you are newly born and I am finally beginning to feel like an adult, all the way through you turning 18 and learning to no longer feel like a dependent, while I turn 50 and am becoming the woman I always knew I c/would be, we will teach each other lessons that no one else could. We'll be reflections of each other, primordial opposites with nearly identical fates. We'll love the same man (your father), who will mean more to us than we could ever metastasize into words. We'll write each other love notes that we'll probably never send because neither of us will be very good about owning our feelings. And we'll dream of a life that seems so different from our own, while we hold onto each other and the life we have together, which, when we think about, isn't too different from the one about which we fantasize.

You'll be the girl I always wanted to be and I'll be the woman you are both afraid of  becoming and admire unfailingly at the same time. We'll cook together, go thrifting together, watch college football together, and read Nietzche together. Eventually, I'll buy your first pack of cigarettes on New Years and you'll drive me to the hospital when I'm old and frail. We'll resent each other, we'll praise each other, we'll ignore one another, and we'll proclaim our love for one another on a mountaintop for all the world to hear.

We'll hate each other and love one another. It'll suck most of the time, but there will be moments of
the most intense love that neither of us could imagine life without it. I can't wait to meet you. I know already that you're the coolest gal around.

Love,
A