A Letter to My Baby — Written Before You Could Read

Why This Works

Your baby won't remember their first year. That's the strange, poignant thing about new parenthood: the period in their life where you're the most consumed by them, the most transformed by them, the most exhausted and in love — they won't recall any of it. The stories you'll tell them someday are all you'll have to share, and the stories will always be the version you remember, not the version you lived. The actual inside feeling of those first months vanishes the fastest.

A letter, written right now to your baby, pins it down. You write in your real voice, to the specific tiny human sleeping in the other room, on a specific night when you couldn't get them down and ended up writing instead. You describe what they look like today. The things they already do that feel like them. What you're learning about yourself in this first year of parenthood. What you want them to know about who you were when they were new. Then you seal the letter, we hold it, and on their first birthday it arrives in the mail.

They won't read it on that first birthday — they're one. But you will, with them in your lap. And years from now, when they're old enough, they'll read it themselves. They'll meet the version of their parent that existed at the beginning of their life — the one who was still learning how to be anyone's parent, let alone theirs. Most kids don't ever get that. They get a few photos and a lot of retold stories. Your kid is going to get a real letter, in your real handwriting, from the parent you were before you even knew who they were.