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A Letter to My Future Child | July 2018

Liaa Fernandez

Dear anak,

I’m writing this to you now, when I can still purely and wholly empathize with the challenges you’re experiencing. That’s not to say that at some point I will stop understanding the way you think, but you’ll soon learn that time is unreliable. It shifts, but also tends to shrivel and jade our perspective on many matters of the heart. I hope you will be able to relate to my insight here; maybe you’ll even learn something from it. 

You will fall in love. No, it’s not always the type you see in movies: girl meets boy, boy thinks girl is cute, they live happily ever after. Love is an abstract - almost like art, if you will. It blossoms in unexpected places. I’ve fallen in love with cities, the breeze of the palm trees on my face at the top of your great-grandparents’ house, and the gentle tug of the waves’ retreat into the sea. And I have fallen in love with the people around me, in every possible way. If you are lucky, you will have met some of them by the time you read this. But most you will never know - because that’s the way life works. They have loved me and I have loved them, and we have shared the days we were meant to spend together. 

You, my dear, will experience many iterations of love as I have, too, throughout all the seasons of your life. Some will bring you immense joy and as a parent, I thank them for that. Others, not so much. And that’s okay! The important thing is that you use both with equal measure: to develop your capacity for feeling, to develop your means of expressing it, and to develop tenacity for handling all the heartbreaks/rejections of everyday life.

These are just some of the lessons I have learned in love and pain, a summary of all the love letters I have written from the road. I hope you will remember these and many more, until the next time I write to you again.

Yours,

Liaa

(mom)