I have been writing about mothers and daughters and daughters and fathers for what feels like a lifetime. Wading into the complicated and beautiful relationships, not unaffected by history, lineage, beauty, survival, and reckonings.
The beauty of the work that I do here is in how it allows my writing muscles to move and my imagination to flex in different and more technical—but still creative—ways. This gift has nurtured my personal writing, and my personal writing has nurtured this space. Symbiotic. Reciprocal. Ritual. A bridge between the head and the heart.
These two seemingly unrelated drifts of thought occupy this page, connected by a vein—an alchemy. A birth.
March brought me a daughter.
March brought me a wish and a promise, and she has been threaded through every tap of the laptop keys and wave of the pencil since June of 2022.
Life always changes the stories we occupy and, this month, she continues to evolve my own—the one I write in breath and bone.
As I read the stories that occupy this issue, I feel a deep thankfulness for what this journey has brought to me and my family. Beginnings and endings fill these pages, and so much of the stories we tell traverse this cycle, enrich our understanding of each other in this industry, and expand our family and personal lineage here.
I may be reading the tea leaves through the lens of this new experience. Seeing things that have always been there but now have oxygen and breathe differently than they have in the past 11-and-a-half years I have been at this company. Whatever the lens—microscope or microcosm—I thank you, more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today.
While I take a bit of time away to let this new life emerge from its chrysalis, know that these stories have fed my heart, and so fill my family.
I humbly and wholeheartedly finish this letter with a strong desire to continue writing it. So, this is both a beginning and an end in the most beautiful of ways.
See you all very soon.
