A child is something else before it’s a person
After a child becomes a person, but before they’re a person who has some kind of child (real, planned, fantasized or otherwise) it’s impossible to explain
How ludicrous it is, to imagine naming a real person
How absolutely horrifying for a child to learn that her parents had hoped for a little brother for their daughter
It’s not until you have a child, a conflicting amalgam of hopes, expectations, hubris, and fantasies—not a flesh and bone person, not yet, or maybe not more than a fistful of goo—then you can understand a world where you yourself had not yet been
All the offenses to your personhood come back, new and sinless, to the next person who might become























