My beautiful daughter Bree. Today you turn four. From a distance, four is just a number, and a birthday just another day. A symbolic gesture of time passing. But we have always known that time and the way it passes through you has carried a little more weight, been a little more looming, and been a little less expected. So on your birthday, we celebrate it a little deeper.  

I am not writing this for you. This letter is for me. You won’t understand it now or later. You are a cognitive mystery, not because you lack understanding, but because you live in a world I can only witness, not enter. You are an equal and deserving member of our family, and yet a special and unique addition to this world. You are a sunflower blooming at the bottom of the ocean. You are a star that we can appreciate, but never fully understand. 

I write this letter as a tool to process my feelings for you. I write this letter as a tool to process my love for you. I’m flooded with emotions that have never fallen neatly into words, but are splattered across a spectrum of joy and wonder and love and fear and regret and sorrow. To write is to release the pressure valve. To let these unnamed emotions flow, rather than jumble into fractured chaos inside. I do this for me. 

I share this letter as a way to express my love to the world around you. To both validate your beauty and attempt, as much as I can, to give others a glimpse of your worth. Your personality shines in your nuance. In the different grunts and sounds you make, the arches of your smiles, and the slow and deliberate movements of your eyes. I want people to realize what those closest to you realize: that you bring a magic to this world that is incomparable to others. 

Again, these are just words for me and others, not for you. You live in a blissful unawareness. A joy rooted in the here and now, untouched by the fears and anxieties that haunt the rest of us.

While you do not understand the meaning of this day, your life in itself, as you are, makes this day significant. Your birthday is a defiance to those who doubted you. It’s an excuse to gather with the friends and family that support us and you. It’s a chance for everyone to reflect on what care, value, joy, and time truly mean. To question our priorities. To reconsider our understanding of love and contribution. To look others in the eye and say: you matter, simply because you exist. You make us all reevaluate what it means to be human. That caring for someone else can fill our cups. 

You teach us that next year is never a guarantee, so the todays should be more full.  

You have shown the world the malleability of love. How it can shape and form in so many different ways. You have ignited a love within your sister, Shyla. You’ve taken the incredible girl she is and somehow helped her bloom into an even more amazing person.

You belong to this world and also exist in a space we can never fully grasp, but live in the radiance of. 

So, on this today, we mark the day you arrived, this rare, radiant star, and we celebrate the beautiful unknown that is you.