Mindful Minion

“The greatest legacy I will leave my children is that they will never exist.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer

I came across this quote while mindlessly scrolling through Instagram.

Most quotes disappear as quickly as they arrive. We read them, agree or disagree, maybe save them for later, and move on. But this one stopped me. I stared at my screen for nearly ten minutes, rereading it over and over while scrolling through the comments. Strangers were debating whether it was profound or depressing, compassionate or selfish, wise or cynical.

And somehow, I couldn’t look away.

Perhaps because my birthday is approaching.

Birthdays have a strange way of forcing us to think about existence itself. Not simply another year lived, but the fact that we were born at all. The fact that someone, somewhere, made the decision that we should exist.

And for as long as I can remember, I have had complicated feelings about that decision.

During some of the darkest periods of my life, I remember telling my mother if I had been given a choice, I would not have chosen to be born. It wasn’t a rejection of her love. It was a reflection of my suffering.

I struggled with my mental health for much of my childhood and adolescence. There were years when I hated myself, years when I hated my life, years when simply existing felt exhausting. No parent is perfect, and mine certainly weren’t. There were mistakes, misunderstandings, and wounds that lingered longer than they should have. But through all of it, I never doubted that I was loved.

That is what makes this so difficult to explain.

Because my gratitude toward my parents and my doubts about existence have somehow always coexisted.

I know I was wanted. I know I was chosen. My parents intentionally tried to have me. They hoped for me, dreamed of me, and loved me before they ever met me. I was welcomed into this world with open arms.

I was lucky.

And perhaps that is exactly why this hurts so much.

Because despite all that love, I still suffered.

Life contains beauty. It contains friendship, music, laughter, wonder, and moments so beautiful they make us forget everything else. But life also contains loneliness, grief, heartbreak, illness, disappointment, failure, and loss.

No one escapes suffering.

Not a single person.

Whenever I speak about these thoughts, someone inevitably reminds me that suffering is only half the story. They tell me about joy. About love. About all the things that make life worth living.

And I understand what they mean.

But sometimes I find myself wondering whether the only reason we need happiness to rescue us is because we are here in the first place.

If we had never existed, we would never need comfort.

We would never need healing.

We would never need reassurance after heartbreak.

We would never spend years searching for meaning, belonging, or peace.

Perhaps that thought is unfair.

Perhaps it is incomplete.

But it is a question that has followed me for years.

And lately, I have found myself wondering whether it is fair to ask another human being to carry that same question.

The strange thing is that I don’t think I fully understood this part of myself until recently.

For most of my life, I convinced myself that I didn’t want children. Or perhaps more accurately, I convinced myself that I couldn’t want them. When you’re struggling to carry your own pain, it becomes difficult to imagine carrying responsibility for another human being. It felt easier to tell myself that motherhood simply wasn’t for me.

But as my birthday approaches and I find myself taking inventory of my life, I have begun uncovering things about myself that I somehow overlooked for years.

And one of those things is this:

Perhaps I wanted to be a mother long before I ever realized it.

Not in the obvious way. I never dreamed about baby names or imagined a perfect family. I never consciously thought to myself, One day I want children.

Instead, it revealed itself in quieter moments.

When I was lonely.

When I was heartbroken.

When I felt invisible.

When something went wrong at school.

When I fought with my parents.

When I felt misunderstood.

I would retreat into my room and hug my pillow. Or one of my plushies.

And in those moments, I would imagine they were my children.

I would hold them close.

I would comfort them.

I would talk to them.

I would have entire conversations with them.

I would tell them all the things I desperately needed someone to tell me.

That they were enough.

That they were loved.

That they didn’t have to earn affection.

That they didn’t need to be perfect.

That their feelings mattered.

At the time, I thought I was simply a lonely child talking to stuffed animals.

Looking back, I think I was trying to create the kind of love I was searching for.

I think I was trying to become the person I needed.

The person who listened.

The person who understood.

The person who noticed.

The person who stayed.

I carried so much loneliness as a child. So much self-doubt. So much confusion. And because of that, I developed an almost desperate hunger for emotional understanding.

Not advice.

Not solutions.

Understanding.

To be seen completely and still loved.

To be heard without judgment.

To be met with patience rather than criticism.

To have someone sit beside me and say, I understand. I’m here.

Perhaps that is why the thought of motherhood affects me so deeply now.

When I imagine having a child, I don’t imagine perfection. I don’t imagine achievements, milestones, or family photographs. I imagine listening. I imagine understanding. I imagine creating a place where a child never has to wonder whether their feelings matter.

I imagine giving them the emotional safety I spent so many years searching for myself.

And perhaps that is why this realization has been so painful.

Because it turns out the thing I thought I didn’t want may have been something I wanted all along.

The older I become, however, the more I realize that motherhood is not entirely a choice.

For a long time, I thought it was. I thought motherhood was simply a decision a woman eventually makes. Something she plans for. Something she either wants or doesn’t want.

But life has taught me otherwise.

Uncertainty does not begin when a child leaves their mother’s arms.

It begins long before that.

Before conception.

Before pregnancy.

Before birth.

Before the child even exists.

I cannot control timing, fate, another person’s choices, whether my body will cooperate, or whether circumstances will align. I cannot even control whether I will ever have the chance to meet you at all.

Perhaps that is what frightens me most.

Not suffering itself.

Suffering is inevitable.

What frightens me is how little control we have over it.

The older I become, the more I realize that almost everything that shapes a life exists beyond our control. Before a child is even born, their existence already depends on timing, circumstance, health, fate, and the choices of other people. And after they are born, that uncertainty only expands.

Perhaps that is why motherhood feels so overwhelming to me.

Because loving a child is within my control.

Everything else is not.

Sometimes people speak about motherhood as though it begins with certainty. As though a woman decides she wants a child and the rest naturally follows. But life has never felt that simple to me. Life has always felt fragile, contingent, dependent upon countless variables beyond any individual’s control.

And if I am being honest, there is something terrifying about realizing that even before you existed, there would already be so many things I could not protect you from.

So tonight, I find myself writing to someone who may never exist.

My child.

My hypothetical child.

The child I sometimes imagine when I see a mother carrying her baby through a crowded street.

The child I sometimes think about before I fall asleep.

The child I may never meet.

And sometimes, if I am being honest, I wonder what you would look like.

Would you have my eyes?

My smile?

My stubbornness?

Would you inherit my sensitivity, for better or worse?

Would you be quiet and observant, always watching the world before speaking? Or would you be the kind of child who asks a thousand questions a day and never seems to run out?

Sometimes I wonder what your favorite color would be.

What cartoon character you would become obsessed with.

What toys you would drag around the house.

What books you would ask me to read over and over again until I knew every page by heart.

I wonder what would make you laugh.

What would make you cry.

What fears you would bring to me in the middle of the night.

What questions you would ask about the world.

Would you love drawing?

Would you love animals?

Would you collect little treasures from the ground and insist on showing me every single one?

Would you inherit my tendency to overthink everything?

Or would you be nothing like me at all?

And perhaps what hurts the most is that when I imagine you, I don’t imagine perfection.

I imagine you.

Whatever that would have looked like.

Maybe you would have inherited my eyes. Maybe you wouldn’t.

Maybe you would have looked nothing like me at all.

It wouldn’t have mattered.

You would have been perfect to me.

You would have been beautiful to me.

You would have been enough.

I would have spent your entire life reminding you of that.

Because I know what it feels like to doubt yourself.

I know what it feels like to feel inadequate, misunderstood, or not quite enough.

And if you had been mine, I would have wanted so desperately to protect you from that feeling.

I would have wanted you to love yourself. I really would have.

Sometimes when I see children laughing in a playground, dragging their parents through toy stores, showing off a drawing they made at school, or excitedly talking about something only they care about, I find myself wondering about you.

Would you have liked that too?

Would you have been excited about that?

Would you have come running to tell me about it?

I don’t know.

And that breaks my heart.

Because when I imagine you, I don’t only imagine who you would become.

I imagine all the ordinary moments we would have shared along the way.

I would have taken you on trips.

I would have attended every school competition I could.

I would have sat through every performance, every ceremony, every event, probably taking far too many photos.

I would have proudly shown up to parent-teacher meetings just to hear what your teachers had to say about you.

I would have helped you study for exams.

I would have cheered for you even when you didn’t win.

I would have celebrated your victories and sat beside you through your disappointments.

I would have bought you Happy Meals and baked brownies for you.

I would have listened to stories that made absolutely no sense.

And somehow, those are the things I find myself grieving most.

Not the grand milestones.

Not the big moments.

The ordinary ones.

The everyday moments that quietly become a life.

For a long time, I thought that perhaps being around other people’s children would be enough. Perhaps seeing my friends become parents, watching children grow up around me, hearing their laughter from a distance, would somehow satisfy whatever maternal instinct existed inside me.

But it never did.

If anything, it only made the feeling stronger.

Because every time I see a child discover something new, every time I see a parent comforting their son or daughter, every time I witness one of those ordinary moments, a question appears in my mind.

Would you have liked that too?

Would you have laughed?

Would you have been curious?

Would you have enjoyed this?

And the hardest part is that Mommy will never know.

Mommy will never hear your answer.

And every time I imagine these things, I realize something that breaks my heart.

I don’t think I’m mourning the idea of motherhood.

I think I’m mourning you.

Not the person you would eventually become, but the thousands of tiny moments that would have made up your life. The questions I will never hear. The laughter I will never recognize. The favorite color I will never learn. The bedtime stories I will never read. The ordinary little pieces of you that somehow feel precious even before you’ve existed.

And perhaps one of the saddest truths I have learned is that not every child arrives to the same welcome.

Some children are loved before they exist.

Dreamed about before they exist.

Celebrated before they exist.

And others encounter hesitation, uncertainty, or even rejection before they ever have the chance to become real.

Because timing, circumstances, fear, exhaustion, and the complicated realities of life have already begun making decisions around them.

Even before they exist.

And perhaps that, too, is something I have never been able to stop thinking about.

So I want you to know something: I would choose you.

That has never been the question.

The question is whether choosing you would be enough.

Because I cannot make everyone else choose you.

I cannot make your future friends choose you with kindness.

I cannot make your future employers recognize your worth.

I cannot make strangers treat you gently.

I cannot make the people you fall in love with love you back.

I cannot make fate spare you.

I cannot make life be fair.

I cannot make life be gentle with you.

I cannot promise that one day your heart would not break the way mine is breaking now.

I cannot promise that life will be kinder to you than it has been to me.

I cannot promise that there won’t come a moment when you sit alone, trying to make sense of a pain that feels too heavy to carry.

And perhaps that is what frightens me most.

Not that you would suffer.

Suffering is inevitable.

But that one day you might suffer in ways I recognize all too well.

And perhaps that is the most heartbreaking thing I have ever realized.

Because before I could even worry about the world choosing you, I first had to confront the possibility that even your existence might not be mine to choose.

Sometimes the dream of motherhood itself is fragile. Dependent upon timing. Dependent upon circumstances. Dependent upon choices that are not entirely your own. Dependent upon a thousand variables you cannot control.

And that realization has broken my heart more times than I can count.

Every story teaches us that love conquers all. That if we want something badly enough, we fight for it. That determination can overcome every obstacle.

But life has taught me something far less comforting.

Sometimes love is real.

And still, it is not enough.

Sometimes you can choose something with your whole heart and still discover that part of the outcome was never yours to decide.

If somewhere beyond this world there exists a soul who was meant to be mine, I hope you know that if you had arrived here, you would have been loved beyond measure.

I would have memorized the way you pronounced each word the first time you learned it.

I would have celebrated every tiny victory.

I would have listened when you were sad.

I would have sat beside you through every heartbreak.

I would have tried my best.

God, I would have tried my best.

But trying my best has never been the same thing as being able to control the outcome.

My parents chose me.

The world did not.

And perhaps that is the quiet tragedy hidden inside every birth.

A mother may pray for a child, dream of a child, long for a child, and welcome them with tears of joy and open arms. But beyond those arms waits a world that made no such promise.

A world that may celebrate them, ignore them, misunderstand them, disappoint them, abandon them, love them, or break them.

No parent can negotiate with fate.

No parent can remove suffering from existence.

No parent can guarantee happiness.

Perhaps that is why I hesitate.

Because choosing you would be easy.

Trusting the world with you is the hard part.

Because if I chose you, I would want the world to choose you too.

And I cannot ask that of the world.

So this is my apology.

I wish love were enough to bring you here.

I wish wanting you were enough.

I wish fighting harder could guarantee your existence.

But life has taught me that some things remain beyond our reach, no matter how deeply we love them.

And so, sweetie, this is my answer. I am sorry.

If there is another life beyond this one, perhaps we will meet there instead.

Perhaps I will finally hear your laugh.

Perhaps I will finally learn your favorite color.

Perhaps I will finally get to hold you.

But not in this life.

In this life, you will remain a collection of questions I will never have the chance to answer.

And until then, thank you for existing, if only in my imagination.