Nenna

I nicknamed my daughter when I was ten years old.

She is my earliest memory of a time when I wrote for someone else, simply because I wanted to. Although she was—and continues to be—only a dream, I wrote to her in a silky smooth journal with all of the earnest, motherly love my precocious heart could muster.

 I never actually intended to name my daughter Nenna. Rather, I envisioned that it would be a mysterious, affectionate nickname that she would never really understand until her tenth birthday when I gave her the diary. Flipping through the pages of the lavender spiral-bound notebook, she would find quotes, magazine clippings, recipes, and pieces of advice from her ten year-old mother, all addressed to “Dearest Nenna."

This was the first time that I recognized the ability of writing to transcend time. It didn’t matter that I was only ten years old; it didn’t matter that I wouldn’t have a daughter for years and years. It never occurred to me that my advice might seem outdated and juvenile, or even humorous. I wrote for myself, what I wished I could hear from the past.

I wrote for my daughter, a more distant piece of me, imagining the echoes of my past colliding with the future.