Today is Full of Possibilities

I have my mother’s last words tattooed on my arm.

I got them thirteen years ago, a few months after she died. I was twenty-four. I thought I understood what they meant. Something about hope, about choosing light over darkness. The kind of thing you’d want to carry forward from someone you lost.

I’m only now starting to understand what she actually meant.

My daughter is two and a half. Her brain is encoding these mornings at maximum resolution. Every texture, every sound, every expression on my face. She won’t remember any of it.

Research on childhood amnesia is clear: most memories before age three or four don’t survive. The brain systems that store long-term memories are still developing. She’s building herself from experiences she’ll never consciously recall.

Which means I’m the keeper. The only one who will remember what this time actually felt like.

I catch myself reaching for my phone while she's talking to me. She's singing a lyric from one of her favorite show's theme songs, or pointing at something in her find it book, and I feel the pull toward something that isn't here. I put the phone down. I stay.

For a long time I thought this was a problem to solve. A failure to fix. If I could just be more present, more disciplined, more here, then I’d be the keeper I’m supposed to be.

But something about that framing never worked. And this year, with a second daughter, I finally understood why.

My mother was wonderful. Boisterous, funny, the kind of person who filled a room. But underneath there was something she was always outpacing. Things that happened when she was young, too big for a little girl to hold. She kept moving. Kept the energy up. And when the walls cracked, which they did, what came out was from somewhere very deep.

She struggled with depression most of her life. The running was how she managed it. Staying ahead of whatever was behind her.

When the cancer came back and it was clear it was terminal, I think part of her found peace in that. The running could stop.

She left a diary. The last entry read: The ups and downs have been terrifying. Today is full of possibilities, not blank or dark.

Those are the words on my arm.

For thirteen years, I read that as triumph. She was dying and she still chose hope. She looked at a dark situation and refused to let it be dark. That’s what I thought I was carrying forward. Her refusal to give in.

But that’s not what she wrote.

She wrote that the ups and downs had been terrifying. Present tense relationship to past experience. She wasn’t saying she’d conquered anything. She was saying it had been brutal, and today, this specific day, was full of possibilities anyway.

Not despite the terror. Not after the terror. In the same breath as naming it.

There’s a seeking I can’t shake. This sense that the real moment is somewhere else, that I should be moving toward something I can’t name. The phone is just where it goes. Before phones it would have gone somewhere else. Work, plans, the next thing. The next thing is always more compelling than this thing, even when this thing is my daughter eating her lunch, listening to the Winnie the Pooh storybook for the hundredth time.

I recognize it now. The seeking is my version of my mother’s running.

She ran from things too heavy to hold still with. I seek because staying means feeling the full texture of everything. The weight of time passing, the fact that my infant daughter will only be this small right now, the bittersweetness of moments that are already becoming memories.

The seeking is how I outpace that.

Scientists talk about prospective and retrospective duration. How long time feels while it’s passing versus when you look back. Novel experiences force the brain to write new files. Routine lets it compress and move on. This is why childhood summers felt eternal and adult years disappear.

I used to think the goal was more novelty. Force the brain to encode. Fight the compression.

But my mother wasn’t writing about encoding. She wasn’t trying to hack her experience of time. She was choosing to be in the day she had, one of her last, while fully acknowledging that the ups and downs had been terrifying.

She wasn’t saying “I finally stopped running.” She was saying “today is full of possibilities” while still holding everything that made her want to run.

That’s what I missed for thirteen years.

I see my mother in my eldest's smile. The way her cheeks squint when the joy is genuine. Nothing performed, nothing hidden.

She won’t remember these mornings. Her brain is writing everything down, forming who she’ll become, and it will all dissolve before she can access it. The asymmetry used to feel like pressure: she's recording everything and will lose it; I could record everything and I'm letting moments slip.

But that framing was wrong. The goal isn’t to stop the seeking, to fix the pattern, to finally achieve presence as a permanent state. The seeking doesn’t stop. My mother’s running probably never fully stopped either.

The goal is to choose the day anyway.

My infant daughter is seven weeks old. I’ve done this before. The weight of her, the rhythm of feeding, the particular exhaustion. I notice myself compressing. Filing these weeks under “infant phase” instead of encoding them fresh.

And the seeking is still there. The pull toward the next thing. The sense that I should be doing something other than sitting here with her weight against my chest.

But I’m learning something. When I let myself stay, not by defeating the seeking but by choosing to stay anyway, time does something different. It doesn’t slow exactly. It becomes more there. The resolution goes up. I can feel the texture of it.

That’s what my mother’s words actually meant. Not that she’d found peace. Not that the darkness was gone. But that today, right now, whatever morning it was when she wrote that entry, was full of possibilities.

She chose the day. Knowing everything. Holding everything. She chose it anyway.

I don’t have this figured out. The seeking is still there every morning. The phone is still in my hand more than I want.

But I’m not trying to fix that anymore. I’m not waiting until I’ve solved the pattern to be present. I’m choosing the day with the pattern still running.

She won’t remember these mornings, but something of them will live in who she becomes. Just as something of my mother lives in the words I’m still learning to understand.

Tomorrow I’ll reach for my phone again. I’ll feel the pull toward something else. And I’ll choose the day anyway.

That’s not the end of something. That’s just the morning.