On the night of August 4, 2014, the day her daughter Saoirse was born at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Aoife Brennan sat on a recliner in a quiet hospital room and wrote a letter on a folded piece of paper a nurse had given her. The letter was three paragraphs. It was addressed to Saoirse. It said, among other things, that the world she had been born into was loud and bright but had at least one quiet person in it who would love her without conditions.
Aoife folded the letter into thirds and put it in her bag. The next August, when Saoirse turned one, she wrote a second letter. She has written one every August since. There are now eleven.
The letters are kept in a small unfinished pine box, made by Aoife's brother in 2015 for this purpose. The box sits on the top shelf of a linen cupboard in the family's flat on Robie Street. Saoirse, eleven, knows the box exists. She knows what is in it. She has been told, repeatedly, that she will not read the letters until her eighteenth birthday.
She has not, to Aoife's knowledge, opened the box.
Aoife is forty-three. She works in development for a small cancer-research charity. The father of her daughter is Liam Brennan, forty-five, a paediatric nurse at the same hospital where Saoirse was born. The marriage is, by both their accounts, ordinary and good. Liam knows about the letters. He does not read them either.
The ritual of the letters is one Aoife observes alone. Each August 4, after Saoirse's birthday party (and there has been a party every year, of varying scale), Aoife sits in the kitchen, sometimes after midnight, with a cup of tea, and writes.
The letters are not long. The first letter, the hospital letter, was three paragraphs. The longest letter, written in 2020 during the first pandemic year, was four pages. The shortest, written in 2018 when Aoife was exhausted and Saoirse had not slept properly for a week, was four sentences.
The content varies. Aoife will say, if asked, that the letters are partly a record, partly a confession, and partly, she suspects, a kind of cowardice. There are things she would like to tell her daughter that she cannot say to her at the age she is now. There are things she will not be able to say at any age. The letters are a place to put them.
Some of what she has written, she will not even reread herself.
The 2015 letter, written when Saoirse was one, is mostly about how it felt to give birth. The 2016 letter is about a near-divorce that did not happen. The 2017 letter is about Saoirse's first complete sentence, which was I do it myself, delivered to Liam at a kitchen counter, and which Aoife wrote down on the spot.
The 2018 letter, the short one, says only that the year has been hard and that Aoife is sorry she has not been a better mother in it. The 2019 letter retracts the apology, gently, on the grounds that Saoirse was, at five, by all evidence, fine.
The 2020 letter is about the pandemic. The 2021 letter is about Saoirse starting school in person, finally, in a classroom on Quinpool Road. The 2022 letter is about the death of Aoife's father. The 2023 letter is about Saoirse, age nine, beginning to develop opinions about her own body, and what Aoife felt and did not say in response.
The 2024 letter, written when Saoirse was ten, is about something Aoife had not previously written about, which was an episode of her own childhood she had not, until then, told anyone.
The 2025 letter, last year's, is about a small estrangement between Saoirse and a former best friend, and about how Aoife wished she could fix it but knew she could not.
The letters are written on whatever paper is to hand. Some are on lined notebook pages. Some are on the back of receipts. The 2017 letter is on a sheet of hotel stationery from a trip to Truro. The 2022 letter, the one about Aoife's father, is written on the back of his funeral programme.
Aoife is aware that this practice will not, on its own, produce a child who feels loved. The letters are not a substitute for daily love. She knows this. They are something separate, a slower channel.
What the letters give Aoife, she has come to understand, is an annual obligation to stop and say what she actually thinks of her daughter that year. There is no editing for the audience, because the audience does not yet exist. There is no performance, because no one is watching. The letters are perhaps the only place in her life where Aoife writes without considering how the words will land.
Liam, the father, has said he will, perhaps, begin his own letters this year. He has said this twice. He has not, so far, begun.
Saoirse, on her eleventh birthday last August, asked her mother at the cake whether there would be a letter again. Aoife said yes. Saoirse asked how many there were now. Aoife said eleven. Saoirse, doing the arithmetic of an eleven-year-old, said: Seven more.
There will be seven more, if Aoife stays well, which she expects to. She has a plan for what to do if she does not. She has written, into a separate envelope kept in the same pine box, instructions for Liam and for her sister Niamh about what to do with the letters if Aoife is no longer alive when Saoirse turns eighteen. The instructions are short. They say that Saoirse may have the box, regardless.
The writer Catherine Newman has written about her own version of this practice, an annual letter to each of her children that she rereads on their birthdays. Aoife's variant differs in one respect. Aoife does not reread. She writes the new one without consulting the old ones. The accumulation is part of the point.
When Saoirse is eighteen, she will open the box. There will be, by then, eighteen letters. Aoife does not know how Saoirse will read them. She has imagined, on different evenings, different scenes: Saoirse alone in a university dorm room with the box on a desk; Saoirse at the kitchen table on Robie Street, Aoife and Liam pretending to be out for a walk; Saoirse opening one a year for the next eighteen years, the way Aoife wrote them.
Aoife has no preference among these. She has decided, somewhat formally, that what Saoirse does with the letters is none of her business. The writing was hers. The reading is her daughter's.
Last August, after the eleventh letter, Aoife put the folded paper into the box, closed the lid, and put the box back on the linen cupboard's top shelf. The kettle was still warm. She poured a second cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table for a while longer, not writing anything else.
