To my daughter on her thirteenth birthday

The monstera plant you gave me last spring sits in the kitchen window, its leaves pressed against the glass like palms seeking warmth. One leaf has developed brown spots, crisp at the edges where it forgot to unfurl completely. The others reach in their characteristic splits and perforations—nature's design to let wind pass through, to prevent the broad leaves from tearing in tropical storms. Even in failure, there is adaptation.

I've watched you study this plant, your fingers tracing the aerial roots that snake down toward the soil, searching. "Is it dying?" you asked last week, pointing to that imperfect leaf. The question carried more weight than its four words should bear. These days, you ask many questions like this—about the shrinking monarch migration, about the empty lots where meadows used to be, about the summers that burn hotter each year.

The truth is, I don't always know how to answer. The leaf is damaged but the plant grows on, putting out new shoots with a persistence that seems both foolish and brave. This morning, I noticed a tiny leaf emerging, tightly coiled like a fist. It will take weeks to open fully, to reveal whether it will be whole or split, perfect or flawed.

When you were small, you used to imagine yourself as a plant—usually a dandelion, stubborn and bright, breaking through sidewalk cracks. Now at thirteen, you see yourself more like this monstera: reaching for light while anchored in shadow, carrying the marks of hard seasons while pushing toward growth.

What I want to tell you is this: Yes, there is damage. Yes, there are leaves we cannot save. But look at how the plant keeps unfurling new possibilities, how it finds ways to continue even when the path forward isn't clear. Look at how it adapts—not by becoming harder or more defensive, but by creating spaces for the wind to pass through, by learning to bend without breaking.

The brown-spotted leaf will eventually fall away. But today, right now, a new leaf is uncurling in the morning light, carrying all the complexity of our moment—the inheritance of damage and the insistence of hope, the hard truth of loss and the harder truth of continuation. We cannot know what shape it will take. We can only tend it as it grows.