You have just been born, and already I am kissing your feet, your hands, your neck.

“I could kiss you to pieces.”

It is no exaggeration. It is the most sincere thing I have ever said. I could kiss you to pieces!

Just hours ago, you were inside me. Now you have come into the light, and the body that carried you can hardly believe it. What it feels has an ancient name: you are another self.

In The Symposium, Plato tells us, through Aristophanes, that we were once whole beings. We were split apart, and ever since, love has been the longing to become one again. ¹

We have all felt it: those who have held a newborn and those who were once held in someone’s arms. “I could eat you up” is the desire to recover that lost unity.

But from the very first day, something begins to teach us otherwise.

You cry, and we don’t know why.

You refuse what we offer you.

You are someone else.

And that is where the art of loving begins: loving someone who is part of us without devouring them. Love that cannot say “no” begins to look more like possession than love.

Aristotle observed that we become just by practicing justice, and courageous by practicing courage. ² Virtues are formed through practice. Every morning kiss, every bedtime story, every boundary set at the right moment helps shape who you become.

And with every light that emerges from us because of you, we, too, are building our own experience of parenthood.

None of this is spectacular. Education is love put into action: a sum of small acts of self-giving that no one applauds because they seem to come naturally, as though they were written into our very nature.

There is no instruction manual.

You don’t need perfect parents. They don’t exist, and besides, they would be an impossible standard to live up to.

You need parents who are consistent: who try to do what they say, and who acknowledge it when they fall short. You will learn more from watching them ask for forgiveness than from hearing them claim they never make mistakes.

A real example is what is needed. One you can actually live up to.

Seneca knew this: the road of precepts is long; the road of example is short and effective. ³

Then adolescence will arrive, and you will close the door to your room. It will be your way of finding yourself. You will feel as though you are just beginning to discover who you are, and you will want to take center stage. The Delphic maxim “Know thyself,” which Plato connects to Socrates search for self-knowledge, is a provocative challenge. ⁴

And we will face the hardest part: not giving away the ending. Our task will not be to give you answers, but to keep the door of our home open while you search for them. To help you ask the right questions. Sometimes all it will take is a look, or a simple, “You can tell me when you’re ready…” In other words, we parents should not reveal the answers to life before our children have the opportunity to discover them.

True unity is not fusion. It is a bond strong enough to withstand distance. It is a bond that keeps us close, even when we are far apart.

Today, we live in almost the opposite reality. Families connected at every moment, yet rarely truly present: each person on their own screen, all in the same room. Contacts multiply while unity grows weaker. Sometimes we catch ourselves looking at our phones while you are right beside us.

A child needs undivided attention, even if only for a little while.

Perhaps all it takes is a pause: setting aside some time each week, free of screens, when we can look at one another in peace and you can choose what we do together: play, walk, cook, do nothing at all. Sing and dance. Simply be together and savor the happiness of having one another.

And one question, asked quietly: What do you need me to do, or stop doing, for you?

No judgment. Just to see.

We know all these things now, with your little head resting on my shoulder. And yet, we don’t really know them, because the heart doesn’t read philosophy.

I still want to “kiss you to pieces.”

But I will let you go, little by little, because that is the only way you might one day come back.

And that day will come. A room full of people, a thousand things demanding your attention. You will be fifty years old, with your work and your children.

And before greeting anyone else, you will sit beside me and give me a kiss on the cheek.

And silently, I will think: I could kiss you to pieces.

No one will notice a thing.

The important things, as is so often the case, happen where no one can see.