Today is L’s birthday. She’s fourteen, which means there’s enough adult in her now to imagine what she’s going to look like in her twenties. When she was born she looked like just about every other newborn: squinting and wrinkly, she looked like the most helpless and pure being in existence. Her skin was softer than anything I’ve ever touched, and she smelled like nothing else in the world, a creamy, buttery odor with musky notes of sourness and a base of sweet, freshly baked bread. I held her in my arms for the first time and realized at an elemental though conscious level that we would never be the same again. We were three, with our latest addition being the most helpless member of our new family.

I was so nervous holding her, worried that I might hold her the wrong way, might grip too hard for fear of dropping her, might not support this or that appendage properly and thus allow grave damage. I spent the first several weeks worried that I was doing something wrong. Those weeks of “is this right?” worry stretched to months, then grew into years, and while the end of that worry is in sight, I know that I will worry for the rest of my life about whether or not I did it wrong.

I see pictures of her infancy now, and I find myself thinking that I’d give significant money to have one more opportunity to hold her as an infant, to have her head nestled into my neck and her feet not even touching my belt. Perhaps that’s the magic of grandchildren: it’s a return to a time of helplessness when we can appreciate it and not simply worry about it.