I won’t tell you what the attached is about, because you might shy from it, missing out on a stirring demonstration of both humanity and prose. And yes, it’s by my daughter, whose essays you can discover here.

I view the work of my two writing children with wonder and awe. Son Peter’s fiercely principled Substack essays you can find here. Both write with heart and art – see for yourself. But what swells my pride bigger than a Snoopy parade balloon is their fierce morality. Here are two souls living their lives to better the world for others, not aggrandize themselves. Their goodness almost convinces me our world may yet be saved.

Their mother would be so proud.

Last weekend, I took my three kids on a ski trip in the Adirondacks to celebrate their friend’s 12th birthday — a President’s Day tradition three years strong. The kids run around the lodge like a wild pack, moving en masse from the pool to the game room to the gym, where they’re definitely not supposed to be but no one cares, while the grown-ups drink and play games; and one day a bunch of us ski and ride Gore Mountain.

There always seems to be some drama on this trip, perhaps an inevitability of getting two dozen people together in northern climes where the winter conditions are pretty extreme. There was the year my eldest daughter’s ski pole got caught in the chairlift and she ended up going back down the lift — disappearing into the frigid twilight as the teenager manning the lift obliviously scrolled away on his phone — and the only way to rescue her was to descend a double-black diamond in blinding snow and failing light, which my friend heroically did. (My daughter has mistrusted skiing ever since.)

There was the year one mom forgot her Adderall and got increasingly frantic about minor things like whether there were enough paper plates to serve the cake? There was the year all the kids got a painful skin rash from marinating in the hot tub despite a sign saying it was out of order.

This year, my personal drama was that I was seven weeks pregnant, which at age 43 struck me as a tenuous miracle. I’d long since stopped thinking about another child, and when my period had been a bit late and I had some spotting, I’d at first assumed it was perimenopause.

I hadn’t told many people, having learned the value of discretion after miscarrying my last pregnancy four years earlier. I’d told the kids — how could I not? — but tasked them with the nearly impossible request not to tell their friends yet.

But on the first night of this trip, I gave the kids the green light to tell these friends, and I announced the news myself to a small group of women — which of course meant everyone would know by the night’s end. There was no point in keeping it to myself any longer: my belly was already obvious, especially in a bathing suit, plus I wouldn’t be drinking while they were all getting sloshed, so it wouldn’t take them long to figure it out. I didn’t relish the idea of the gossip otherwise: is she pregnant, or did she just gain weight?

I feel good — strong, I remember saying. (No, I didn’t jinx it. So I keep telling myself.)

The next morning, not 10 hours after I’d finally spilled the beans, I woke up and found myself spotting. While wrangling the kids and all our stuff to the slope, I felt the cramps set in and tried to will what was happening to be something else: a little spotting, a bad dream. I got us all signed in, sent the kids up the chairlift with friends, went to the bathroom, and saw what I already knew. My body already felt different — my breasts were no longer tender, my belly had already begun to deflate.

I called my midwife. She told me what I needed to hear: There is nothing you did, and nothing you can do. If you’ve begun to lose the baby, there’s no medical intervention, no drug for it. I called my husband, and we cried a moment together — like last time, though this was a more mellow sadness. Less world-rocking, the second time.

Should I go back to the lodge and be by myself? The thought filled me with despair. So I strapped on my snowboard and took my little guy — my seven-year-old, who’d been trying to keep up with his big sister — on a green run. And then another. Why not? It was a gorgeous day, 30 degrees and sunny. How many days like this do you get?

I’d be bleeding out my baby somewhere, and I couldn’t think of a better place than this mountain.

I told one friend what had happened. Should we go in the lodge and drink Bloody Marys? she offered, along with a strong hug — a hug that felt like it was gathering the parts of me that were still intact and firming them back together. I love her, love this group of friends, parents of the kids with whom my kids went to Waldorf school when they were toddlers. I wanted to be surrounded by them, to be gliding down the slope together in the sun.

I told my two younger kids the news when we stopped for lunch. This was why I’d been hesitant to tell them I was pregnant in the first place, but it was impossible not to. We are too close for big secrets. And oh, my God, they’d been overjoyed.

Now they were sad, confused, had questions. I gave them the best answers I could, but of course the big question — Why? — is the one you can drive yourself crazy asking. Could it have been the pool chemicals (the ones that had caused that infamous rash), and was it stupid of me to swim laps for an hour last night? The sushi I ate last week that was too spicy for the kids and I didn’t want it to go to waste? The cold I’d gotten a few days earlier? The heavy bin I carried up three flights to our hotel room last night? Was there something wrong now with my uterus, after getting Covid during my last pregnancy? Was it simply my age?

My little guy, for the rest of the day, kept up both ends of our conversation, a cheerful pitter-patter — shenanigans of his classmates, observations about the snow-capped world below us, hypotheticals about what would happen if you skied down this or that off-limits trail — while we rode the lift and worked our way up from greens to the occasional blue. My mind was wandering, but I was full of gratitude to this sturdy soulmate of mine, the one person in all the world I’d most want to be with right now.

Only once did he reveal that the baby was very much top of mind, with a question seemingly out of the blue.

So you got a cut and lost the baby? That doesn’t make sense.

(When the kids had asked, at lunch, how I knew I’d lost the baby, I’d told them I had bled a bunch.)

No, the bleeding was out of my vagina, I said, worried it was too much but not knowing what else to say.

He thought about that as I lifted the bar of the chairlift and we scooched forward to dismount.

“So that was your message,” he said, understanding — enough, anyway. And he said no more about it.

We had a really, really good day. For that I will be forever grateful to my little man with such unexpectedly broad shoulders.

That evening, back in the hotel, the kids and I finally had space to process our new reality together — for a few seconds anyway, before they bolted for the pool.

“Bro, the baby,” was all that my understated middle child, 10, had to say — or needed to say — on the subject. In those three words were all the feelings: sadness, regret, tenderness, love, a general why-the-fuck aimed at the universe. And she was off to the pool.

My eldest, 13, while wriggling into her two-piece, left me with a directive. I’d had to tell her the news almost in passing, pulling her aside at the slope for a private moment away from friends, and tears had sprung into her eyes, reflecting mine.

But now, her steeliness had had time to take back over. “Okay, just… don’t be sad. It’s my pet peeve when people are sad,” she said, all boss. Somehow, this helped, too. I knew she was sad, she knew I was sad — but we could also choose to be happy.

I showered, gave myself an hour to put my feet up and watch the Olympics in the dark den of my hotel room, put my face to the wall and cry, say my goodbye. Then I got dressed and found my friends, who greeted me with a glass of wine.