My one and only

I never intended to have just one child. But when my daughter came along, we haphazardly adjusted to being a three and the newly-formed family felt so right that we couldn’t see our way to disrupting it by adding a fourth to our number. Three had a magic about it: as the Latin phrase omne trium perfectum affirms, everything that comes in threes is perfect. Three was indivisible, like the Trinity. It denoted the number of clauses that lend emphasis to a sentence, the number of dimensions of space we live inside and the number in a list that insists. Three felt complete, like triumvirates and triptychs. Seventeen years later, it still does.

My regrets