I'm listening to a philosophy lecture, and the professor asks, "Is there an end to space? Does it just go on and on forever?" Even contemplating an answer to that question is hard for most people, she says - they wouldn't even know where to begin.

It's familiar for me, this question, because it makes me think of motherhood, of the enormity of these little lives before me, the little people I have to grow and develop. It's not a task. Not a bullet point, not a goal. It's an enormous endeavor, an odyssey.

And it's hard to wrap my mind around it because it's me standing at the edge of the world, staring out into an endless space, trying to make sense of it. Trying to decide what I believe in, how far I can stretch out into the deep expanse, trying to intuit where I think it goes and if it ends or goes on forever.

Before I can do that, any of it, even begin to stare down the void, I have to try and understand myself, unequivocably, and to understand myself separately from my daughters, and it's just impossible. They're standing right there with me facing down the void, and we have to step out there. I have to take them with me. It's the scariest thing I can think of, what we'll find in that void, and I hope it isn't a void at all. I hope it's a space filled with color and the softest shadows and light. I hope it's life on distant planets and joy, but from here, I just don't see it. But we're taking those first steps out anyway. Here we go, girls. I ask them to trust me and can't think of why they should. Except.

Them. For all that deep scary blackness I see in front of me, I see them putting it to shame. They are my life on distant planets, all the color and light, all the joy the universe could know. They are what the atomists believed in, atoms, atoms that can't be created or destroyed. They are infinite, they are the stuff of life, and they have created me, these girls.

I believe in them, their worth, their intrinsic, indivisble, infinite worth. And if I believe in them, I should believe in me, too.

The philosophy lecturer posits that if you believe there is an end to space, you have to think you'd reach a point where you can't reach your arm out, there'd be nowhere to put it. Is that possible? And I can link my arms with my daughters' arms, hold their small hands, fill my ears with their sounds and kiss their soft faces. Tangible evidence of infinity, belief in a thing that goes on forever.