I miss the children I never had.

I was never pregnant. I never miscarried. There is no medical chart, no ultrasound photo folded into a drawer. And yet, there are two girls I have known for quite some time—two girls conceived in my mind.

I’m not exactly sure when this little mental game started. Maybe when I began wondering what I would have named a child if I had had one.

The feeling and wondering involve some sort of ache. A longing. But it isn’t only painful. There’s something sweet about it as well, or I wouldn’t keep returning to it, turning it over in my mind like a smooth stone.

Naming the Feeling

Until recently, I didn’t have a word for this feeling.

But then, on my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, where my co-host Emily John Garces and I explore words from across the globe that don’t quite exist in English, I came across the Portuguese word saudade.

Our Portuguese guest, Lucas Gomes, described saudade as a form of missing that isn’t about temporary absence. It isn’t the kind of missing that assumes reunion. It’s not “you’re in the other room and I’ll see you in a minute.” As he explained it, saudade is something that arrives in the middle of an ordinary day and reminds you that something you love is simply not here. Not delayed. Not recoverable. Gone. Or perhaps never fully present to begin with.

What distinguishes saudade from ordinary longing is this: it does not point toward resolution. It names a desire that does not expect fulfillment.

What struck me immediately was how precisely that word fit the feeling I’d been carrying for years. And how satisfying that was. Like finally discovering that the weird pain in your foot has a Latin name and is therefore respectable.

In my book Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself, I had tried to describe this peculiar pattern. “If I had a baby girl to name, what would I name her? It’s a little rut my mind gets to circling from time to time, maybe more often than I would like to admit.” That circling matters. This wasn’t grief that resolved itself. It wasn’t a decision I’d made peace with once and for all. It was something I returned to. Something that stayed. It behaved less like a wound that heals and more like a tide that comes in and out.

In my book, the imagining becomes oddly specific. I try on names for the girls, my girls. First, the oldest, Josie Rose. Josie, with its tomboy looseness and buzzing consonant, a girl who could throw a ball hard and fast, cap pulled low against the sun. Then the younger one, Babette. A name that feels elegant and playful at the same time.

I feel a tenderness toward the two of them, or the idea of them, or maybe toward what I could have been, could have offered.

How to describe this tenderness? Saudade, I now think, is how.

When Longing Isn’t a Problem

Saudade isn’t nostalgia. It isn’t regret. It isn’t even quite sadness. It’s longing without a clear plan for repair. You’re not motivated to fix it. You’re not trying to eliminate it. You’re simply aware of it. You feel it, and then it recedes, and then it comes back again. It is a form of emotional weather rather than a psychological emergency.

This distinction matters because we live in a culture that treats longing as a problem. If something hurts, we assume it must be healed. If something aches, we assume we’ve done something wrong. We are quick to pathologize desire that doesn’t lead anywhere concrete. We measure mental health by how efficiently we eliminate discomfort.

But saudade suggests something else. It suggests that some forms of longing are not symptoms to be cured but conditions to be understood.

Distance Makes Desire Possible

Philosopher and theologian Peter Rollins joined us later in the conversation and immediately recognized saudade as something much bigger than nostalgia. “The most important things,” he said, “are not the things we have, but the things we don’t.” He connected saudade to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, whose philosophy was shaped by a love he chose never to consummate. Kierkegaard broke off an engagement with a woman he adored, believing that both his depression and his vocation made marriage impossible. He never stopped loving her. Instead, he wrote. Endlessly.

Rollins described this as “an enjoyable suffering,” a longing that was both painful and generative. “That painful longing for what he would never have,” Rollins said, “is what gave birth to the entire philosophy of existentialism.” In other words, absence did not block creativity. It fueled it.

This idea challenges a core assumption of modern psychology, namely that mental health means eliminating suffering wherever possible. Rollins approaches it differently, arguing that longing itself is not the problem. The problem is how we attempt to manage it: by repressing it, obsessing over it, or demanding that it resolve.

Rollins explores the notion of distance to longing in his film Making Love, directed by Helen Rollins, which centers on a relationship sustained by impossibility. In the film, an obstacle stands between two people who love each other, and the story gradually reveals that the obstacle is not the enemy of desire but its engine. Remove the barrier, and longing collapses into something ordinary.

He often illustrates this same idea through the old-fashioned notion of the chaperone. We tend to think of a chaperone as someone whose job is to suppress desire, to keep intimacy in check. But Rollins argues the opposite. The chaperone does not extinguish longing. The chaperone generates it. By creating a boundary, a limit, a prohibition, the chaperone keeps desire alive. Distance becomes the condition that allows intimacy to exist at all.

This brings us back to saudade. The paradox at its heart is this: what we experience as deprivation may actually be the structure that gives love its depth.

Carrying What Was Never Lived

This doesn’t mean longing can’t become destructive. It can. But the solution isn’t eradication. It’s discernment. It’s learning how to live at the right distance from what you love. Close enough to feel it. Far enough to not be consumed by it.

I don’t miss the children I never had because I secretly want to redo my life or correct a mistake. My imagined children are not symbols of regret. They are evidence of capacity.

Babette still shows up from time to time. So does Josie Rose. Not as ghosts, not as accusations, but as reminders of a kind of tenderness that doesn’t demand a receipt. They belong to a life that was never lived and yet was not wasted. A life which exists entirely in the subjunctive mood, that underrated tense, which I’m coming to think, is not always a terrible place to be.

Saudade gives that life a name.

Some longings are not meant to be fulfilled. They are meant to be carried. They ask us not to cure them, but to let them have a place.

Sometimes, all it takes to do that is a word.