If someone asked me who taught me strength, I would say my mother. But not in a simple, fairy-tale way. Ours is not the kind of story that fits easily into a single paragraph. It is a story of fire and silence, of resistance and misunderstandings, of growing up next to someone who never really got what she deserved and yet gave everything she had.
My mother was not allowed anything. No career. No voice in her own home. No room to dream out loud. But she carved space anyway. She did it quietly, but with a kind of force that I only understood much later. She fought not by arguing, but by existing fully in a world that tried to reduce her.
And in all that pain, she never let go of me. She taught me how to think. How to read. How to speak up in rooms that preferred silence. I know what resilience means because I watched her live it every day.
Our relationship was never without its complications. We fought. We misunderstood each other. There were moments when I did not want to be near her. And moments I could not bear to be far away. Sometimes I was jealous. People would compliment her beauty and presence, and I would shrink into myself. I was younger, but I felt smaller. It’s strange, the kind of tension that exists between mothers and daughters a mixture of admiration and rebellion, intimacy and distance.
But no one else made me feel more seen. No one else gave me space to share as freely as she did. Our conversations were never scripted. Sometimes they were sharp. Sometimes healing. But always real.
I know now that many of my best traits come from her the curiosity, the hunger to learn, the quiet anger at injustice, the softness that survives no matter what. When I speak in a way that helps others feel safe, it is because she spoke to me that way first.
I don’t romanticize her, and she would never want me to. She is not perfect. Neither am I. But that’s not the point. What matters is that we kept showing up for each other, for ourselves, again and again. And that is what love looks like when it grows up.
