We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us. But we can choose whose children we would like to be. Seneca
As I reflect on this Mother’s Day weekend, I find myself not holding flowers in remembrance. Instead, I am reconciling memories with meaning. I am embracing the inheritance of love and forgiveness passed down from generation to generation. I’m not talking about heirlooms. I am referring to inner strength and a will to survive. I also mean the emotional undercurrent of my mother’s presence.
My mother felt everything. She wore her emotions like a second skin. Grief, rage, delight, and worry flashed across her face. They colored her voice and filled our home. She was neither distant nor detached. She loved as best she, with full volume and vivid color. And in that intensity, she embodied both the beacon and the tempest.
She came from women who had no room to collapse—women who raised children while nursing their own invisible wounds. They carried disappointment and unfulfilled dreams in their bones. Yet, they still managed to bake bread, tend to bee stings, sing in the choir, and serve dinner at 6. Their love wasn’t always gentle; it could be fierce, and their tenderness often manifested as grit.
As a child, I often felt swept up in that storm. I was confused by her contradictions. I yearned for peace and ached for predictability and a sense of connectedness. When Mom died, the silence left in her wake was deafening. There were no final reckonings, no apologies or soft closures. Just a mother-sized dark void and a thousand unfinished sentences.
In the years since, something softened. I began to understand her not just as my mother. I saw her as a daughter herself. She is shaped by the pain of others. She tries to do better with what little she was given. Her imperfections were not evidence of a lack of love. They were signs of inherited burdens. She had no map or compass for these burdens. She steered herself simply by faith and Dead Reckoning.
From Bitterness to Beholding
In those years after I lost Mom, I harbored great bitterness and resentment. How could she leave this place without a shred of remorse? How could she depart without an apology for what she left in me: loneliness, brokenness, an unlovable soul? As I sit here today, I feel deep gratitude. With enduring forgiveness, I remind myself of whose child I have chosen to be. I am the child of not just one Mom, but of many. The child of a legacy that has survived, adapted, and endured. I am the child of women who didn’t speak the language of healing. They endowed us with the raw materials to begin the journey. The child of emotions expressed openly and of the quiet transformation that follows.
This Mother’s Day, I honor the mother to whom I was born—and the mother she always strove to become. I honor her complexity, her emotion, and her strength. And I honor the daughters—like you, like me—who carry this legacy with love, discernment, and grace. To the women who raised us and the women into whom we shape ourselves—this day belongs to us all.
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