Happy mother’s day to the child they never had to worry about

Mothers do not always have to bear a child. 

Sometimes, they are the child themselves, the child who learned how to survive alone. The child who became quiet not because they had nothing to say, but because they learned early on that being seen too much often meant being left alone with everything. The child they never really needed to worry about. 

So they learned how to mother themselves instead. 

And maybe there is motherhood in that. In staying with yourself through every version you thought was too much to love. In remaining tender after life kept asking you not to be. In becoming both the child who needed comfort and the arms that taught themselves how to give it.

These are the people who grew up too early, forced to carry the small weight a child was never meant to hold alone. The ones who were called strong simply because they learned how not to ask for help. The ones who sat alone at the dining table, who went through family days at school without anyone beside them, who had no one to ask about their homeworks at all. 

And somewhere in that silence, they learned how to hold themselves with the kind of care they once searched for in other people, the warmth and touch they once yearned from their own mothers. 

So if the only image of a mother you ever knew was yourself, Happy Mother’s Day.