If my mother could see herself through my eyes, she would know that she is loved truly, deeply, even when I don’t have the language to say it. She would know that my love for her has always lived beneath the noise, the misunderstanding, and the quiet distance that time has stretched between us.

Mothers and daughters have always lived between mirrors. One sees the reflection of what she once was; the other, the reflection of what she fears she might become. Between us lies a profound tenderness that often disguises itself as anger, silence, and a quiet ache we both mistake for indifference. When I was younger, I thought my mother was made of certainty, a woman who always knew what was right, who always knew what to do. But now, as I grow into my own womanhood, I realise she was simply doing what she could with the small pieces of herself that life hadn’t yet taken. I see her now, a girl who never got the chance to be one, a woman who learned love through endurance, who mistook survival for peace.

There are mothers who love loudly, with hands that cradle, with words that soothe, and there are mothers who love in quiet gestures, in the meals they never eat until everyone else has, in the prayers whispered at dawn, in the patience they never got to receive. My mother belongs to the second kind. The kind who never says “I love you” but whose eyes betray it when you walk away.

Some days our love is sweet, easy, like sunlight spilling through the curtains. Other days, it is sour. Two generations clashing over how to exist in a world that demands too much from both of us. We have argued over freedom, over faith, over womanhood. We have stood on opposite ends of the same truth, reaching for each other through years of unspoken apologies, and yet, love remains. Even when it hides behind frustration, even when pride builds walls we cannot climb.

If my mother could see herself through my eyes, she would see the woman I have been trying to understand all my life, the woman whose voice I carry in my own, whose sacrifices I swore I’d never repeat, yet find myself imitating in small, unthinking ways. She would see that I do not blame her for the walls she built to survive; I only wish she could have lived without needing them. She would see that I have forgiven her, even for the things she never meant to do. That I have come to understand her silences not as absence, but as protection, her way of saying, I love you, but I don’t know how to say it without trembling.

Every daughter, I think, grows up trying to rewrite her mother’s story, to fill in the blanks, to heal what was broken, to become what she wished her mother could have been. But in the process, we discover that our mothers were once daughters too, women who loved and lost, who dreamt and compromised, who learned to carry pain quietly because no one ever taught them another way.

If my mother could see herself through my eyes, she would see how extraordinary she is in her ordinariness. She would see that love does not need perfection to be beautiful, that even her mistakes became maps for me, teaching me where to go, and where not to. She would see that I am her continuation, not her correction. That everything I am becoming is not in spite of her, but because of her.

If my mother could see herself through my eyes, she would finally understand that she is not just my mother, she is my origin story, my first home, the woman whose laughter taught me joy and whose pain taught me empathy. And maybe then, she would stop apologising for the ways she could not be more. Because in my eyes, she has always been enough.

My Mama❤️,

with love💐.