Happy Birthday Mommy
My mother is an enigma. She held secrets in the furrow of her brow and decades of unheard wishes in the soles of her feet. A cryptex wrapped in cinnamon skin, I always wondered what lay beneath her rigid backbone.
My mother knows obedience like the back of her smooth hands and holds tight to convention the way we cling to one another during every goodbye. In the years we felt like strangers, I wondered if I could ever decipher the riddles of her true nature.
What was she like as a little girl? How did it feel to cross the ocean, leaving behind one home to create another? How did it feel to fall in love for the first time? What was it like to feel my heartbeat grow inside her ribs? To hold my hand for the first time?
Perhaps, I was a puzzle to her - skinned knees and a burgeoning curiosity in the form of a little girl made in her image. Maybe she could not decipher the deep ebb of my emotions, the way I wore vulnerability like a badge of honor, or my dreams of living out loud without shame - to grow into womanhood without a man dictating the course of my own adventures. I wondered if, maybe, we were less two mysteries and more like two halves of one heart.
My mother sometimes, still, feels like an enigma, but it is a gift to work together as masons, removing the walls between us brick by brick. I feel tendrils of healing spirits suture my heart whole because it is through her example I have learned to say I am sorry. Like a jigsaw coming into place, I can grasp the full picture of our relationship and only see love.
In the story of us - mother and daughter, dream and reality - I know that I come from a strength that is unmatched. She has always had to find a way, to be strong, to take care of others - sometimes at the cost of her self. I know that my mother has never had the privilege of softness, but that is her largest gift to me. Her crimson tipped hands always held me upright even when I felt there was nothing left in me to find my own way home. My mother never quite understood the degrees and awards overflowing on my resume but it was her example of kindness, generosity, and sacrifice that lay at the root of my work. I am a child of her and my father’s many sacrifices, born of her wildest dreams and secret prayers
My mother is only human, one who her did her best with the little she was given. Her best was raising me to be what she couldn’t. When I gaze at my own reflection, it is only her face I see. The complexity of her life are inked in my smile and the creases in my brow. I have my father’s hands and feet and my mother’s fire - the embers of her unrealized wishes lay at the foundation of the life I am privileged to live. In all these years, perhaps the enigma was simply learning one another’s love language so we could finally fall in sync.
To my mother, who has given me everything beyond what she ever dreamed of, happy birthday. May you feel as beautiful and loved as you deserve. In the story of us, I am blessed to be your daughter. I love you, I love you, I love you.
