03/09/2026
Watching a Mother’s Strength and Love
I grew up believing my mother was strong.
I don’t think I understood just how strong until I got older.
Her love for me was steadfast. Unwavering. She held me through versions of myself I hadn’t learned how to accept yet. Identity crisis I don’t think she ever knew I had, but She somehow saw beyond the mistakes, my stubbornness, the growing pains and all the noise and bu****it that comes with becoming a man.
Long before I learned to make peace with myself, my mother had already made space for me.
That realization has hit mad differently with age.
Now that I’m standing close enough to watch my wife mother, I recognize that same strength from another angle.
I see the days when work has taken more than enough. Home needs more. Garden needs tending or harvest in these days. The child needs everything and she doesn’t take that lightly. There’s laundry somewhere either of us can’t seem to understand how it managed ending up there. Something needs fixing (her way), somebody needs an answer, and whatever small piece of a social life she wants to exist has to be pushed to another day. Yet somehow, a mother keeps giving.
Not perfectly.
Not without frustration.
And certainly not always quietly.
Hell, sometimes you can hear a mother’s strength from the next county. 😂
You know the sound. You’ve felt the silence following. Where they begin to feel bad for having a split second of letting it all get to them.
But I’ve learned something about the silence they sit in. That quieter voice, that never seems to miss our heart strings and bring us that space of saftey and comfort.
There is an authority in it no doubt. A tenderness backed by something almost immovable. The voice that says I’m here. The hand on a shoulder. The late-night worry nobody witnesses. The thousand invisible calculations made every day around the happiness, safety and future of the other human beings.
That kind of love has teeth.
It protects. It corrects, and It sacrifices.
But, it also knows when to loosen its grip and leave enough space for a child to become who they were meant to be.
I think that may be one of the hardest parts of motherhood (big think
