Against all Odds

All that she carried, she carried alone

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I have written fictionalized stories about my grandfather, my grandmother, and other people in our family. Stepping into their minds, imagining their feelings, filling the spaces between the facts - it came naturally. But when I tried to write a fictionalized story about my mother, something felt wrong. Every sentence felt too small, too simple, too thin. It didn’t do her justice. It didn’t come close to the woman she truly is. She deserved more. She deserved honesty. She deserved to be seen, finally, not as a character but as a whole human being.

I may still share that fictionalized version, but not today. Today, she deserves something real. Today, she finally receives the story that has always belonged to her. Because it is time she is truly seen for the woman she is.

This is the story of my mother. Not the version she learned to perform, not the quiet shadow her parents molded her into, but the woman beneath all of that - the woman I see, and the woman I want her to see in herself.

For most of her life, my mother believed she was unlovable. That her softness was a weakness. That her loneliness was her fault. She learned this not from the world, but from her own parents - people who should have loved her fiercely, but didn’t know how. People who kept her at arm’s length and called it parenting. People who punished honesty, dismissed her feelings, and taught her to expect abandonment.

But the truth is, my mother was never hard to love. They were simply unable to love her the way she deserved.

My grandmother, especially, held her children at a distance, and later admitted it in her own writing. In her diary, she described her children not with tenderness, but with coldness. She wrote like an outsider to her own life, observing her family but never stepping into it. Sometimes, reading her words, I wonder if she ever wanted children at all.

She said she didn’t know why she kept them at a distance. But I know one thing: It was not because my mother lacked anything. My grandmother saved her warmth, her passion, her devotion, for someone else. For a man who was not her husband. For a man who was married to another woman. For a relationship built on longing and secrecy and ego.

She wrote that without him her life would have no value. And she wrote that while having children. Children who needed her, who waited for her, who thought her distance was their fault. She wrote about her own life as if her children were footnotes to a story centered entirely around herself.

She lied to protect her own image, not to protect my mother. She lied about her affairs. She lied about her choices. She lied about my mother’s first love - my father - the boy who cherished her, the boy who wanted a life with her, the boy they forced out of her world. And she never confessed. Not when my mother trusted her with her heart. Not when she sat at her bedside in her final days. Not even when holding a memory book in her hands, with her daughter sitting beside her - the daughter she had hurt without ever admitting it.

Instead, she rewrote history. She pretended he didn’t exist. And when my mother insisted on speaking his name, she spoke badly of him, as if he were the problem. But the truth came out years later. And the truth was that he wasn’t the one who walked away. He was taken away. They removed him from her life - and from mine - because of their pride and their control.

My mother lost the first person who truly loved her because her parents couldn’t stand the idea of her choosing someone they didn’t approve of. They stole that future from her. They stole her security. They stole the chance for her to not feel alone. And then they expected her to thank them for it.

When I read my grandmother’s diary, I felt a grief I didn’t expect. Not for her, but for my mother. A grief for the little girl who never understood why love felt like walking on eggshells. For the teenager who thought she wasn’t worth fighting for. For the young woman whose parents silenced her, manipulated her, and twisted the truth so she would doubt her own memories.

But here is the miracle: My mother became everything she never received. She became warmth. She became safety. She became love. She held me the way she had longed to be held. She supported me the way she was never supported. She protected me the way no one protected her. She broke a cycle that she never even realized she was carrying. And that is what this story is about. Not her suffering. Not the loneliness they built around her. Not the lies they told.

This story is about how she rose above it. How she found her own light. How she raised me with a kind of love that still humbles me. How she survived a childhood that tried to shape her into the same coldness she grew up with, and refused to become it.

My mother is not the woman her parents taught her to be. She is the woman she chose to become. She is a quiet kind of brave, the kind that doesn’t demand recognition or applause. It is the kind of bravery that shows itself in small moments. The way she listens fully, the way she forgives too easily, the way she holds on to hope long after others would have let go.

She carries scars that no one sees. The world never witnessed the battles she fought inside herself. The doubt planted by her parents, the constant question of whether she was worthy of love, the ache of never having been chosen first. She moved through life never understanding why her heart felt so heavy, never realizing that it wasn’t her heart that was the problem. It was the weight others had placed on it. And yet she remained kind.

She learned early that affection could be withheld, twisted, or used as punishment, but she refused to weaponize it herself. She gave love without conditions, because she knew too well how it felt to grow up without it. She became a mother who stayed, a mother who listened, a mother whose presence was steady even on days she felt lost inside.

She did not harden. She did not shut down. She did not become cold to survive. Instead, she carried warmth through a life that gave her very little of it. And that is what makes her extraordinary. Because the truth is that many people in her position would have repeated the pattern. Many would have built the same distance with their own children. Many would have become mirrors of their upbringing. But my mother broke something ancient, something heavy, something inherited. She ended a cycle without ever knowing its name.

She never had a mother who held her when she cried, but she held me. She never had parents who reassured her, but she reassured me. She never had a family that protected her heart, but she protected mine. She gave me a childhood she had to invent from scratch.

And still, she doubts herself. Still, she wonders if she was enough. Still, she questions whether she failed in moments she struggled. Still, she does not see the magnitude of what she has done. But I see it. I see everything she carried. Everything she overcame. Everything she chose to become in the absence of a model, or a mother who could show her how.

My mother lived her entire life believing she was ordinary, but she is anything but ordinary. She is the evidence that love can grow in places where it was never planted. She is the proof that a wounded heart can still become a healing one. She is the reason I know what love feels like, not because she was taught how to give it, but because she created it herself.

She built her love from fragments, from instinct, from the longing for something better than what she had been given. And she succeeded. She is not the woman her parents tried to shape. She is not the daughter they failed to cherish. She is not the girl they silenced with distance and judgment. She is the mother who chose tenderness. She is the woman who did the impossible. She is the heart of my story, and the hero of her own, whether she can see it or not.

And this tribute is for her. So she will finally know who she is. So she will finally understand what she became, despite everything. So she will finally see herself through the eyes of someone who loves her the way she always deserved to be loved.