She didn’t know how to mother, but she showed me how to survive that too
on mother wounds and blooms
As the evening breeze kissed one side of my face and the red sun dipped low, I sat in the passenger seat, talking to my mother on the phone - my partner in the drivers seat, driving us back home. My mother complained about the flaky Danish summer weather, predictable in its disappointment. I told her about the day we had spent in Montpellier and how boldly summer had arrived here. I spoke to her as the woman who gave birth to me, not just my mother.
A decade earlier, when I was twenty-five and living in Montpellier on a study abroad program, I still spoke to her as my mother. At that time, the girl inside me was only just beginning to loosen her grip. She was beginning to let go, little by little, so that she could finally witness the women behind the titles. I was starting to see that the person I called Mama in Uganda, Mom in South Africa, Mor in Denmark - had once been just a person too. A person who had survived. A person who had pieced together what she had been handed and called it a life. A woman who had shaped a nest for children before she had ever settled the fact that no one had taught her how to build one.
I remember spending most of my childhood feeling as if I were waiting. Waiting for my mother to come home. Waiting for her to call me close, to hold me, to be just my mother, to tell me that she had the whole day - even just one day - just to be with me - without all the things she had to be and do. But how could I expect that from someone who was constantly putting out fires before they consumed everything she was working hard to build? How could I expect that from someone stretched far beyond the reach of any real guidance or support?
And yet, as an adult, I understand that I was not seeking anything selfish. My mother was not withholding anything out of selfishness. We were simply two girls and two women, trying to make a life out of circumstances, some chosen and some inherited.
The day I realized that the mother I had been waiting for was never going to come home, not because she did not want to, but because she had actually never existed - was one of the most painful days of my life. I grieved like someone mourning a mother, only imagined by a child desperate not to be undone by the truth. That realization severed the emotional umbilical cord I had clung to - still hoping it would one day nourish me with more than the scraps I had learned to survive on. I understood then that I could either continue to starve or choose to set us both free. I could stop waiting to be fed by a kind of love she never claimed to carry and may never have known how to give.
In the days that followed, as my tears dried and my aching heart began to steady itself, I came to see that I was giving us both a new chance at life. I realized that I now understood more than my mother ever could about what I needed as a young child and woman. I committed to meeting those needs for myself. No matter what it might take, I decided that I could and would heal from the grief and heartache of facing my reality and accepting it.
With distance and a growing sense of peace from facing life as an adult, I also began to see my mother more clearly. I saw her not as a mythic figure, but as a real human being, one who existed long before I ever did. A girl who had her own dreams, trauma, disappointments, pain, wishes and fears.
That day on the phone, she told me that she had just finished her last shift and had packed for her upcoming trip back to Uganda to surprise family. For the first time, she had rented a hotel room (big because she does not like sleeping in “strange people’s” beds) , and she had even booked a full-body massage for the day after she arrived. I told her that I was proud of her and excited for her. I could hear the quiet joy in her voice, and it quietly healed something in me.
“I’m focusing on me now,” she said. “I want to pour more back into myself. It's my time.”I agreed and encouraged her to pursue all that for herself and more!
She has not been the same since my sister passed away, almost four years ago now. None of us have. Yet, I cannot imagine what it is like to bury your third child, to watch the soil fall, to know that you will never hold them in your arms again. I cannot imagine the words you must say to yourself in order to survive that kind of pain.
Over the past four years, when she would send me pictures, though smiling - I still saw the rivers of grief behind her eyes. “Will she make it through to the other side”, I wondered. Though far apart, I held her even closer to my heart in those moments. This woman who birthed me is also still a woman - a woman in search of peace, a quiet place to rest, and a reason to get up in the morning. Because life never paused for her many seasons of grief. The sun never stopped moving when her world shattered - not then, and not during any of the other times it broke. There were still bills to pay, children to raise, food to prepare, laundry to iron. There were babies waiting, with hearts hungry to be nourished by a mother still trying to hold on to her own faith in life.
So when I hear her speak on the phone, as a woman who is no longer just surviving, but choosing to embrace life again, I feel something shift. I not only see her, I see the woman who made me who I am.
Unlike the twenty-five-year-old version of myself, who once wrote in her first book about the pain of realizing she had been raised by a girl-mother who never quite prepared a soft landing, the thirty-six-year-old woman I am now is filled with grace and gratitude.
Older women often say that daughters see their mothers more clearly once they become mothers themselves. But I have not had any children. Still, I understand what it takes to raise a whole woman. I understand the immense effort I have poured (and still need to) into myself over the past decade and more to make up for the missing parts.
Even without the interruptions my mother faced - wars, migration, separation from her own mother and family, a violently destructive partner, children to raise and bury, emotional wounds too heavy to name - I have struggled to walk the path of wholeness. I have stumbled often. And I have still promised myself that I would rather have no children than bring new life into a world while I was still living from the wounds of the little girl within me.
My mother, by fighting to give us a new life, had given the gift to afford making such a choice. The gift of enough external safety to face my inner wars and tend to the remaining wounds.
From this place of growth and clarity, I can now see everything my mother passed down to me. It was not only trauma, dysfunction, emotional neglect, grief and pain. Yes, the garden of life I inherited had its share of weeds. Yes, there were overgrown, uninvited bushes crowding the soil. But the ground was fertile. The rain was generous. The sun fair and abundant. And a few sturdy, well-rooted trees offered enough shade when I needed it most.
I was never beginning from nothing, even if my path led me somewhere she could not guide me. For every stretch of the journey she could not walk beside me, she left me with tools - quiet inheritances of wisdom and resilience. They were offerings gathered from her own walk through uncharted terrain, a young woman trying to give more than she had received, trying to build a life with hands that had rarely been held with tenderness.
In the tool bag she packed for me, I found:
The ability to face discomfort in the name of forming true and lasting comfort.
A refusal to grow bitter, no matter how many sour lemons life throws my way.
The gift of forgiveness without forgetting the lesson of how not to end up there again.
The importance of mourning deeply, of emotional cleansing, so I do not become a ghost of myself.
Pride in the things I have, big or small.
A sense of dignity that is unconditional and unwavering.
The strength of sisterhood, from blood kin to chosen family.
The practice of valuing people by their character, not their circumstances.
A sense of adventure and curiosity, and a heart open to newness.
The capacity to commit to love from a pure place, even when the heart is bruised.
The alchemy to turn anger into sacred fuel - to remember that if I am truly tired of something, I have what it takes to change it.
The patience and work ethic required to make dreams into reality, with tenderness guiding the way.
But more than anything, my mother taught me never to stay stuck. Even when the seas were stormy and survival felt uncertain, she showed me how to face the light. When I could not swim, I could float. When I could not run, I could crawl. But I must never give up moving toward the shore.
She taught me that people can change. That healing is real. That pain does change us, but that it does not have to destroy us. That we do not have to be defined by our trauma or our worst moments. I am the woman I am today because of the strength and faith in life that the girl who birthed me somehow held onto.
She showed me the humbleness it took, for her to accept that her best was not enough, and how to still feel her love for me. To love her anyway. She did not crumble in bitterness. She did not give up. She kept believing in the possibility of something better forming from all the disappointment that came her way.
Before we hang up, I tell her that I miss her. I tell her I am looking forward to all the pictures from her trip. I ask her to be present, to rest, and to be intentional about how she spends her time. She tells me that she loves me and I know with every cell in my living body, that she does and always has.
I send greetings from my female partner, still driving us home - a person my mother is slowly learning to acknowledge with less discomfort and more courage. That, too, is a form of growth. Another brave stretch into the uncomfortable for an African Christian woman and mother.
And I am proud of her for her efforts - not just as the girl she birthed, but as the woman she raised. A woman who understands the courage it takes to face discomfort in service of love and change. A woman who now walks with the grace to say: we are both growing - sincerely doing the best we can with the cards we’ve been dealt, each of us tending to a new garden meant to offer more than just shade to those who come after us. And that, truly, is more than enough.
