There’s something about the light here this morning in early Perry. I watch it as—it cuts across the land and through the pines at a perfect angle, turning everything golden for just a few minutes. A reminder of my mother’s kitchen when I was a kid. She’d be up before everyone else, the countertop scattered with whatever project she’d started at 5 AM, before the rest of the house stirred.
Motherhood isn’t what Hallmark sells you. It’s not flowers and breakfast in bed one Sunday in May. It’s stubborn persistence. It’s a woman choosing, day after day, to put one foot in front of the other when the path isn’t clear.
My mother taught me about distance and closeness simultaneously—how to stand back far enough to let someone become themselves, while staying close enough that they never doubt you’re there. That kind of calibration takes remarkable intuition.
The thing about mothers is they’re time travelers of a sort. They see versions of you that no longer exist—the infant who couldn’t hold up his head, the kindergartner who refused to wear anything but that one red shirt, the teenager who slammed doors. They hold all these iterations of you in their minds simultaneously.
So today, I’m thinking about my mother’s hands. How they looked chopping vegetables, how they felt cool against my forehead when I had a fever, how they gestured wildly when she was excited about something. Hands that did a thousand thankless tasks, most of which I never saw.
To the mothers reading this: We notice more than we say. Your work doesn’t vanish into the void. It lives on in how we navigate the world, in our reflexive responses, in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
The older I get, the more I realize that we never fully grow up, just further away. But the magnitude of what you gave remains, growing larger with distance and perspective, like mountains viewed from across a valley.
Happy Mother’s Day to all!
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