My Mother, My First Home

Grief escapes no one. Even years later, it can hit like a ton of bricks to the heart. Each year on this day—my birthday—I think it will get easier, but without fail I am reminded of your absence. It has been so many years now, Mom, and our relationship has taken so many different iterations. It almost seems silly to me that the ache would still be there, but yet again you teach me another lesson. The heart never forgets love, and no matter how many years it’s been, it still pays homage to it through grief.

I miss you. It’s funny, though—I feel like this year I miss you in a way I never have before. I miss your soul. I miss the home you used to be for me. I know our relationship was so tried, and now, being a mother, I can see how heartbreaking that must have been for you. I can tell you now, Mom, that each year my birthday sucks because when you died, it felt like a piece of the joy of that day left the world. That is the only way I can describe it. Why would I celebrate a birthday when the name itself is a tribute to the woman whose body I came into the world through?

Seeing Mani and the way she loves me—the safety she feels in my arms, the moments of panic she experiences when I leave the room—have taught me so much and healed so much between us. Before her, I thought you and I never had that. I thought I just didn’t get a mother–daughter relationship. That we never had a bond. Now, with her, and with all the other little ones I meet with their mommies, I see how that could not have been possible. Mothers are a child’s first home. You were mine, and I never realized that before. No matter what the relationship looks like as they get older, that is how we started out—feeling safe, loved, and whole in only one person’s arms: yours.

I cried harder than ever for you today because, for the first time, missing you wasn’t paired with confusion about who you were, or mixed feelings about all the ways I felt abandoned by you, or how you didn’t understand me. Today, I just missed you. Your smell. Your eyes. Your skin. I thought of the feeling of the gold bangle you always wore against my skin. The way your arms looked—always slightly tanned and soft. I thought of your hands, and how much I loved them, and how comforted I felt by the faint smell of cigarette smoke on them as you held me.

It feels like now, with Mani, a lens that was once so blurry I couldn’t see anything is finally coming into focus. I remember being a baby with you, and you being my first home in the world. I remember the moment of pure love we shared before karma set in—before I felt like no one loved me less in the world than my own mother.

I feel you now in the sunshine, in the warm air on my skin, in the deep breaths I steal in quiet moments while she sleeps on my chest. I feel that love. And I thank you for it. It also comes with so much more heartbreak than I ever imagined.

Perhaps I was lying to myself before—learning to be my own mother meant grieving the one I never felt like I had. But now there is more heartache, because I get to miss the one I did have. The one I can never have back.

And yet, somehow, you are still here.

You are here in the way I hold her when she cries. In the way my body knows how to be a refuge, even when my mind is unsure. You are here in the softness that surprises me, in the tenderness I didn’t know was learned. Loving her has revealed you to me—not as absence, but as imprint.

I see now that grief is not only about what was lost, but about what was real. About the love that existed before it fractured, before it became complicated, before time and pain pulled us apart. That love lives on, quietly, faithfully, asking only to be felt.

So on this birthday, I let myself hold both truths: the ache of missing you, and the gratitude of having known you as my first home. I carry you forward not just in memory, but in motion—in the way I mother, in the way I stay, in the way I love without needing to disappear.

You are gone, but you are not lost.
You live in me now.
And in her.