Every year around Mother’s Day, timelines fill with flowers, family portraits, carefully chosen throwback pictures, and captions trying to summarize a lifetime of love into a few paragraphs.
And every year, I find myself sitting quietly with a more complicated truth.
Because when I think about motherhood, I don’t just think about the woman who gave birth to me.
I think about every woman who ever carried me emotionally, spiritually, mentally, and sometimes financially through seasons I didn’t think I would survive.
Of course, my mother is where that story begins.
I was born into a racially divided family. When my mother became pregnant with me, her father disowned her because my father was Black.
As a child, I didn’t fully understand what that meant. Children rarely do. We absorb tension without language for it. We notice silence before we understand pain. We feel grief moving through a house before we can identify where it lives.
But adulthood has a way of reopening your childhood and translating things differently.
Now, when I revisit memories of my mother, I no longer just see “mom.”
I see a young woman navigating heartbreak while trying to prepare for motherhood.
I see someone grieving the loss of her father’s acceptance while carrying a child growing inside her body.
I see someone trying to build safety for me while her own sense of belonging was collapsing underneath her feet.
And suddenly moments from childhood hit differently.
The exhaustion in her face I once misread as frustration.
The nights she sat quietly after everyone went to sleep.
The way she sometimes stared into space, like her body was present but her spirit was somewhere trying to recover.
Back then, I thought mothers were just naturally strong.
Now I realize many women become strong because life gives them no safe alternative.
My mother loved me through rejection.
And there is something sacred about a woman who chooses love even when love costs her community, approval, or comfort.
That kind of love leaves marks on generations.
But what I’ve also come to understand is that motherhood has never belonged to one person in my life.
My sheroes are my soul ties.
The women I strategically meet on this journey called life who plant the exact seed needed for the soil I am about to step into.
And I say strategically because some encounters feel far too aligned to be random.
There were women who entered my life for only a season but shifted me permanently.
A friend sat beside me in complete silence while I cried in her car because I didn’t have the energy to explain my pain out loud.
A mentor pulling me aside after a meeting and saying, “Stop shrinking yourself to make other people comfortable,” not realizing those words would echo in my spirit for years afterward.
A woman showed up at my door with food during a season where survival had exhausted me so deeply that feeding myself felt overwhelming.
People think transformation always arrives through major events, but sometimes healing enters quietly.
Sometimes it’s a woman texting, “Did you make it home safe?”
Sometimes it’s someone braiding your hair while reminding you that you deserve softness too.
Sometimes it’s another woman seeing greatness in you during a season where all you can see are your wounds.
Black women, especially, have mastered the art of mothering each other in invisible ways.
We carry each other through divorces, funerals, financial hardship, heartbreak, depression, childbirth, caregiving, and silent battles that never make it into public conversation.
And the truth is, many of us are still alive because another woman refused to let us disappear inside our pain.
Then there are my daughters.
My five daughters.
Nothing prepared me for the ways children hold mirrors to your spirit.
Nobody tells you that motherhood is also confrontation.
Confrontation with your patience.
Your tone.
Your unresolved trauma.
Your tenderness.
Your fears.
There are moments when I watch my daughters sleeping and feel overwhelmed by the realization that I am witnessing healing in real time.
Not perfect healing.
Not curated healing.
But generational healing.
The kind where children laugh freely in rooms that once held tension.
The kind where softness is no longer confused with weakness.
The kind where love is no longer rooted in fear.
And strangely enough, my daughters have mothered parts of me too.
They’ve awakened wonder in me.
Helped me reconnect with joy.
Forced me to slow down long enough to notice how much survival mode had hardened parts of my spirit.
Because eventually you realize something profound:
As women, we exchange these sacred roles continuously throughout life.
Mother.
Daughter.
Sister.
Friend.
Mentor.
We move in and out of these identities for one another forevermore, whether we physically gave birth to a child or not.
Some women mother through advice.
Some through protection.
Some through presence.
Some through accountability.
Some through prayer.
Some through simply refusing to let another woman fall apart alone.
That is motherhood, too.
And I don’t need to name these women individually because deep down, they already know the role they hold in my life.
They know who they are.
The woman who answered the phone on the first ring when my voice cracked.
The women who sat with me in silence when words couldn’t reach what I was feeling.
The women who corrected me with love instead of shame.
The women who protected my name in rooms I wasn’t in.
The women who reminded me of my light during seasons where I could only see my wounds.
Some of them mothered me for years.
Some only for a moment.
But every single one left fingerprints on my becoming.
And maybe that’s the sacred thing about womanhood.
we rarely realize how deeply we are shaping one another while we’re doing it.
A conversation over dinner.
A hand on my back while I was trying not to fall apart publicly.
A random text saying, “Thinking about you.”
A prayer whispered for me that I never even heard.
Seeds.
That’s what these women planted in me.
Seeds of courage.
Seeds of softness.
Seeds of discernment.
Seeds of survival.
Seeds of joy.
And now when I look at the woman I am still becoming, I can trace parts of her back to each of them.
So to every woman who has mothered me in friendship, mentorship, sisterhood, or simple presence, this article is dedicated to you.
You helped carry me toward myself.
So this Mother’s Day, I honor my mother first.
For the sacrifices I am still uncovering as an adult.
For the pain she survived quietly.
For choosing me despite what it cost her.
And I honor every woman who mothered me along the way.
The soul ties.
The mentors.
The sisters.
The friends.
The daughters.
The women who planted seeds in me they may never fully realize bloomed.
Because none of us become ourselves alone.
We are shaped by every woman who loved us enough to help carry us toward ourselves.
Beautifully written.