An archive of the women who raised me. Women, tethered not by fairy-tale legacies, but by the quiet miracle of endurance.
Part I
Some lives are endured. They are carried like cracked porcelain through storms, beautiful in their survival, delicate in their pain.
My grandmother grew up in a house that creaked beneath the weight of too many bodies. Eleven siblings. There were no lullabies, only the clang of spoons fighting over food and the soft sweeping of dried coconut polishing dirty wooden floors. Everything was loud— laughter, arguments, and hunger.
She became a mother young. And when her own children were ten, the cupboard was still often bare. So she made a choice. Not a dream. A necessity. She left, not in pursuit of a better life, but in desperate hope of keeping theirs going. The math was simple and cruel: either she stayed, and watched them wither, or she went, and hoped they could grow.
She landed in the Middle East, in a house too grand to feel real. She was hired to clean one floor. Every night, her body ached with exhaustion, but her mind—her mind raced with thoughts of the children she had left behind. When the other maids fled, the entire mansion fell into her hands. She scrubbed floors that would never know her children’s laughter, polished windows that never reflected her own face.
When she asked to go home, her employers ordered her to come with them. They drove her into the desert—miles of nothingness stretching in every direction. The sun was punishing. The silence, heavier than the heat. They stopped at a pit carved out of dust and stillness.
“You want to go home, Rosario?” The words slipped through their teeth like poison. She understood and followed them back to their house, silent. One day, a truck driver passed by. He saw her. Really saw her.
That was her miracle. He helped her go back home.
When she returned, the first place she visited was the church. She dropped to her knees and wept— not from grief, but from disbelief that her heart was still beating. I asked her what she prayed for that day. She said, “I thanked Him for not letting me die. Even though some days, I wished He had.”
The beginning of her adulthood was like winter– cold and unrelenting. I hoped with all of my heart that she would one day experience her spring, maybe even her summer.
But she never did.
She returned to a home that wasn’t the one she had dreamed of. Her husband— he had changed, or perhaps, revealed who he had always been. She walked into their bedroom one afternoon to find a woman lying beside him. She didn’t realize then that it wasn’t the first time— and it wouldn’t be the last. Each betrayal broke something inside her that she didn’t have time to mourn. She cried silently, behind bathroom doors, while folding laundry, while cooking dinner for a man who treated her like a ghost.
She couldn’t leave. She had no money– She had used it all on her children’s schooling, on keeping them alive, on trying to leave the Middle East. And the world and era she came from did not make room for divorced women.
So she stayed. She endured the silence, the shame, the slow unraveling of herself— she believed that if she pushed through, her children would live better than she did.
Part II
In a way, my mother carried my grandmother’s hopes and dreams. She was the youngest of four. The smallest shadow in a house that didn’t have a ceiling, only sheets of corrugated tin. Their walls were thin, and their bathroom was a shared bucket behind the house. Their world was made of dirt and dust, but they still found a way to call it home. She tells me these things not with bitterness, but with a kind of nostalgic tenderness.
She met my father at work. Love came slowly, and then all at once. But love never arrives alone. It invites sacrifice and sorrow. He was of a different faith. And his parents, bound to theirs like anchors, didn’t approve. My mother was too different. Too unfamiliar. But he chose her and converted for her. He changed his god to experience his heaven on earth. His parents masked their contempt in passive-aggressive remarks, treated her like a maid in their home, and tried to force her to raise me in their religion— as if her own beliefs, her own ways of mothering, didn’t matter.
When my father was offered a job in a different country, they took it without question. They packed their lives into suitcases that barely zipped. My father gave up a scholarship from one of the country’s most prestigious universities and my mother gave up a life she hadn’t even finished building to take care of us.
I remember her in those early years— her eyes tired, her shoulders always hunched slightly forward, like she was bracing for something. She didn’t know the language. Had no friends. No one to talk to but us. And then, one afternoon, her phone rang.
“Your brother didn’t make it, Marilyn.”
There was no money, and no time to fly back. She came into my room in tears, looking to my face for something to hold onto while my father wrapped his arms around her. He was buried thousands of miles away, and all she could do was clutch the phone in both hands, staring at the screen as if she could reach through it to bring him back.
In that moment, she felt like a child again— lost, just trying to grow up and make sense of the world. She had always believed that adulthood would make pain easier to bear, that her heart would grow calluses over time, thick enough to dull the ache. But that day, she grew up a little more.
She realised the truth: it never really gets easier.
She never went back to work. Never rebuilt the friendships she left behind. She poured all of herself into us— my sister and me. She packed our lunches, braided our hair, and learned to navigate a foreign world so we wouldn’t have to feel foreign in it.
She did all of this without resentment or regret for what she had sacrificed. Like her mother before her, she bore it all, in the hope that I would have a better future.
Part III
And then there is me. The firstborn. The experiment. The bridge between two worlds— one of survival, the other of expectation.
I grew up in a city where nothing belonged to us. We rented a two-bedroom apartment too small for big dreams and too quiet for the kind of love that dances. We slept on the floor in those early years; two single mattresses shared between a family of four. Dining at McDonald’s was a luxury.
From as early as I can remember, I was told to be useful. To be good. To make it all worth it. The sacrifices. The distance. The disappointments no one dared name. I was taught that success was not optional— it was the only repayment I could offer.
From a young age, I knew how much my parents had given up for me. So I poured everything into what they told me would make me successful.
I studied until I forgot what silence without panic felt like. I collected awards like armour— proof that I was doing it right, even if I was falling apart inside. I topped my cohort. I gave speeches. I led societies. I earned praise from everyone except the two people I longed to impress most.
When I was eleven, I brought home my first award: Best in Conduct. My mother scoffed. “Most useless award,” she said, not even looking up from her plate. When I fell short of perfection academically, they berated me, telling me that I was stupid, that I would get nowhere in life. When I ranked first in my cohort at fifteen and again at sixteen, they nodded. “As you should,” they said.
I swallowed their indifference.
I told myself it was okay.
I told myself I didn’t need applause.
But I did.
I needed someone to tell me I was doing enough. That I was enough.
They were harsher with me than with my sister. She came after me, when their fears had softened and their regrets had grown visible. She was raised on gentler words, held with open hands. I don’t resent her. But I remember watching them smile at her and wondering what I had done wrong. Maybe I was too quiet. Maybe I didn’t break loudly enough.
So I filled my days.
I built a life too full for sadness to slip into.
Because if I had energy left at night, I’d start thinking.
And that would be worse.
But sorrow is patient.
It waits in the bones.
When I turned 20, I broke.
It wasn’t one thing. It never is. It was the years of silences, of unmet gazes, of being told that excellence was just the baseline. I said everything. Every word they ever threw at me that landed like a stone. Every time I cried alone in my room and told myself to get over it. Every moment I felt like a guest in their love. They cried.
“We’re sorry, Sophia.”
They apologised, over and over, saying they thought they were doing the right thing, that they didn’t realise how much I was bleeding beneath the surface. Now, they ask if I’m okay. They try, in their own way. It’s not perfect, but it’s something— a beginning. And in that beginning, there is a gentleness I hadn’t known before. A softness that, slowly, begins to mend what was broken.
Still, I flinch at raised voices. I search every compliment for hidden conditions. But I’m learning, little by little, how to believe in tenderness without bracing for pain. Learning that I am allowed to want gentleness— even from myself.
Sometimes, I look at my grandmother, admiring her strength. She has lived through betrayal, starvation, abandonment. She has buried her son. She has buried herself more times than she can count. She deserved more.
And my mother—
She wakes before the sun, still. Fills our fridge, still. Smiles softly, still. She carries her loneliness like a purse– worn, heavy, and familiar. She doesn’t complain. She just continues.
The women before me did not ask for ease.
They asked only to live.
I am made of both of them.
In the clenching of my fists, I carry my grandmother’s drive.
In the set of my jaw, my mother’s calm resolve.
And in my eyes— some days alight, something new.
Something that says: maybe it ends with me.
Maybe I am the last to bleed for things that should’ve been given freely.
Maybe I am the first to learn how to be loved gently.
Remembrance
There is a kind of strength that is not loud.
It does not raise fists.
It does not win medals.
It simply wakes up, day after day, and continues.
And now, I stand here— not unbroken, but breaking differently.
Less violently.
More openly.
I am learning how to hold love without suspicion.
How to speak without apology.
How to rest without guilt.
The women before me taught me how to live.
And I intend to do just that.
Not for them.
But because of them.
Because they gave me this chance.
Because they walked so far with bleeding feet just to hand me a pair of shoes.
Because they didn’t stop when they should have.
Because they chose to stay. To rise. To survive.
And now it is my turn to become more than survival.
To become someone who remembers.
Someone who feels.
Someone who forgives, and stays soft anyway.
My grandmother.
My mother.
Me.
Bound by love and tenacity.
