That moment between words, when the familiar chatter goes quiet and something older slips through felt like a small fissure opening in my day. I called my mother this morning because it had been days since we last spoke. We started with the usual who’s doing what, which neighbor had said what, you know those small gossips between a mother and daughter that stitch our lives together. Then, in a breath, she went still. But when she spoke again, it came out like a question one she’d probably been carrying for a long time.
“Can I still say when I grow up I want to own a clinic or is this it?”
PS: my mom is 46.
Honestly, the question landed like a pebble in a pond. I knew where it came from; I knew the contour of that silence. But hearing her say it out loud, unpolished, made something in me stop. My mother has always wanted to be in medicine. Not the sterile, clinical sort you read about in books, but a clinic of her own. A place where native medicine is honored. where women are taught to trust their bodies and breathe through birth. Where herbs and hands worked together. She loves to speak of natural births the way some people speak of prayers. Softly, with conviction.
But…
I think those visions were silenced after she had us. Those dreams of hers folded themselves into diaper bags, late-night feeds and the steady work of keeping us alive and whole. She still helps women anyway, delivering babies gently, and I’ve watched her always offer the right herb for the right complaint, holding a hand while a woman breathes her way into becoming a mother. Her hands remember the things her words never got to say in full. Another thing I have watched from a corner is how her bigger dreams were shelved and dusted like books nobody had time to finish.
Sometimes I think my mother lost a part of herself when she gave herself to us and that’s not because she wanted to lose it, but because life’s arithmetic asked too much. The years add and subtract in ways that aren’t fair. We’re grown now and the last of us is 15 but looking back on those years where she gave three hours for feeding, it took away a night of study; she handed over a portion of her dream in exchange for our safety. She has been the best mother anyone could ask for, but the best mothers can carry unspoken losses like secret luggage strapped to their backs.
I wanted to tell her, in that small breath on the line, that it’s never too late to speak of a dream. I wanted to tell her that clinics can be built in unlikely hours, that visions can be resurrected from the quiet corners where they’ve been waiting. But I listened instead with tears gleaming in my eyes. I allowed her name the hope. Her hope. I let her air the words and I felt the ache of a life both given and deferred.
There is a strange tenderness in witnessing the person who carried you choose you over herself again and again. There is also a quiet, furious love that wants to set those deferred things free. If I could gather up the years she surrendered and rearrange them for her, I would give them back with interest.
So I’m writing this as a wish for her, like a prayer and a promise. I wish my mother, in whatever life she finds next, gets every dream she has stored away. The clinic, the women she will teach, the herbs and the soft hymns of natural birth and I wish it even if that life has no room for me.