The woman across the street hardly knows your name, yet she lets you pass first along the busy street, before any of the men ahead have the chance. The girl in your third-grade class offers you a slice of her orange despite being explicitly told that she shouldn’t share her food. Your mother runs her hands through your scalp calmly and softly. She blows raspberries into your stomach until you shriek and gasp and giggle. The quiet thrum of Jermaine Jackson’s Let’s Get Serious plays low on our kitchen speakers, she sighs when it’s on the radio, left hand slowly turning the knob. 

All the time I think of you. 

When I was 13 years old, I assumed I was the ugliest person in the world, with my teal braces, hand-me-down, ill-fitting Macy’s jeans, and dry curls. I didn’t want to be seen in mirrors, could hardly stand putting on a dress in a fitting room, and refused being photographed for roughly two years. I remember what it felt like when my mother put her own shade of lipstick on my mouth, warm hands cupping my cheeks, and a small smile on her face. I remember her telling me I was so, so beautiful, and how she was so, so grateful I could be a part of her life. It almost makes me laugh now at how horribly simple I am—at how quick tears fell down my cheeks in gratitude, in appreciation, in pure, unadulterated love for my mother. I’ve started to realize that my urge to love, to appreciate other people, to look out for one another, is all taught by her.

You’re with me no matter what I do. 

I often wonder how many little girls never hear those words, how many children grow up untethered, lacking a mother's love. Men have started wars, created famines, and committed atrocities because of the absence of a mother’s love. And perhaps that is the tragedy of motherhood, of a soul connection with a single human—that her grief, her absence, her anger manifests onto you. True loneliness starts the minute your mother forgets to pick you up from daycare, the minute she forgets the birthday of your dear friend or the date of your dance recital. The pain of being forgotten by the person that matters most—that force is enough to smother.

In the place I wanna be, with my love in you. 

When I was 17, I was angry and bitter at the world, struggling to cope with the loss of my rose-colored childhood glasses. I became convinced that “my people”—those who truly understood me—were somewhere far away, across the seas. I believed that once I ventured out into the world, my longing for connection and understanding would finally be fulfilled. My mother would listen to me moan and groan and complain about all I desired while washing my clothes, braiding my hair, fixing my old 2005 Buick. She would smile, and smile, and smile despite my insistence that I would never return to my hometown after graduation. She smiled like she understood, like she forgave my immaturity, and in my aggressively delusional state, I just assumed she would let me go. 

Walk around with a smile upon your face.

A year later, at 1:29 a.m., I walk the streets of Providence alone, backpack resting on my right shoulder and tears welling in my eyes as I cross the near-empty roads. I pull out my phone from my back pocket and dial the number I memorized at seven years old. She answers on the first ring and as she laughs into the receiver I feel relief from the weight of the day, of endless change, of confusing friendships, of shitty grades, of insecurity. Despite the fact that she has her own life, her own job that she has to wake up for in five hours, despite the 352 miles of distance that separate us—I feel like I’m home again.

Longing for each other just ain’t fair. 

You sit in your classes, finish your problem sets, eat three meals a day at the dining halls, and avoid calling your mother because the burden is too great to bear in your everyday life. But when your friend is crying into your shoulders, you rub her back in the same calming circles your mother did when you were a child. And when you fall ill to the natural freshman germs that permeate the classrooms every October, you shuffle through your drawer of medications and drench your Ratty tea in the same honey brand your mother used. And on the rare occasion that you pass by groups of young children running down Thayer, you move to the side so they won’t run headfirst into the traffic on their left. You don’t even understand; you can hardly fathom the fact that your mother’s teachings bleed into every little thing you do today, that a silent lesson of culture, of empathy, of love has now been instilled in you before you could even form your first words.

And you cannot tell me that you don’t hear your mother’s words in moments of fear, that you don’t think about her when you adorn yourself with her old jewelry or listen to a Top 40 song from 2004. I think, sometimes, it hurts more to admit how much we care.

When we’ve got so much love we want to share.

I remember being 19, sitting in my advisor’s office, telling her how useless it was that the only thing I seemed to care about, beyond school, beyond friends, beyond hobbies, was people.

“I like people, right? But you can’t make a degree out of that,” I complained, voice high and (probably) annoying.

“Well, sure you can. Why would that be a bad thing?” At my advisor’s question, I’m left silent, although the answer dances on my lips: Because then, I would be like my mother. And that’s terribly unkind to think of, but it’s what I do think of. I think of the Saturdays we spent helping my uncle, who could hardly spare my mother a “thank you.” I think of my mother under the hot weight of the sun, pulling weeds from our neighbor’s garden because Barbara’s knees were too weak to crouch. I think of her with her students in the classroom, attempting to rub their Sharpie marks out of her desk, hunched over, tired but persistent.

And I think that if I had a heart that big, it would probably choke me. But for my mother, it fills her like a reservoir—an unlimited resource that is meant to be shared.

In my mind, you have taken a permanent space. 

And perhaps the bravest thing you can do within a world of trained apathy and feigned nonchalance is to love like a mother. With open hands and tired eyes, insistent, egoless, unafraid.

At the very least, I’ll try to.

Let’s get serious.