Dear Mother,

I look into the mirror and look away from the face that looks exactly like you. How bitter is it that I have lived these years determined not to end up like you, and yet... Here I am anyway.

Please don't misunderstand. It's not that I hate you. It's just that your unhappiness has colored my life ever since I can remember. Maybe now you're content, even happy. But I know a little of what you went through these years. And a part of me wants (and is afraid) to ask: was it worth it?

I am not now, nor will I ever be married. I do not have children to raise. At my age, you already had me and my older sister. You can say our paths have been different. But I still feel a certain sense of inevitability.

Now I stand as mother to my younger siblings, and it would be so easy to do what you have done, mother. I feel the same frustration you must have felt. The same helpless love, the same fears. Maybe now I can forgive you for your choices. Even as I make my own.

And it is difficult to choose again and again to let your children be, to let them make their own mistakes, to let them try and fail, to let them follow a different path from yours. At what point does the parent's job end? At what point do we say, 'I have guided you and shaped you this much; I can go no further'? Because I feel like I'm at that point. How strange to see children grow up, form opinions, form habits and vices, face the world both indifferent and hostile... Or maybe the right word is terrifying.

O mother, do you see what I see? My breath catches in my throat, and I want to hold them close and never let go. Yet I would do a disservice to them. I'd rather imagine them free, free, free.

I never realized how much courage motherhood required.

Your daughter,
M.O.