10/05/2026
๐๐ก๐ ๐ฐ๐๐ฌ ๐
โShe doesnโt understand me.โ
The thought comes easily now, slipping into my mind as naturally as breath whenever my mother and I fought โ which, lately, seemed to happen more often than not. I hated the way she questioned everything: where I was going, why I stayed awake so late, why my replies sounded colder than before. I hated how every conversation became a lesson, every silence a warning.
Most of all, I hated how she looked at me afterward โ as though love and disappointment could exist in the same breath.
Our evenings had begun ending the same way: doors closing too loudly, tears wiped away with stubborn hands, silence settling between us like a third person in the room. In those moments, I convinced myself that she did not understand me at all. That she only knew how to hold too tightly, speak too sharply, worry too much.
That evening, rain pressed softly against the windows while the house carried the heaviness of unfinished words. I lay awake staring at the ceiling, replaying every sentence I should not have said and every sentence she should not have said back.
Downstairs, I heard faint movement in the kitchen โ the careful opening of cabinets, the muted clink of porcelain, and water boiling somewhere in the quiet. Even after everything, she was still awake, preparing for the next day as though our argument had not hollowed the house only hours before. The realization settled heavily in my chest, sleep now nowhere to be found. Perhaps reading would quiet my thoughts. I tried to remember where the old books had been kept. The attic, perhaps.
I tiptoed upstairs slowly, careful to avoid the wooden steps that groaned beneath too much weight. She would only scold me again if she found me awake at this hour. The attic greeted me with the scent of dust-worn paper and forgotten years. As I searched through yellowing blankets and stacked boxes for something to read, my eyes landed upon one tucked carefully in the corner. Its edges had softened with time, as though it had spent years waiting patiently for someone to remember it existed.
And somehow, in the stillness of that midnight hour, it felt as though it had been waiting for me. So I opened it.
Inside were photographs. Not the framed kind displayed in living rooms, but the forgotten ones โ the ones that carried fingerprints at the corners, writings at the back, and smiles too candid to have been rehearsed.
There she was. Not my mother. Not entirely.
A girl no older than seventeen stood beneath a rain tree, sunlight tangled in her dark hair as laughter rested carelessly on her lips. She wore a white uniform and blue plaid skirt softened by the wind, a familiar lanyard hanging against her chest like a quiet bridge between her girlhood and mine. She looked toward the camera with the kind of brightness people carry before the world teaches them caution.
I stared at the photograph longer than I meant to. Because for the first time in my life, I was looking at my mother before she became one.
There were more photographs beneath it. My mother sitting by a classroom window, books scattered across her lap while afternoon light spilled across her face. My mother standing beside friends whose names had likely faded with time, all of them smiling as though the future had not yet learned how to disappoint them. My mother clutching certificates against her chest with tired but triumphant eyes.
In every photograph, there was movement in her. Dreams too large to remain hidden.
And beneath the photographs rested a diary wrapped carefully in fading cloth. I hesitated before opening it, as though I were about to step into a room I had never been invited into.
The pages smelled faintly of old paper and dried sampaguita flowers. Her handwriting curved gently across brittle sheets, elegant but hurried in places, as though her thoughts had once moved faster than her hands could follow.
โI want to see the world beyond this town someday.โ Another page. โI am afraid of becoming ordinary.โ Then another. โSometimes I feel as though I am failing at everything at once, but tomorrow still arrives asking to be lived through.โ
I paused there, fingers resting against the page. Somehow, those words unsettled me more than our arguments ever had. Because suddenly, my mother no longer felt untouchable. She became painfully human before me โ a girl who had once doubted herself, carried fears she never spoke aloud, buried dreams beneath responsibilities that arrived too early and stayed too long. A girl who had once been as lost as I was now. And still, she endured โ not perfectly, but faithfully.
Outside, rainwater slipped quietly from the roof while the night deepened around me. The attic no longer felt like storage for forgotten things. It felt like standing inside the unfinished story of someone I thought I already knew.
Sometimes, in the middle of anger, I had forgotten that my mother had once been young too. That before she became someoneโs refuge, she had first been a girl learning how to survive herself.
I thought of all the ways love had existed in our house without ever announcing itself loudly. In neatly folded clothes waiting at the edge of my bed before dawn, uniforms pressed smooth on hurried mornings, stitched buttons repaired before I even noticed they had fallen loose, bowls of hot soup appearing beside me whenever sickness hollowed my body, in the porch light left glowing whenever I came home later than promised.
My mother had left pieces of herself everywhere. Not in grand gestures, but in the quiet rituals of staying. And perhaps what unsettled me most was the realization that I had inherited more than her eyes. As I sat on the dusty attic floor with her photographs scattered across my lap and her diary resting gently in my hands, my gaze drifted toward a small mirror leaning against the wall nearby.
For a moment, the girl staring back at me no longer felt entirely like myself. She looked achingly familiar, as though she had once stood beneath a rain tree in a white blouse and blue plaid skirt, laughing carelessly before the world taught her caution too.
Recently, I had begun tying my hair the same way while studying. I reread messages after sending them, just as she rereads grocery lists beneath her breath. Even my love resembled hers โ care disguised as reminders, worry hidden beneath scolding, tenderness tucked quietly into habit.
I resembled her. Not entirely in appearance, but in the way I feared, in the way I hoped, and in the way I kept surviving despite myself.
All my life, I thought I had been trying to understand my mother. Yet perhaps the missing piece had never been motherhood itself, but the girl who existed long before it. I closed the diary carefully and carried it downstairs. The wooden steps groaned beneath my weight. So much for leaving unnoticed.
My mother stood at the kitchen counter with her back turned, sleeves rolled slightly as steam curled around her tired figure. For a moment, she looked exactly like the girl from the photographs and nothing like her at all.
โMira?โ she called softly, noticing me standing there. I crossed the room without answering. Then quietly, I wrapped my arms around her from behind. She stiffened in surprise before slowly relaxing into the embrace.
And there, between the scent of soup and the warmth of familiar hands, I realized something I wished I had understood sooner: My mother had only been living for the first time too. I glanced at the wall clock past midnight and remembered.
โHappy Motherโs Day, Mom,โ I whispered. This time, when she held me close, I held her back.
Words by Aira Nicole Sevilla
Artwork by Bianca Loraine Gargantiel
