Year Eleven – Imagining the Future
Another decade begins.
Today, I stand on the edge of something new—not just marking another year without Mom, but stepping into the quiet unraveling of motherhood itself.
When Lila was little, love was an urgent, tangible, all-consuming act of survival. It was scraped knees and midnight lullabies, tiny hands clinging to mine as if I held the world together alone.
Now, the tide is turning. This is the decade where she will stretch beyond me, where her life will become hers in a way that no longer fits in the palm of my hand.
It reminds me of Mom—how she must have watched me grow taller, bolder, more certain of a path she wouldn’t have chosen for me. We were a study in contrasts: I questioned, she steadied; I chased horizons, she cherished the familiar. Yet somehow, love always found its way between us, stitching our differences into something strong enough to hold us both.
As my mother, I crossed an ocean at the end of her second decade. Distance rewrote us—love became letters saved in shoeboxes, phone calls measured in calling cards, the ache of missing her cooking sharpened by the thrill of my becoming. But it never diminished us. If anything, it distilled love to its purest form: chosen, intentional, unshaken by time or tide.
Now, I feel Lila beginning her departure. At her first dance performance this year, the other girls clung to their mothers. My daughter? She shut the dressing room door in my face. “Wait outside, Mama.” There it was—my stubborn independence reflected at me, and suddenly, I heard Mom’s voice in my bones: “One day, you’ll understand.”
And I do.
My role now is not to guide or shield, but to witness—to be the steady ground beneath her leaps, the silent cheer when she stumbles, the hands that resist reaching out even when every instinct screams to pull her close.
It’s the bittersweet math of motherhood: the deeper the roots, the wider the wings. Mom taught me that. She let me go even when it broke her, loved me enough to celebrate the life I built beyond her, and now, I honor her by doing the same for Lila: loving without clinging, cheering without flinching, and trusting that roots hold fast even when the wind howls.
So here’s to the threshold.
Here’s to the tide, the ache, the sacred art of release.
Here’s to the future—wide and bright and hers.
And here’s to you, Mom, for teaching me that love isn’t a cage, but a constellation. Ever-guiding. Ever-glowing. Forever enough, no matter the distance.
