THE MOTHER I NEVER KNEW

Relaxing with mom

The bond between a mother and a daughter is a universal, powerful relationship. The love my mother has given me over the years has been consistent and unchanging. She has always loved me and in turn I have always, on some level, loved my mother, but the love has grown and changed over time.

As a child, I saw my mother as perfect and invulnerable, but I never realized she was also a person. She is a woman who has dreams and desires and wants to accomplish great things. She is not just my mother who cooks food or cleans the house but she is an amazing, strong woman who does great things every day.

The moment this dawned on me was when my mother and father had just returned from Brazil. My mother is from Brazil, and it was the first time she had seen family in over 15 years. My parents sat all the kids down and showed us photos and videos clips of all the places they had visited and all the people they had seen.

The best video clip was of my mother laughing and talking with her sisters. In the video, she was with her two sisters and they were having coffee and freely speaking in Portuguese. I had never seen my mother so free. She had a light in her eyes I had never seen before.

In America there was always that barrier of language, and when she spoke to me in Portuguese I usually answered in English. But in that video I saw my mother as the woman she was, a strong, confident, and free woman. That is why I love my mother forever, because she is more than my mother. She is a woman I am striving to be in every moment-strong, confident, and freely able to love.