My mother’s love was a garden of thorns.
I grew there, tangled in the roots,
bleeding with each reach for her hand.
She smiled, tired and proud,
and said, “This is how we’ve always grown.”
But no one told me
the soil was watered with tears,
generation after generation,
until the earth itself was heavy with grief.
It’s a strange loyalty, isn’t it?
To carry the weight of wounds we didn’t choose,
to mistake pain for love,
to mistake silence for safety.
We learn to hold the betrayal close,
like a child clinging to a mother
who has already let go.
I tried to ask her once,
why the love felt so sharp,
why trust was a fragile thread
always breaking beneath us.
Her face closed like a book,
her voice cracked like a mirror:
“You’ll understand when you’re older.”
And I wanted to forgive her for that,
but forgiveness felt like surrender—
a quiet submission to the same old ache.
It took years to see the truth:
she was wounded, too.
The violation came before her,
and before her mother,
an ancient script handed down
with no time for rewrites.
They did what they could
with trembling hands and broken voices.
Forgiveness is a tender rebellion,
a refusal to wear their scars like armor.
I laid down the sword,
not for her, but for myself,
letting love spill through the cracks
where only resentment had lived before.
When I look at my daughter now,
I don’t see the thorns.
I don’t see the mirror,
or the weight of what once was.
I see her own reflection,
clean and bright,
free to grow wild.
“Do you forgive her?” she’ll ask me one day.
And I’ll say,
“I forgave her so you could breathe.”
Because love is not a wound,
not a chain,
not a story that cannot change.
Love is a garden we choose to tend,
soft hands pulling out the roots
and planting something new.
B 🤍
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