“Do you...like me?” I asked. “I mean...even a little bit?”
Nothing. Not a flicker, not a breath.
“Every time I hand a newborn to its mother,” I continued, “I always think about you and wonder the same thing: were you even the tiniest bit happy when you held me for the first time?”
Her face twitched, but I didn’t stop. Years of unspoken thoughts finally found fire.
“I didn’t ask to be born, either. I didn’t ask to haveyoufor a mother, but I still tried. I tried to make it worth it, to makemyselfworth it. And still, somehow, you hate me.” My breath snagged. “And this thing—thisstupid, ancient Arab tradition of only wanting boys—it isn’t even a thing anymore. It’s not a part of Islam, it’s not something we’re supposed to believe in, yet you cling to it like it’s your life’s purpose or something.”
“I don’t hate you, Lillian.”
“Really? So the last thirty years were you showing me love?” I shook my head. “Forget it.” I turned back to the closet, refusing to let her see the tears pricking my eyes. I adjusted the last onesie five times, just to keep my hands busy, to keep from shattering.
“I was jealous.”
I froze, my fingers still clutching the pink fabric. For a moment, I thought I’d imagined the tremor in her voice. My mother never trembled. She broke things, bent them, commanded them—but she didn’t tremble.
“Jealous of what?”
“You.”
I blinked. “I don’t...understand.”
“In the beginning,” she began, her hands twisting around each other, like she was trying to wring the truth dry. “I didn’twant a daughter because I didn’t want her to end up like me. Married too young, no education, no career, no life outside her husband and children.” Her voice wavered, just barely. “I told myself I was protecting her.”
“Then why,” I asked, confusion threading into something harsher, “did you spend my entire life trying to push me into exactly that?”
Her gaze flickered away—to the wall, to the painted sunset she’d insulted less than ten minutes ago. “Because it was all I knew,” she said. “I raised you the only way I’d ever been taught. The same way my mother raised me.” She swallowed thickly. “But you...you were different, Lillian. You didn’t do what I did, you did what Icouldn’tdo. You saidno. You became your own person, and I know it’s awful, but I was jealous, and I—I guess it bled into the way I treated you.” She met my eyes again, and in them shimmered something like regret. “I’m sorry.”
There was a crack. It wasn’t loud or dramatic—more of a tender tingle of a hinge surrendering after years of rust. It was almost imperceptible, the sound of a wound loosening, but I felt it—some hidden part of me shifting, recalibrating.
For so long, I had seen her as a fortress of composure and control. A woman carved out of frost, her edges sharp enough to draw blood if you got too close. She had always seemed indestructible, immune to softness, to regret, to love that wasn’t conditional or barbed.
But in that moment, standing there in my half-finished nursery with her voice quivering between us, I saw her differently. Not as a mother, not as the woman who had spent years reminding me of my inadequacy, but as agirl—one who must’ve once had stars in her eyes and dreams that reached further than her kitchen walls. A girl who might have wanted to write, or travel, or simplychooseher life before someone told her that her worth began and ended with the ring on her finger.Before her fire was smothered under duty, expectation, and a religion she was taught to fear instead of understand.
And I hated that I saw her like that, hated that empathy blossomed where I wanted resentment to stay rooted because anger was easier. Anger didn’t hurt.
But empathy had a way of finding its way in, even when you bolted every door and boarded up the windows. It slipped through the smallest cracks, like light under a locked door, illuminating corners you would’ve preferred to keep shadowed.
And suddenly, I wasn’t looking at the woman who broke me—I was looking at the girl who never had the chance to become whole.
It still wouldn’t completely make sense in my head, though, the idea that a mother could be jealous of her own daughter. I tried, briefly, to put myself in her shoes, to imagine what it must feel like to watch your child become everything you were never allowed to be, but all I felt was pride, not ire. Pride that I’d somehow raised them well enough to rise beyondme. Wasn’t motherhood, at its core, about giving your child more than you ever received? To wish for your child what was never granted to you?
“You didn’t have to keep the cycle going,” I said. “You could’ve broken it.”
Her gaze snapped to mine. “But Idid, Lillian. Look at you. You’re nothing like me. Your life is nothing like mine.”
“Do you think it was easy to become this person? That it just happened?” My throat burned. “Every choice I made, every wall I built, every version of myself I had to fight for—it was all in defiance of you. Growing up with you wasn’t character-building; it was survival. I became who I amdespiteyou, not because of you.”
She looked like I’d slapped her. And maybe I had with words I’d spent my whole life swallowing.
I pressed a hand to my stomach, my daughter’s heartbeat still echoing in my ears, a quiet percussion of hope. “But it doesn’t matter anymore,” I said. “It ends here. I won’t pass this down. My daughter will grow up free. She’ll know love without begging for it. She’ll never have to earn kindness, especially not from me. Hermother.”
My voice wobbled, but I didn’t stop. I turned away, not wanting to look at her when I spoke because it was easier to talk to the closet, to the future, to my daughter.
“You can stay, if you want,” I said. “You can be part of this. Ofher. I won’t shut you out, not if you don’t want to be. But it’ll be on my terms this time. I won’t let you hurt her the way you hurt me.”
Silence answered. I continued hanging tiny outfits, pretending it didn’t matter, pretending I wasn’t hoping she’d say something. When I finally turned, ready to face her, the doorway was empty.
