Kate Didd

A moment hits me and I cannot stop laughing.

I’m in the hospital. She’s on life support, the machine breathing for the woman who once breathed life into me. The room is heavy in that sterile, fluorescent way that hospitals are. Three nurses. A doctor. My brothers. My father. The air feels like it’s waiting for permission to break.

The doctor looks at me gently and asks,

“What do you call her when you want her attention?”

Without hesitation, without rehearsal, without dignity, I say:

“Hey Ma, why you being a bitch?”

Silence.

Then my mother smiles.

The doctor blinks and says, “Guess you do.”

And that’s when I knew, I knew her most.

Not the polished version. Not the church-lady version. Not the long-suffering wife. Not the martyr mother. I knew her. The woman who laughed at irreverence. The woman who understood our language wasn’t Hallmark, it was survival. It was sharp edges and sarcasm and love disguised as insult.

That was the moment I understood that I would have to speak for her.

Not the cleaned-up version.

The truth.

And the truth is, my mother was complicated.

By every definition the English language can hold. A woman of God. A devout mother. A single married woman. A wife whose husband performed goodness while carrying on elsewhere. A woman driven by shame and guilt so thick it wrapped around our childhood like humidity you couldn’t escape.

She did it alone. Even when she wasn’t alone.

And shame is a quiet inheritance.

Each of us children took a piece of it.

Wrapped it around ourselves.

Called it identity.

I see the worst of her in all of us sometimes.

Especially in me.

Because I am my mother’s daughter.

And I am a devout mother.

If there is nothing anyone can say about me, it is this: I put my children first. I have ruined worlds to keep them safe. I have burned bridges and built kingdoms in the same breath for their protection. I earned this title.

But here’s the thing, she left me tools.

Little sentences.

Little warnings.

Little pieces of wisdom she herself didn’t know how to use.

I think part of her knew she was stuck.

Knew she was scared.

Knew I wasn’t.

So she handed me the toolbox and said nothing about how to build.

And then she left.

Fuck you, Mom.

How dare you leave me with all these questions?

There was a girl once, screaming into canyons, oceans, waterfalls, trying to drown out the noise in her head. That girl was me. I wanted to disappear. I wanted relief. I wanted to feel loved in a way that didn’t cost me my spine.

And when everything cracked open, when grief swallowed the floor beneath me, I reached into that toolbox.

And the tools fit.

I negotiated life through a new lens. I refused perspectives that weren’t true. I refused narratives that painted her simpler than she was. They didn’t know her like I did. They didn’t watch her cry when no one else was looking. They didn’t feel the weight of her pain pressed into their chest at night.

My story is not built on grace.

It is built on rubble.

But I built anyway.

I wake up.

I keep healthy habits.

I love my children loudly.

Dinner on the table.

Story time.

Kisses.

Full bellies.

Safety.

I did it.

And she never saw it.

Everything I have is because of you, goddamnit. That’s my mother.

And then I look at her, my daughter.

Her eyes look just like mine.

Hopeful.

Curious.

Lit from within.

And I wonder when I drifted from protecting her. When did my pursuit of building myself leave questions in her hands? How did I unknowingly mirror the very thing that wounded me?

I built structure. Beauty. Cold edges where chaos used to live. I built the life my mother wished she could have had. Romantic mornings with my husband. Soft laughter instead of resentment. A partnership that gets better, not bitter.

I did it for her.

For the fifteen-year-old girl abandoned by her birth father.

For the child who watched her mother survive.

For the woman who wanted approval and love in the same breath.

My daughter is easy to love. She is not lightning in a bottle, she is sunlight. She is warmth the very essence of the word. And I give her everything. The tools. The truth. The warning that she may not understand them yet.

“One day they’ll fit,” I tell her.

Tell me how they fit into the beautiful life you build.

And I won’t say I told you so.

Because belief is not a competition.

It’s a gift.

I am not perfect. My monsters are locked behind doors that will never open inside my home. They haunt only me, as they should.

I wished for better.

And I got it.

Because of you.

Because of what you showed me and what you couldn’t.

I wish you would’ve been kinder to yourself.

You did the best you could.

I didn’t always give you grace when you were alive.

So now I give it to her.

And to myself.

March fourth.

Move forward.

And bee kind.

Kind to the complicated women who came before us.

Kind to the daughters trying to untangle inheritance from identity.

Kind to the mothers building worlds with shaking hands.

This is the world I made with stars in my eyes and dreams in my head.

And because of you, I learned how.