N8tivegirl

When the Strongest Woman I Know Grows Older

Some of my earliest understandings of strength did not come from stories or sermons.

They came from watching my mother survive.

She became a mother at sixteen—when innocence is still supposed to be intact, when life is still imagined instead of carried. I know myself well enough now to admit this truth plainly: I could not have done what she did. But she did. And she did it without spectacle, without complaint, without the luxury of choice.

At seventeen, she left home—not to escape responsibility, but to shoulder it.

Job Corps. Nursing. Long days and longer nights.

She wasn’t chasing a dream for herself—she was building stability for a life she had already brought into the world. That kind of courage doesn’t announce itself. It simply shows up, again and again, and does the work.

I didn’t just grow up with my mother.

I grew alongside her.

I cried with her.

I learned from her silences.

I watched her grieve when she buried her best friend—my grandmother—and somehow still rise the next morning. I watched her carry sorrow with dignity and keep loving anyway.

I saw her fight cancer.

I saw her help raise my children when my own strength was thin.

I saw her keep giving, even when her body asked her to rest.

And quietly—almost imperceptibly—she aged.

Not all at once.

But day by day.

In the soft ways time makes itself known.

In my mind, she is still the vibrant woman who raised me.

The one who knew how to stand tall when life was heavy.

The one whose wisdom came from surviving what should have broken her.

And yet my heart knows a truth my spirit resists:

One day, she will not be here.

That knowledge frightens me—not because love will end, but because presence will change. Because there will come a morning when memory does what hands no longer can. Because loving deeply means eventually facing absence.

And still—this, too, is part of God’s perfect design.

Not cruelty.

Not punishment.

But the sacred rhythm of life: arrival, endurance, legacy.

My mother’s life teaches me that strength is not loud, courage is not flawless, and love is not wasted—even when time moves forward. What she has given me does not age. What she has planted cannot be undone.

One day, when her voice lives more in my memory than my ears, I will still carry her.

In how I love.

In how I endure.

In how I rise.

And maybe that is the quiet mercy of it all:

That God allows time to pass—not to erase love,

but to prove how much of it remains.

May you know, on this birthday and every day after, that your strength did not go unnoticed, your sacrifices were not wasted, and your love is still building generations you may never fully see—but God does.