All the girls who learned to guard their hearts

ended up with sons, didn’t we?

Maybe that wasn’t an accident.

We practiced strength long before

we practiced lullabies.

We knew how to hold our own storms,

how to expect less, carry more,

how to survive on the quiet discipline of being fine.

And then they arrived!

Small boys with impossible trust.

Love that did not measure

did not ration,

did not retreat.

They held our faces in their hands

and called us beautiful

like it was a fact, not a favor.

They reached for us as if

we had never once been dropped by life.

They did not ask for the keys to our guarded places.

They simply filled them with light.

And then, the world began calling them forward...

I still remember the first parade.

The morning I pretended I was calm.

The way the uniform looked too large,

as if responsibility had come early.

And there he was.

Not tucked safely in the middle,

but at the very front.

Leading!

Where the road must be met first.

Where others would read courage

from the steadiness of his spine.

People around me cheered for a leader.

I was witnessing a prayer in motion.

There goes my heart, I thought,

walking ahead of me.

Then the first medal.

Cool metal against warm skin.

They called it an award.

I call it Becoming!

The first song, voice trembling but willing.

The first story, letters leaning into each other

as if even words were learning balance.

I kept those fragments carefully.

Proof that a life does not arrive finished,

it unfolds layer by layer.

Then the first stage?

Lights too bright, expectations too enormous.

Yet he remained steady.

Not because he was fearless,

but because he was willing.

The first friend who entered my home.

Other orbits forming beyond me.

Love expanding its horizons.

And then came the falls.

How fiercely I wanted to interrupt them.

How quickly I offered my strength,

in exchange for his pain.

But life doesn’t accept substitutions.

Does it?

So I watched...

I watched disappointment sit with him.

I watched unfairness introduce itself.

I watched the long phases of isolation.

I watched the intense work of rebounding.

I saw him stand for what was right,

even when right stood alone.

I saw him return from defeat

carrying questions instead of bitterness.

Each rising brought back

a version of him

no one had ever met before.

And slowly I learnt.

I was not raising a child.

I was witnessing a HUMAN,

being assembled by experiences.

The universe was not asking my permission

to shape him.

It was doing its ancient work,

carving, refining, and expanding.

What it gave me instead

was a front-row seat.

A place to witness and learn.

He was studying the world.

I was studying him.

Because in his trying again and again,

I saw perseverance without drama.

In his tenderness,

I saw strength without armor.

In his ability to hope after being hurt,

I saw a future my own heart had forgotten to imagine.

Watching him become

began to uncover who I was still meant to be.

Not a protector standing between him and life,

but a student learning from the way he met it.

And somewhere between those lessons,

life turned toward me too.

Teaching release without abandonment.

Teaching faith without guarantees.

Teaching that falling and rising

belong to the same sentence.

Maybe they did not come

so we could shape them.

Maybe they came

so love could gently reshape us.

To loosen the knots we tied for survival.

To rest our overtrained vigilance.

To place trust back into our palms

as something ordinary and safe.

We watch them walk into the distance,

and without announcement,

our sharpness begins to soften.

In their courage, something in us exhales.

In their returning, something in us dares again.

And before we can mark the hour it happened,

we are no longer the women

who first held them.

We are the women in motherhood.

Not perfected.

Not finished.

Just open enough to Witness the Era of Becoming!

THE ERA OF BECOMING!