When she lived with me, I knew her life. The shape of her days, the small things, what was on her mind.
I still want that. I want to be the person she tells. Maybe because she’s my only child. Maybe because somewhere along the way, she became my whole life.
I know this longing from the other side, too. I wish I’d spent more time with my mother. Really enjoyed her. Breathed her in. As a child, you think your parents will be here forever. You know people die, but that feels so far away. You don’t realize how fast it happens. The same way you don’t realize how fast your child grows up.
That’s the beauty of life, and the saddest part of it.
If you’re a mother who knows this longing, you’re not the only one.
Little Birds
Something in me has gone quiet,
further down than sleep.
I stand at the window of my own life
and can't find the latch
to let myself back in.
The house is the same size.
It only feels bigger.
Her door stays open
because closing it would mean something.
Little birds learn to fly.
That was always the plan.
I showed her the sky myself,
pointed at it for years,
said go.
And she went,
far, the way they do.
I still want the small things,
the calls about nothing,
her days told back to me.
I didn't know what my elders were to me
until I'd lived long enough
to count who was left.
She'll learn it the same way.
I only have to still be here.
Nobody tells the mother bird
what to do with the nest after.
So I do what mothers do.
I keep the branch warm.
I listen for wings.
My daughter was home for her father’s birthday, and we just dropped her back at school. After she left, I cleaned her room. Then I closed the door.
I keep it closed. It’s too painful to see her room without her in it.
She’s a junior in college now, and by the third year I was supposed to have figured this out. That was the unspoken deal. You cry through the first semester, and by junior year you’ve found your purpose. A business, a degree, a cause. Something of your own.
People assume I’ll go back to broadcast journalism, the career I left to raise her. I won’t. Every part of me says that chapter is behind me, and I want something completely different. I don’t know yet what it is or how to find it. But every day I push myself to feel secure where I am, and most days I remember how blessed I am.
I’m still waiting. The door is still closed.
I know she’s doing great. She’s fine. I miss her anyway, with an ache I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t been here. I miss her face, her real face across the kitchen in the morning, not on a screen.
Some nights I open Life360 just to see the little dot that shows where she is. On an ordinary day, that’s the closest I get to her. It tells me where she is. It can’t tell me how she is.
I admire women who are full-time mothers, and women who manage full-time careers and motherhood at once. I couldn’t do both. So I chose the one that mattered most, and that was my daughter. She still is. She always will be.
Now she’s grown, and the job I chose is done. I’m truly grateful to watch her out in the world, finding her footing. And still, without her, I feel lost.
Some women reach this point and simply move forward. They’re in a good place, building the next part of their lives, and I’m glad for them. That isn’t me. Not yet.
On the hardest days, it feels like a whiteout. The light is so bright I can’t see the horizon or tell which way is forward. That’s the closest I can come to explaining lost.
Missing your child is hard enough. Then a second voice shows up to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Too much, for too long. Why can’t you let go? Why aren’t you doing more? I’d never talk to a friend that way. Most days, I talk to myself that way.
So I’m practicing something else. We don’t all cope the same way, and we aren’t meant to. One woman’s solution is another woman’s dead end.
Part of the difference is where I come from. In my Afghan family, closeness was the furniture of daily life. We lived near each other, ate together, and knew each other’s days without asking. Girls didn’t leave home until they married. It was old-fashioned, but it was how I grew up. Raising a daughter who would pack up and go away to college meant doing something the women before me never did. So when she did exactly what I raised her to do, I had no map for this goodbye.
I’ll say the harder thing too. Some days the sadness runs deep, and my health doesn’t always give me the energy I want. The missing makes the sadness heavier, and the sadness makes the missing louder. Still, I fight my way through.
I don’t fight alone. I have women in my life who make me feel I’m enough exactly as I am. They hold my hand when things are hard and applaud when things are good. Growing older has taught me how much that matters: friends who walk with you through each chapter and don’t need you to have it all figured out. That sisterhood is a big part of how I’m finding my way back to myself.
And I come from strong women. My father was a diplomat at the United Nations, and my parents came here planning to go home when his posting ended. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and there was no home to go back to. My mother raised us in a country that was never the plan and made sure every one of us went to college. Both my grandmothers, my aunts, and my cousins lost the lives they knew and started over in foreign lands. If they could carry that, I can carry this.
My daughter is watching, too. Children do as you do, not as you say. If she sees me admit how hard this is and keep going anyway, that’s what she’ll remember.
If you feel it too, the loss and the pain and the pride all at once, you’re not the only one. That’s why I’m writing this. There are many of us standing in the same storm, and you’re not standing in it alone.
My uncle has been gone for years. We drove out to California from Las Vegas to see his wife, his two kids, grown and married now, and their kids. Losing him never meant losing them.
One evening we went up into the canyon above Malibu and stopped at an overlook. There’s a bench up there and a tree the wind has pushed sideways. Purple sage was blooming along the edge of the pavement. The ocean was flat and hazy all the way out, and the sun was going down behind the ridge.
I paint water. I do it alone, usually from a photo, and I can spend a long time on one color. Standing up there was different. I was between my father’s sister and my father’s brother, looking at the same thing they were looking at. The ocean wasn’t better than the water at home. I just wasn’t by myself.
That’s most of what this trip was.
My uncle lives in Las Vegas, my aunt came from Virginia, I came from New York. The plan was to be in the same house.
My cousins and I grew up scattered. We were refugees, so the family landed in different countries, not different towns. Our parents got everyone into one house once or twice a year for a few days, sometimes a week, and that was how we knew each other. It doesn’t sound like enough. It was.
We’re still close. My cousins’ wives are lovely and welcoming. The kids didn’t hold back either. They were curious about everything, affectionate, wanting to be in the middle of whatever the adults were doing, and by the third day I had something of my own going with each one of them.
I want that for Sophia. I want her to know her cousins’ kids and her nieces and nephews well enough to recognize them anywhere. It doesn’t happen by itself. Most of us spend our time off somewhere new, a country we haven’t seen yet, and I do that too. But making the family the trip, on purpose, is what keeps everybody in each other’s lives. Nothing else holds. You book the flight, you cook for everyone, you put up with the noise, the way our parents did.
I want her to have the annoying part too. It’s easy to love family you see once a year for an afternoon. I want her to have the ones who get on her nerves and she goes back to anyway.
My uncle’s kitchen in Las Vegas holds four people and about six conversations. My aunt is telling me something about my father. My uncle interrupts to correct the year it happened. She keeps going without acknowledging him. Someone sets a plate of cut fruit in front of me that I didn’t ask for and don’t need, and I eat all of it.
This is the closest I get to my parents now.
Not because I don’t see these people. I always have. But nobody visits the way they used to. People call instead, or they mean to. A house full of everyone at once, for no reason except that it’s Tuesday, is something my parents’ generation did and mine mostly doesn’t.
Here is the arithmetic that brought me here. My father is gone. So is one of his brothers, and so is his sister Halima. On my mother’s side there is no one left at all, my mother included. What remains of my father’s generation is one sister and three brothers.
So I booked the trip. Not a stop on the way to somewhere else, not a weekend that happened to work out. I asked for the days and I came. Next week we drive to California to see my aunt and my cousins, their wives, their children, all of it.
My cousin lives here too, with his parents. He’s here every day, part of the noise. I didn’t know how much I’d been missing that until I was sitting in it.
They are feeding me constantly. They ask what I need before I’ve worked out that I need it. There’s no version of me here that has to be competent or interesting.
And they tell the stories I already know.
I heard every one of them from my mother and father, most more than once, a few so often I could tell them myself. But these are those stories from inside a different body. My aunt was in the room when it happened. Her version carries a detail my father always left out. Or it loses one he always included. Or the blame lands on someone else entirely, and nobody at this table finds that worth arguing about. They just keep going. I’m listening to a story I’ve heard forty times because this is the forty-first, and there won’t be an unlimited supply.
I understand now that I was never hearing the story. I was hearing my father’s telling of it, which is a different object, and there were only ever a few people alive who had their own.
My parents never sat me down and explained that this was the point. They just lived as though it were. My father was a diplomat, which meant he and my mother and their children were safe when the war came. The rest of the family wasn’t. They went from prominent and comfortable to refugees, and they landed where they could land, Germany, and several different states here. We watched all of it happen. My parents treated the scattering as a logistics problem rather than an ending. Our house was the hub. People came from wherever they’d ended up and stayed for weeks. Every bedroom taken, then mattresses on the living room floor, then the hallway, then the kitchen. You stepped over people to get to the bathroom. Nobody delivered a lesson about family and I absorbed the whole thing anyway, the way you absorb a language before you know it has grammar.
I’m in the third chapter of my life now. What that mostly means is that I’ve stopped assuming I’ll get around to things.
Four people left who remember my father as a boy. That number has only ever moved one direction.
I’m not going to be the generation this stops with. That’s the whole of my ambition here. What happens after me isn’t mine to decide, and I’ve made my peace with that, but whether there’s anything left to carry is decided now, by whether I keep showing up while everyone is still in the room.
Sitting in that house I feel overwhelmed and completely safe at the same time, which I didn’t know were compatible.
Sophia is twenty. She’s seen some of this, the full houses, the fuss, the cooking for more than showed up. I don’t know if it took. Nobody finds that out for years.
Tell me about the house you grew up in. Was it the hub, or was it quiet? I want to know.
We made the drive to California the following week. That part is Once or Twice a Year.
You already know if you’re in one of these. Not the kind of knowing you’d say out loud to a friend, but the quiet kind, felt in your stomach a half second before you talk yourself out of it. The relationship that doesn’t make you happy. The one where you’re smaller at the end of most days than you were at the start.
I’m not a therapist and I don’t have a method. I have twenty years of watching women I love, myself included, stay somewhere bad and call it something else. A rough patch. He’s stressed. She doesn’t mean it like that. I’ve come to believe most of us were taught long ago that love and diminishment can come from the same person, in the same sentence. A parent who criticized you as devotion. A partner who cuts you down and calls it honesty. Learn that pairing early enough, and unkindness stops registering as unkindness. It registers as familiar, and your body mistakes familiar for safe.
That’s why smart, capable women stay in relationships that would horrify them if a friend described the same one back to them. I’ve watched women who run companies and speak to full rooms without shaking go home and shrink in front of one person. Confidence doesn’t touch this. It runs on a different track.
Some do leave. File the divorce, pack the car, move to another city so there’s nothing left to walk past. A few years later they’re sitting across from someone new who turns out, once you know him, to be the same person with a different last name. Leaving him doesn’t leave the pattern. It isn’t attached to any one man. It’s attached to her, waiting for the next familiar shape to climb into.
It rarely starts with the woman living it now. This moves down a line, mother to daughter to granddaughter, each one certain she’ll be the one to end it, each one arriving there anyway, because nobody handed the next woman what actually stops it: the knowledge that this is a pattern and not a personal failing, the confidence to name it while it’s happening instead of years later, and one other person willing to say so plainly instead of looking away.
I don’t think the way out starts with an ultimatum, and I’ve never seen a five-step plan hold up against a real relationship. The shift I’ve actually watched work is smaller than that. It happens at the table, in the second after the comment lands, when something in her flinches, and then, almost instantly, she starts building the excuse: he’s stressed, I’m too sensitive. That flinch is the truest thing that happens all day. Everything after it is the story she writes to keep living where she’s living.
The women who’ve changed didn’t get harder or colder. They caught themselves mid-excuse, once, and said the true sentence instead: that wasn’t okay, and I’m not going to pretend it was. Even silently. Even if it took months to say out loud to the person who’d earned it. It looked like standing up straighter than they were used to, not like relief. Doing it once made it easier to do again, and easier to spot the next man for what he actually was.
What happens after isn’t the same for everyone. Some relationships bend around a woman who’s stopped apologizing for existing. Others don’t, because they were never built on anything except her absorbing it. I don’t know which one is coming for you, and I don’t think anyone does in advance. But the women who get somewhere better are the ones who stopped being available to people who needed them smaller, and had one person in their corner who could name the pattern and still see her clearly underneath it.
