Motherhood is the sound
of footsteps at midnight,
half-asleep, half-prayer,
moving through dark halls
toward someone else's cry.

It is giving your body away twice:
first to build a heartbeat,
then to spend the rest of your life
protecting it from breaking.

A mother learns the geography of sacrifice
without ever studying a map.
She knows the sharp corners of worry,
the oceans of unpaid exhaustion,
the small glowing countries
where her children laugh.

And still, she stays.

Even when the world forgets her name
and calls her only "Mom,"
even when her dreams sit quietly
like folded laundry at the foot of the bed,
even when love asks too much
and sleep offers too little,
she stays.

There are women carrying entire generations
inside their tenderness.

Women who hide their grief
behind packed lunches and clean socks.
Women who smile through their daily routines,
while wondering how to keep everyone fed,
safe, whole.

Women whose hands become older
while their children become tall.

And one day,
a child notices,
really notices,
the tiredness in her eyes,
the softness in her voice,
the way she always took the smaller piece
without saying a word.

And the child understands too late
that love had been living there all along
in ordinary disguises:

a waiting candle light,
a winter coat buttoned to the chin,
a hand on a fevered forehead,
a whispered "Travel safe,"
a silent seat at every hard goodbye.

Motherhood is not saintly.
It is human and trembling.
It is losing yourself slowly
while hoping someone else can become whole.

And maybe that is the closest thing to holy,
this world will ever know.

Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 20th of Sapiarch, in the year 19 AC.