For Suzanne, on Her Birthday

Suzanne — my mother

She did not inherit ease.
She inherited conditions.

Variables arranged themselves against her,
scarcity masquerading as fate,
silence dressed as expectation.
The literature would call this adverse context,
as though naming it makes it lighter to carry.

But resilience is not an abstract construct.
It has a pulse.
It learns to cook when the cupboards are thin.
It learns to speak when the room prefers quiet women.
It becomes fluent in endurance before it is taught rest.

My mother learned to survive inside systems
not designed for her to thrive.
She navigated thresholds that moved as she approached,
learned the choreography of scarcity,
learned how to keep a household standing
when the structure was unreliable.

Strength, in her case, was never overt.
It was procedural.
It showed up as continuity.
As repetition.
As choosing again what had not chosen her.

Her body, too, has argued with limits.
There were seasons when survival became clinical,
when breath, blood, or bone
required negotiation with uncertainty.
She did not romanticize recovery.
She practiced it.

Love is the other discipline she mastered.
A love that multiplies across generations,
children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren,
unranked, unmeasured, inexhaustible.
An attachment theory the textbooks fail to describe:
presence as practice, devotion as ritual.

She built safety out of ordinary hours.
She absorbed uncertainty and still made room for warmth,
as though tenderness were a skill
one could train under pressure.

There is a quiet rigor to this kind of life.
No applause, no clean narrative arc.
Just a long fidelity to keeping others alive,
to keeping oneself intact enough
to love again the next morning.

If I write with attention,
it is because she modeled it.
If I study structures and their failures,
it is because she lived inside them
and still made a home.

This is a recognition.
That survival, when practiced daily,
becomes a form of authorship.
That endurance, when chosen without bitterness,
is not passive.

Happy birthday, Mom.
May the years ahead meet you
with some of the gentleness
you learned to offer the world
without being promised any in return.

With love,
Your daughter - Monica

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