Where She Still Lives.

Today is Mother’s Day, and it feels like the first one without my mother.

Last year at this time, I was moving through a thick fog of denial—the kind that wraps itself around grief like a protective blanket. Everything felt unreal and I couldn’t fully grasp that she was gone. This year, the fog has begun to lift, but the ache remains. I miss her desperately and I miss holding her hand, hugging her tightly, and thanking her for everything she was to me.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself: What is mothering love? Where does it come from? Is it instinctive, or is it something handed down—a quiet inheritance passed from one woman to another over generations?

My mother’s story makes me believe it’s both.

She was abandoned as an infant in a church in Peru by her biological parents—Chinese immigrants who, according to what she was later told, believed that having a first-born daughter would bring misfortune. A woman I would come to know as my grandmother took her in and this woman, conservative and devoutly religious, had adopted other children before her who were much older than her.

My mother’s adoptive siblings treated her more like a burden than a sister. Her childhood was shaped not by warmth, but by cold discipline, isolation, cruelty, and neglect. The home she grew up in may have offered shelter, but it didn’t offer comfort. And yet—somehow—she grew up to be one of the most loving people I have ever known.

As a child, I never heard much about her past. Questions were met with silence, evasions, or subject changes. It wasn’t until the last year of her life that she began to tell little pieces of the truth—often quietly, often in the car, just the two of us. She shared stories of pain and abandonment, of violence and heartbreak, of years spent longing for something gentler, something safer.

It broke my heart. And it made me wonder:

Where did she learn how to love so fully?

How did she learn to be such a good mom?

Because she truly was.

Despite never being given the love she so deeply deserved, my mother loved with a clarity and intensity that never left room for doubt. If she loved you, you knew. I felt that love every day of my life. I felt wanted. I felt chosen by her. She didn’t learn love by example. She didn’t grow up bathed in kindness. But she gave it anyway and that, to me, is nothing short of a miracle.

It reminds me that love—real love—isn’t always inherited. It isn’t always passed down in perfect form. Sometimes, the most powerful kind of love doesn’t come from where it should. It comes from where it can.

Now, I’m a mother too. And every day, I think about how I show up for my child. How I offer warmth, patience, safety, and care. How I try to give him the emotional nurturing my mother didn’t always know how to give. Because while she taught me how to love—she didn’t always know how to nurture. That kind of emotional intimacy wasn’t something she had ever been given. It wasn’t something she could easily give. And so, I had to learn it myself.

Maybe this, too, is a part of mothering love: not just giving what you received, but daring to offer what you never got. To break a cycle. To heal, even while grieving.

This Mother’s Day, I honor my mother not just for the love she gave me, but for the love she chose to give—against all odds, in spite of her own wounds. That love lives on in me. And now, it lives on in my child.

That, I think, is the real legacy of mothering love.