Don’t worry mother, your daughter is a soldier.

I wish I could say it was a declaration of bravery. I’m sure that’s what I thought when I wrote it down in my journal in 2014.

I was just beginning to write about my mother’s cancer – in the months when her second remission was ending and her body started turning into a battlefield I could barely describe. I was learning then that there isn’t a word for everything.

I was trying to be a soldier. And I was succeeding for the most part. At least in the way a clenched jaw is a soldier. The way a swallowed scream is a soldier. The way a daughter becomes a soldier because she thinks her mother can’t carry one more thing.

I had felt that way about her all my life. That she didn’t need one more thing to carry. Not because she was fragile. She was the opposite of fragile. She was our backbone. She carried everything – both visible and invisible. The household, the history, the hurt, the hope – all of it balanced in her arms like a grocery bag stretched thin at the bottom. And I never wanted to be the thing that made it split open.

I felt she’d weathered enough so, somewhere along the way as a kid, I decided that adding my small griefs to her large ones would be an unforgivable act. I decided that, sometimes, love meant stepping into the rain alone. That keeping my own emotions hidden, might spare her one more burden.

My mother once told me that if I swallowed my bubble gum, it would stay in my stomach for seven years. A teacher once teased that if I accidentally ate a watermelon seed, a plant would grow inside me. I wish they had told me that if I swallowed back the words I need to say, they would linger far longer than seven years – and grow far wilder than any plant.

But this, I suppose, is what they call the “mother wound.” A small name for a great inheritance. It’s not really the cut our mothers made, but the ache they carried — the places where they couldn’t meet us because of their own limits and history. The name makes it sound like they crafted it on purpose, but no mother wakes up and decides to wound her child. The truth is simpler and sadder: the wound is older than they are.

It’s the history that lived in their bones before we ever drew breath. What we call a wound is really the echo of generations of women who bore more than their share and still found a way to love us with whatever remained. It’s the ache passed down through mothers and grandmothers who were taught to be everything – the caretaker, the container, the emotional ledger – while being allowed to be so little of themselves.

It makes me think that maybe mothers make more cosmic sacrifices than we ever truly know. That maybe their souls come here already understanding the cost – choosing, in some mysterious and holy way, to be broken in places so their children might learn how to mend. To be flawed so their children might learn how to forgive. To carry burdens so their children might learn how to set theirs down.

The original teacher. The original wound. The original blessing.

What a beautiful and heartbreaking thing that is to think about. That her broken places become the openings through which we can somehow learn how to become whole.

I used to think the mother wound was only something to heal from. But now I also see that it’s something to understand. Maybe even to honour. Because it’s the wound that teaches us how to grow our own wisdom. How to hold space and compassion for the flawed and tired women who raised us while trying to raise themselves. How to know that love is not perfect, but it is persistent. It keeps choosing us, even when choosing has a cost.

Sometimes I’m at peace with my mother being gone. I surprise myself. Other times, like yesterday afternoon, I have to catch my breath when I remember that I will never see or speak to her again. The finality of it is a belly ache. To miss someone so much and not be able to do a thing about it.

I thought about that yesterday as I hand‑stamped Don’t worry mother, your daughter is a soldier across a piece of art made entirely of the flowers my mother loved. And as I pressed each letter into the paper, I felt the old ache rise – that fierce, impossible longing to tell her that every battle she fought carved out the very ground I now stand on, and that I am still trying to grow something beautiful from the soil she left behind.

And maybe that’s the truest thing of all. That I’ve learned to carry both her ache and her courage and, in doing so, became a soldier shaped not by war – but by love.