By Keira

If one has ever spent any amount of time with children, you well know how much they love their parents. Ask an elementary class who their hero is and every sticky hand is thrown in the air, proud to announce to the world that their very own parent is the best in the world. I was no different—my beautiful momma was my best friend, my favorite teacher, my most respected confidant. 

If one has ever spent an amount of time with middle schoolers, you well know they are not particularly fond of their parents. Their coveted position of hero had, more often than not, been gifted to their favorite sports icon or successful celebrity.  But not me—never for me. I still threw my hand in the air to proudly announce that my momma, beautiful and wise, was still the best person in the world. That my respect and admiration of her had not waned, and it never would. She was the best mom for sleepovers, the coveted carpool driver, the favorite class trip chaperone, the one my friends all called mom. 

If one has ever spent time with high schoolers, you well know they pretend their parents do not exist. They don’t particularly believe in heroes—cynical towards figures of authority, convinced that their parents are out to get them and make them miserable. But not for me—never for me. My mom was still perfect, my family was still untouchable, her position of idolization still set permanently in stone in my mind. 

While my peers struggled with their families and shouted that they hated their moms, my love for her only grew stronger. While my friends grew apart from their parents, I grew closer. While nearly every other teenager spent less time with their families, my illness made them my life, my every hour of every day, my closest community. 

To me, my mother was still as perfect and as strong as the woman I adored at age five. She had no noticeable faults, she never tired, she never made bad choices. She was everything I wanted to be. She was a fighter, a hard worker, a coveted friend, a respected leader. I had the best mom in the world. I knew it. Our family was rock solid, untouchable, even by the illness that shook me and my loved ones. 

By 2018, my perfect family was looking up again. My health was on the up-rise, my parent’s careers were taking off, my brother was thriving in school, we were finally achieving the success that I just knew my perfect family deserved.

Then a blip in the plan—a blood clot. While away for a weekend with my father and brother, my mom was escorted to the ER by a friend and only upon returning did we learn of what had happened. But my hero mother was brave—she worked as hard as ever, in spite of the fear and pain she felt.

The blip in the plan soon became another blip—she fell ill and spent a few days in bed. This blip became another blip, then a season, then it began to set in that this was the new way of life. What started as an accident because of some medication she was prescribed created a change in my mom’s body that none of us saw coming. Sick days turned into sick weeks, after work naps turned into fifteen-hour nights. 

Sick leave was granted, accommodations were made, but it didn’t get better. Her pain got worse, her relationships became strained, our perfect family began to fall apart. You see, it was her that made it work—her patience, her wisdom—she made us the poster family. 

I felt immense pain for my mom, the losses she was experiencing, the fear she was living in, the pain that plagued her. I also felt immense pain for me—I missed my perfect mom, I missed her input and our late night chats, our target shopping sprees. I didn’t know this woman that lived in our house, that lived in the room at the top of the stairs. 

I began to grow to resent the person that was once my mother. I resented the loss of my hero. My patient mom snapped at the smallest inconvenience, my hard-working idol yelled when the wrong groceries were bought, my strong untouchable role model hardly stood on her own two feet. 

In the midst of her struggle with illness, our family community fell apart. A once-thriving safe space for the four of us became a battlefield of hurt, anger, and miscommunication. Then the church where my mom was hailed as a respected intelligent leader, where I grew into adulthood and into a deep, personal spirituality, the place that was the common factor in my most beloved friendships and relationships—it became my greatest source of anxiety. 

This season of chaos wreaked havoc on me and on my family. Not only did cause me hurt, but it caused my hero the same, if not more. For the first time in my life I saw her hurt—not just the processed hurt that we share once we have healed, but raw unbridled anger. We processed alongside one another, we made mistakes together, we were the iron to one another’s iron—and I hated it. 

For the first time in my life, I began to see my mother as human. And it scared the shit out of me. The idol I had built in my mind throughout my childhood was being deconstructed in front of my eyes and it wrecked me. She wasn’t perfect. She made mistakes. She was prideful, she hurt people, she spoke without thinking, she yelled, she cried, and for the first time in my life,

I didn’t want to be like my mother. 

In my mind, the things I admired about my mom had been swallowed up and destroyed by illness and by conflict. My hero didn’t exist anymore.

And I was forced to consider that, maybe, she never had. 

Then, one day, it all changed—

and in a matter of minutes, I realized I was wrong.

Because on that fateful day, for reasons I can’t even remember, my mother and I sat on the couch together—and she cried in my arms. I held my hero’s head in my hands, and for the first time in my life, I carried her. I held her. I gave to my hero expecting nothing in return and it hit me in the gut like a brick. 

She had held me my whole life. In fact, she had held every member of our family together for as long as I could remember. She worked night and day to make us feel loved, to be that perfect mom, the perfect wife, the perfect friend. She had never been held the way she held everyone else in her life. And it broke her.

In an hour, on that couch, I gained a clarity I had never fathomed. 

She had hurt like this her whole life—she’d had crippling fears and anxieties the whole time. She’d struggled to find worth and meaning through her abilities from the day she was born. She had been trying to be perfect—and to prove she deserved love as best as she knew how.

My perfect mother wasn’t real.

But on that couch that afternoon, I didn’t mind. 

She had loved and led even in her insecurities, she had just never let anyone see. Especially not me—she had to be strong for me, she had to be my hero. 

There is a great danger in having childlike faith in a hero—in wanting to see someone as perfect. Expecting them to be untouchable, unbothered, inhuman. 

And there is just as much danger in trying to be that hero. A lesson my mom and I learned the unbearably hard way. But a lesson that has changed my life.

With my momma’s snot on my shirt, her tears dripping in my lap, she became my true hero. Not the hero that I threw my hands up in class to brag about, but the hero that I knew I wanted to be. 

The years of hell leading up to the afternoon on the couch had destroyed my idealized idea of a hero and gently placed in my lap a real one. A human, hurting, mistake-making, hero who loved even in her own personal hell. Who watched her children suffer and work through suicide attempts, who watched her job suffer and her relationships dissolve, and still held me, still heard me. 

And so, to my hero, for her birthday:

I love you momma. You are still the person I want to be most like, you are still the woman I look up to. You choose to love deeply, even in the midst of pain, and that is the most heroic thing in the world to me. I thought that you being imperfect disqualified you from being my hero, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

You are my hero because you are learning to be patient and appreciative towards our family, even when we don’t listen well. You are my hero because you play MTG with Korey and listen to me explain memes for hours. You are my hero because you cry with me and you tell me about your heart and your fears and your hurts. You are my hero because you open your home and your heart even though you are exhausted and miserable. You are my hero because even in your mess, I see you choosing love and choosing Jesus every single day. 

You deserve to be loved, you deserve to be seen, and you deserve to truly know that you are worthy of respect and love—not in spite of your weaknesses but because of them. And I hope and pray that you grow to have a new understanding of a hero as well—that you see that being perfect doesn’t make you happy, it makes you lonely. 

I am more proud of you than I know how to express momma. I am honored by the trust you have had in me and I am incredibly grateful for the vulnerability you have shown me. It has been a devastating journey we have had. Trying to learn our worth in the midst of failing bodies and dangerous, learned self-expectations. It has been the greatest honor in my life to have been able to be on this journey with you. To hurt with you, to fight with you, to cry with you, to learn and to love with you. 

Happy Birthday to my best friend, my greatest teacher, my hero. 

I love you. 

chronic fatigue chronic illness chronic pain expectation growing hero heroes learning parenthood parenting raising girls