What I held in my hand that quiet, warm summer night of June was more than just a pile of old, nearly rotten papers. It was a fragment of a forgotten past and, to me, a new introduction to the star of every show, the heart-warming person whom I call mother.

How great would it have been if she had a daughter as lively and full of contagious energy as herself. Instead, what she got was me. To put it in her words, “an old soul,” and to put it in mine, “a calm and composed aura”, for whom life was a tranquil pond, unlike the gushing river it was for her. If her ideal Saturday was one with a bustling kitchen and a group of her favourite ladies, mine was being curled up with a book in the company of myself.

In all these years, our garden has had more parties than it has had plants, but neither the parties nor my mother’s gentle persuasions had made me like her. Though we were not alike, it was also evident that there was no one who could be what we were for each other.

One calm evening, as my parents were out for a stroll, I decided to hunt for a good read in our small library. Though limited in number, there was a diverse collection of books, orderly arranged from top to bottom. I started reading the titles, but nothing caught my eye. I took out a novel, ran my fingers over the glossy surface of its shiny pages, but the story felt too bland for me. I put it back in again, took out another one, and put it back too.

A forgotten poem tucked inside an old book revealed a version of my mother I never knew and a version of myself I finally understood

The Silk Roads, too long. Alexander the Great, not for me. Why Nations Fail, some other time… I skimmed through the titles. Just as I was about to give up, I settled in a chair next to me.

“One last try,” I thought and casually took out a book. I swung open its hardback cover only to find something that did catch my eye. A pile of folded papers, nestled beneath two old photocopies of my grandparents’ ID cards, was what had caught my attention.

I unfolded the delicate pieces of paper cautiously and curiously. As I began reading, I found out that it was a beautiful piece of poetry. I was not much of a poet myself, but whatever I wrote, I would read it to my mother, knowing that she would prefer me socialising at a kitty party rather than immersing myself in the world of words all by myself.

The poetry on that page did not belong to me, yet each word felt like my own. As I read, “...but I am not alone, nor I mourn, For in the world of the known, I have my friend loneliness alone….”

I could not believe that these words once flowed out of the pen of my mother, whose mornings began with dozens of phone calls from friends and family, who valued her connections over herself, the middle-aged, extroverted woman I’d known all my life. Was it really her?

A big smile ran across my face as I realised that my mother was once just like me! No wonder she was the only one who truly understood me more than I understood myself. It dawned upon me then that whenever my father gazed at me with utmost admiration and love, he not only saw his daughter, but a reflection of the woman he fell in love with, a woman who evolved over time, but left the essence of her youth in her daughter.

I was in this chain of thoughts when I heard the door creak. I rushed back the pages along with the book from where I had found them. I saw my mother approach me, and then she sat right next to me. I not only saw in her the “not-like-me social butterfly mum” but the “just-like-me poet mum.”

I smiled at this stranger I had just met and asked rather hesitantly, “If you were just like me, why had you never expressed it?”

She smiled back, a wise smile that said a thousand words at once, and she spoke, “And one day, you’ll realise that you would have become just like me too.”

I don’t know if that’s true, but what I do know is that even when we are not physically together, she will always be there in me, just as she carries my grandmother in her, just as all daughters carry their mothers.

Published in Dawn, Young World, November 22nd, 2025