I found the letter on a Tuesday.
Saro-Wiwa oluremi@oluremisaro-wiwa6800
14 days ago
I found the letter on a Tuesday.
Not hidden. Not buried. Sitting in a shoebox on the top shelf of the wardrobe where my mother kept her good shoes and her secrets.
She had been dead for three months. I was clearing her things. The kind of clearing that feels like archaeology - every drawer a dig site, every item an artifact from a life you thought you understood.
The letter was addressed to me. Dated the year I was born. Never sent.
It began: 'My daughter. I am writing this because one day you will ask questions I will not have the courage to answer out loud.'
She was right. I had asked. Many times. About my father. About why she flinched at certain songs. About the scar on her left wrist she said was from a kitchen accident but that was too straight and too deliberate to be an accident.
The letter answered everything. Four pages. In handwriting that shook on the hard parts and steadied on the parts where she had made peace.
I will not share what she wrote. Some things belong to the space between a mother and a daughter even after one of them is gone.
But I will say this: the woman I buried was not the woman in the letter. The woman in the letter was younger, more afraid, and braver than anyone I have ever known. She survived things she never told me about and then raised me with the kind of steadiness that survivors build from wreckage.
Mama. I read the letter. I understand now.
And I forgive everything. Including the silence.
#Notes #PersonalStory #Motherhood #Family #Healing #WritersOfNircle #Grief #Letters
8 days ago