I don't remember my first breath, but sometimes when I close my eyes, I imagine the air tasted like metal and medicine—cold, sharp, too bright for a newborn heart. I imagine the room was filled with beeping machines and white sheets and voices that rose and fell like faraway waves.
But more than anything, I imagine her.My mother.The first warmth I ever knew.
She told me once that the morning I was born felt quieter than she expected. Most mothers describe something loud, overwhelming—rushed footsteps, nurses barking orders, a husband whispering encouragement into her hair. But for my mom, there was a silence that didn't make sense. A missing piece.
My father wasn't there.He was at work.He chose that over meeting me.
I didn't know any of this then, of course. But I think even as a tiny baby, wrapped in a too-stiff hospital blanket, I could feel something in the air around her—something heavy, something hurting. The kind of ache you can't hide from your own child, no matter how small they are.
But despite the ache, despite the fear, her arms were steady when she held me for the first time. And that steadiness… it sank into me. Felt like home before I even knew what home meant.
There were people there—just a few—faces leaning over me with smiles tired from life but soft with love. The smell of floral perfume, cigarette smoke clinging to jackets, winter air still trapped in coats that hadn't warmed up yet. Almost everyone in that room stayed only for a moment, but Mom held me like she was grounding herself, like she was breathing for both of us.
We stayed in the hospital longer than most—until the nurses gently nudged us out with half-sympathetic smiles and papers my mother signed with hands that shook only when she thought no one was looking. My big sister toddled around in shoes that squeaked on the floors, asking questions in the only way toddlers can ask—with wide eyes and tugging hands.
Three days passed before my father finally walked in.Mom said he stood there like he wasn't sure if he should pick me up or apologize first.
I didn't give him any emotion—I didn't know who he was. But Mom's heart told the truth for both of us. She held her breath. She held me a little closer. A small disappointment settled in the room like dust falling in sunlight.
When we were discharged, most families carried their babies through the doors and into cars full of balloons or diaper bags or brand-new car seats.We left differently.
Mom didn't take me back to the trailer where we'd been staying. The walls were stained. The floors uneven. The cold settled into the corners like an unwelcome relative who refused to leave. Mom said something inside her just couldn't bring a newborn into that space. So she scooped up me and my big sister and brought us to a cousin's place.
It wasn't perfect—just a temporary safe spot—but even as a newborn, I think I sensed the shift. The air was different. Softer. Warmer.A place where Mom could breathe without flinching.
That choice she made—leaving comfort, leaving familiarity—was the first sacrifice in a long list I wouldn't understand until much later. She wanted me to come home to something better, even if she had to walk into the unknown to find it.
And there was another truth hovering in the room those days, one too fragile to speak aloud:No one was completely sure who my father was.
Mom carried that fear alone, the way only mothers can—quietly, without letting it touch her love for me. She held me tighter during those weeks, maybe because she was afraid of what the world might say, or maybe because she needed something solid to cling to. Eventually, the truth came out—I belonged to the man who showed up three days late.
But that uncertainty… it left its own shadow on my beginning.
A few months later, Mom got us into a government apartment in a tiny town where the nights smelled like wet pavement and distant train tracks, and the walls were thin enough that you could hear your neighbors sneeze. It wasn't much—just two small rooms, a kitchen with cabinets that groaned when you opened them, and windows that fogged every morning.
But it was ours.Our start.Our chance.
Mom did everything to make it feel like a home. She scrubbed floors until her knuckles were raw, folded baby blankets with shaky hands, sang to me when the stress made her voice crack midway through the lullabies. Sometimes she cried quietly at night, thinking I couldn't hear—but babies feel tears just as much as lullabies.
We stayed there four, maybe five months. Just long enough for me to learn my mother's heartbeat, long enough for my big sister to learn how to make me laugh, long enough for Mom to prove—to herself, to the world—that she could do this. That she could build something out of almost nothing.
I didn't have words then, but now, looking back through the lens of everything we lived through, I can finally say what I felt:
My mother fought for me from the moment I arrived.She fought tired.She fought scared.She fought alone more often than anyone realized.And she never quit.
I was too little to understand the sacrifices, the confusion, the loneliness she swallowed just to keep us safe. But I felt her love like sunlight on my skin, like warmth in my tiny ribcage.
That is how my story begins.With a mother who chose me—even when the world didn't make it easy.With a home that wasn't really a home, but a start.With a fight she never backed down from.
And with me, a baby girl who had no idea how many storms were waiting…or how many times my mother would walk through them carrying me in her arms.