Ma, in our next lifetime, let me carry you

Ma, in our next lifetime, let me be your mother.

Let me be the one who holds you first. Before the nurses. Before the paperwork. Before anyone tells you what you’re worth or what you’re supposed to become. Let me be the arms that find you before you learn that arms don’t always come.

I want to give you the thing no one gave you. Not the food. Not the roof. Not the survival. You had those. My grandmother made sure of that. I mean the other thing. The thing that isn’t listed on any document but lives in the body forever depending on whether it was there or not.

The holding.

I want to hold you the way you didn’t know you needed to be held until your eight-year-old daughter walked up to you and said you’re supposed to hug me and tell me you love me. I think about that girl sometimes. Not me. You. The woman who heard that sentence and realized she’d never been taught the first language of motherhood. Not because she was incapable. Because no one had ever spoken it to her. How do you teach a word you’ve never heard? How do you offer a touch you’ve never received? You did it anyway. You learned it from a child. And you never stopped after that.

But I want to go further back. Before the learning. Before the gap. I want to be there at the beginning, where the template gets set, and I want the template to be warmth.

In our next lifetime, I want to say I love you to you before you can understand language. So the sound of it lives in your ear before your first word. So you grow up assuming love is something that is spoken out loud, naturally, daily, the way breathing is daily. Not something you discover at thirty because a small girl corrected you in your own kitchen.

I want to brush your hair in the morning and not because it’s tangled. Because touching someone’s hair is a conversation that doesn’t require translation. Because my grandmother never did that for you, and that absence lived in your hands your whole life. I could feel it. The way you touched my hair like you were teaching yourself in real time. Like each stroke was a sentence in a language you were learning by doing. You got fluent. But you started late. And I want you to start early.

I want to sit on the floor with you and build something pointless. Blocks. A tower. Something that falls down and we rebuild and it falls down again and neither of us calls it failure. Because I think you learned too early that things that fall apart are your fault. That if the marriage collapsed, if the money ran out, if the structure disappeared, you were the one who should have held it together. I want to build towers with you that fall and I want to laugh and I want you to learn, before the world teaches you otherwise, that some things fall and it’s just gravity. Not your hands. Not your worth. Just gravity.

In our next lifetime, I want to wake you up for school with my hand on your back. Not a shout from the kitchen. Not a list of tasks waiting at the door. Just my palm, flat against your shoulder blade, warm, still, until your eyes open and the first thing you see is someone who isn’t rushing. I want you to know what it feels like to wake up without urgency. To start a day that isn’t already behind.

I want to tell you you’re beautiful. Not because of the runway. Not because of the magazines. Not because men lined up and your mother catalogued them like inventory. I want to tell you you’re beautiful the way a mother is supposed to tell a daughter. Without agenda. Without measurement. Without the quiet implication that beauty is the only currency you carry. I want you to hear you’re beautiful and think it means you are loved and not you are useful.

I want to let you read your manga in peace. I want to let you sit on the floor of your brother’s apartment and not chase you with cars or cameras or ambition that was never yours to begin with. I want to let you want nothing and not punish you for the wanting of nothing. I want to let you be ordinary on the days you feel ordinary and extraordinary on the days you don’t and I never want you to confuse the two with your worth.

Ma, you taught yourself to be a mother from a sentence your daughter said in a kitchen. You built the whole language from that one correction. You learned I love you from the person you were supposed to teach it to, and you never once acted like that was shameful. You just started saying it. Every phone call. Every goodbye. Every visit. Like you were making up for every year it wasn’t there by putting it in every sentence from that day forward.

You overcorrected beautifully.

But in our next lifetime, I don’t want you to have to correct at all. I want to be there first. I want the arms to be waiting. I want the words to be early. I want you to grow up so saturated in I love you that you never have to learn it. That it’s just the weather of your childhood. Warm. Constant. Unremarkable. The way love is supposed to feel when it’s been there from the start.

You carried me in a life where no one had carried you. You fed me with hands that had never been held the right way. You loved me in a language you were still learning, and I never once felt the accent.

In our next lifetime, let me carry you. Let me be the mother you didn’t have so you can be the daughter you never got to be.

You’ve been strong long enough.

Let me go first this time.