My mom is one of the people I admire most and one of the people I’ve looked to for advice my whole life. Which is complicated, because the older I get, the more I realize some of the clearest advice I’ve taken from her life is advice she never meant to give.

For years, I figured my momma resisted retirement simply because she loves her work.

That’s the easy explanation, the practical one. The one that makes the most sense on paper, at least. She wanted to feel secure, to keep earning. She wanted to make sure she could take care of herself, and maybe take care of us too, if something ever went catastrophically wrong.

All of that is probably true. I just don’t think it’s the whole truth anymore.

I think my mom is afraid to retire because she’s spent her whole life being the person who doesn’t get to stop.

Not because she knew I’d write a memoir one day that would salute her martyrdom. I don’t think she always knew what she was doing half the time, though she certainly acted like she did, which is one of the more alarming skills most mothers acquire. I think she became that person because someone had to.

My daddy didn’t always show up in the ways he should have as a father. So my momma did. Again and again. Year after year. Decade after decade.

When one parent leaves gaps, the other one doesn’t just fill them. They become the entire scaffolding. The person thinking ten steps ahead because no one else can be trusted to think three.

At some point, responsibility stops being a mere task for that parent and becomes more like a name you answer to. That is what I witnessed growing up. My mom as the backup plan, the safety net, the person who could be tired, frustrated, scared, overwhelmed, and still somehow be expected to know what’s for dinner.

My first real model of motherhood was total sacrifice. Loving, yes. Steady, yes. Dependable, absolutely. But also all-consuming.

To someone raised like I was, motherhood looks like never fully choosing yourself. It means always being available, always calculating, always holding the quiet panic of what might happen if you loosen your grip for even a second.

It looks like postponing your own life so naturally that everyone else starts mistaking your absence from yourself for love. And that’s the part that scares me.

Not the children themselves. Not commitment. Not the ordinary chaos of sticky hands, lost shoes, mysterious bodily fluids, and whatever moral injury happens when a toddler rejects the banana they specifically requested. I’m hesitant because I watched what motherhood cost my mom, even though she’d never put it that way herself.

I watched love become labor. I watched care become vigilance. I watched responsibility expand until it seemed to take up every room she entered. And because she made it look normal, easy breezy even, I assumed that’s what motherhood requires.

My little sister, Libby, seems more comfortable imagining that role. Or maybe she just doesn’t flinch where I do. She seems able to imagine the sacrifice without immediately looking for the nearest exit. Meanwhile I’m standing there mentally building a small cabin out in the woods and wondering if nieces can sense fear.

For a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. Like, maybe I am selfish. Maybe I’m missing some essential maternal gear other women were issued at birth. Maybe I skipped the part where everyone else learned to want the kind of life that asks you to become less central to yourself.

Now I think Libby and I just learned different lessons from the same woman. Neither reading is the whole story. That’s the trouble with mothers: they’re people before they become examples, but children almost never experience them that way. We study them like evidence. We mistake their choices for instructions. We turn their lives into proof of what love is supposed to cost.

As a child, my mom’s sacrifice made me feel safe. As an adult, it’s made me afraid.

Both things can be true, which is rude, but apparently adulthood is just learning to hold two truths while neither one offers to settle in and stay a while.

What complicates this even more is the guilt. Because part of me wants my mom to retire. I want her to stop working so hard. I want her to rest. I want her to believe she’s done enough, because she has. More than enough.

But another part of me knows that when I imagine she’s still working for us, I make myself part of the reason she can’t stop. I keep her trapped in the role I’m trying to free her from: the provider, the worrier, the one standing between us and disaster, even when disaster is theoretical and probably just trying to mind its business.

That isn’t fair to her. It isn’t fair to me either.

Her decision to keep working is not really about me or my sister. Not entirely. It’s about her purpose. It’s about her identity. It’s about what happens when being needed becomes the place where your worth lives.

If you spend your life holding everything together, rest can feel less like freedom and more like dereliction of duty. And I understand that all too well.

That’s what scares me most about motherhood. Not that I would fail to love a child, but that I would love a child so much I’d lose the ability to tell where care ends and self-erasure begins. That I’ll inherit my mom’s posture without meaning to: shoulders braced, mind racing, life arranged around everyone else’s weather.

I don’t want to become someone who calls disappearance devotion. I don’t want to confuse being needed with being whole. And I don’t want to have a child just to prove I’m capable of the sacrifice.

Maybe someday motherhood will look different to me. Maybe I’ll find a version that has room for love without self-abandonment, care without collapse, responsibility without swallowing the person carrying it.

But right now, my hesitation doesn’t feel like fear for fear’s sake. It feels like caution. Like I’m standing in front of an inheritance I deeply respect but don’t know yet if I want to claim.

I can love my mom and honor what she gave us. I can be grateful for the life her sacrifices made possible. And I can still refuse to make those sacrifices the blueprint for my own.

That doesn’t make me ungrateful. It just means I’m trying to build a life where love doesn’t require disappearing.

inspo: memoir musings // thinking about my momma and motherhood // started this post in January after one of my mini-revelations but I put it aside (until I saw this prompt) // realizing love doesn’t always require disappearing // responsibility as identity, or provision as identity // motherhood as self-erasure // thinking about what we inherit from our parents, mostly

List the people you admire and look to for advice…

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Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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