My mother's mother.

My grandmother is a woman of applause.

She knows how to perform,

how to host,

how to tilt her head just enough

to be praised by men

who have never seen her rage.

She prays with one eye open,

scanning the room,

measuring alliances,

mastering the art of being beloved

by everyone but her children.

Politics is her gospel.

She worships respectability,

wears it like a second skin,

tight, polished, and exhausting.

To the world,

she is grace in motion:

bearing gifts,

offering parables,

serving food she barely cooked

with hands too clean to bruise.

But at home,

she is a shadow with sharp edges.

A wall with no door.

Her warmth,

a rumor.

Her love,

conditional.

My mother once told me,

“She gives her best to strangers,

what’s left,

if anything,

she gives to us.”

I was too young to believe her.

Now I’m old enough to know it’s true.

I have watched her light up rooms

that dim the moment we return home.

I’ve seen the way she turns presence into absence,

how silence becomes her sharpest tool,

how she mothers through duty,

but never softness.

She broke my mother

without lifting a hand.

Expected obedience,

demanded sacrifice,

praised suffering

and called it strength.

And my mother,

God, she tried.

She still tries.

She folds herself small

each time the phone rings.

She laughs with the ache

of a daughter still reaching

for a mother who won’t reach back.

And me?

I carry them both in my bones,

the woman who gave too much to the world,

and the one who never got enough.

My grandmother does not know

she is my mother’s most tender wound.

That every unspoken word

echoes through generations.

That her absence has weight,

a gravity we keep inheriting.

Still,

there are days I miss her.

I crave the smell of her bitter tea,

the way she tells stories

as if truth were a secret only she could hold.

There were moments,

fleeting and fragile,

when she loved us in a language we understood.

But even that

makes it harder.

Because when good comes

wrapped in harm,

how do you hold it?

She is not always venom.

She has prayed for my mother,

fed her,

clothed her,

once tucked her into bed

with the tenderness of a lullaby.

And yet,

she gave and withdrew,

healed and wounded,

blessed and broke

with the same hands.

My mother still loves her.

Not out of naivety,

but out of something ancient,

a devotion rooted deeper than betrayal.

She speaks no ill.

She turns pain into quiet.

She forgives in ways I do not yet know how.

I, too, fall silent.

Not because I am kind,

but because I do not know

how to fight a ghost in living skin.

I watch the woman who raised me

bend to the woman who raised her,

and I ache to lift the weight

my mother was never meant to carry.

Some nights,

I wish my grandmother would go.

That maybe death

would be softer than her presence.

But I remember,

earth is a prison for us all.

So I do not curse her.

I only pray

that her joy fades

the way she dimmed my mother’s light.

It is not hate.

But love, when twisted,

can rot into something sharp.

And I do not yet know

how to hold both

without bleeding.

She is a complicated woman.

She is my mother’s mother.

And she is mine too.

We do not get to choose our blood.

Only what we choose to carry forward.

Only what we choose to put down.