Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone celebrating today — and a gentle, knowing nod to everyone for whom today is complicated. Both things can be true on the same Sunday.

My grandmother, the one with the porch light, was my first real teacher about what care looks like when it’s not performing. She didn’t make a production of love. She just kept the light on. She made sure there was food. She remembered the things that mattered to the people who mattered to her. Quiet, steady, completely reliable.

That kind of love doesn’t always get the big recognition. It often goes unspoken for years — sometimes forever. But it is the kind that shapes everything. The kind that’s still in you, somewhere, in how you treat the people around you and what you believe, at your core, about whether you’re worth caring for.

Today, if you can, tell someone what their steady love has meant. And if you can’t — if today is hard for reasons that are real and valid — I hope you find some warmth in it anyway. You deserve that too.

The quiet, steady kind of love is the kind that shapes everything.

Who showed up for you with the steady, quiet kind of love?