My mother taught me that love lives in quiet things: in warm hands against fevered skin, in waiting by the door long after midnight, in brushing my hair back while I cried over worlds that feel so small to me now. The older I get, the more I find her inside me. In my softness. In the way I protect the people I love. In the way I hold my child close without even realizing it.

I think the greatest gift a mother can leave behind is not perfection, but traces of herself in the people who love her most. And everywhere I look in myself, there she is.

People know her as this untouchable kind of magic. And although she is magical to me, I've always known her as home.

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He thinks every “goodnight” needs at least three more goodnights after it, and maybe he’s right.

Maybe love was always supposed to sound repetitive: soft little rituals, repeated over and over again until they become part of who you are. One more hug. One more kiss. One more “I love you” whispered into sleepy hair while the night gets quieter around us.

Pietro still reaches for my hand like the world gets a little too big without it, and I still look at him like he personally invented light. Sometimes he’ll close his eyes for two whole seconds just to open them again and make sure I’m still there, like disappearing is even an option. And every single time, I laugh and tell him “go to sleep, baby bear,” while secretly praying the night moves slower.

He thinks the moon follows us home. He thinks stars can hear him when he talks to them from the car window. He thinks every dog deserves a hello and every puddle deserves to be stepped in. There’s something so unbearably gentle about the way children exist before the world teaches them not to. Pietro loves with his entire body, with sticky hands and sleepy smiles and tiny arms wrapped around my neck like I’m something worth holding onto forever.

Sometimes I watch him while he’s falling asleep and realize motherhood is just a long, beautiful ache. It’s wanting time to pass so you can watch him grow, while grieving every version of him that disappears along the way. It’s memorizing the sound of his laugh like a favorite song. It’s learning that your heart can live outside your body and run barefoot through the kitchen asking for blueberries at six in the morning.

And god knows I keep pretending I’m teaching him independence, but the truth is I don’t wanna close my eyes and stop looking at him either.

So when he asks for another goodnight, I always give it to him. Then another. Then ten more, just in case.
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Stella Grace mentioned (ily, my drop-dead-beautiful Bribri).