The Mother's Advice

I still remember the scent of jasmine in the warm summer air, the sun slipping behind the hills, and my mother’s voice — gentle but unwavering — as she brushed my hair out on the veranda.

“You’ll face days,” she said, “when the world feels like it’s against you. But that doesn’t mean you stop walking forward.”

I was only twelve, full of dreams and questions, too young to understand the weight of her words. Back then, her advice felt like bedtime stories — soft, soothing, but distant from the world I knew. But now, years later, those words are etched into my bones.

My mother was never loud. She didn’t demand the room. She didn’t need to. She carried her strength quietly — in the way she folded laundry with precision, in the way she woke before everyone to make sure there was hot tea on the table, in the way she looked people in the eye when they tried to talk down to her. She was grace wrapped in iron.

When I turned sixteen, I came home in tears after my teacher told me that girls “like me” weren’t cut out for science. I slammed the door, threw my bag down, and shouted that maybe I wasn’t smart enough, that maybe they were right.

She sat beside me silently. Then, after a long pause, she reached for my hand.

“Listen,” she said, “other people will try to put you in a box — not because they know you, but because they’re afraid of who you could be if you broke free of it.”

Her eyes, tired but burning with quiet fire, held mine. “Promise me, you won’t ever let fear — yours or theirs — be the reason you stop.”

I nodded. I didn’t say much, but her words stayed with me.

That year, I signed up for the science fair. I failed. Miserably. But I also learned to solder wires, write code, and explain my project to an entire auditorium. And the next year, I won second place.

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As I grew older, the world grew louder. University applications, city noise, relationships that started fast and ended faster. Through it all, her advice became a lighthouse. On late nights when I wanted to quit, when the rejections piled up, when I moved to a new city and found myself crying in a shared apartment with three strangers — I’d hear her voice.

“Some storms are lessons in disguise. Let them teach you, but don’t let them define you.”

I’d never told her how often I repeated those words like a prayer. I just hoped she knew.

Then came the call.

A month before my graduation, my sister called with a voice I hadn’t heard before. It was cracked at the edges, brittle and unfamiliar.

“Mom’s not well,” she said. “It’s… serious.”

I left everything — exams, projects, friends — and took the first train home.

Seeing her in that hospital bed, her body smaller, her skin paler, was the first time I realized that mothers aren’t invincible. That even the strongest hearts get tired.

She looked at me and smiled, that same tired fire still in her eyes.

“You’re doing it,” she whispered. “You’re walking forward. I’m so proud.”

I held her hand, the one that once buttoned my coats and bandaged my scraped knees.

“You gave me the path,” I whispered back.

She passed quietly a few weeks later, surrounded by the scent of jasmine we brought into the room. The day of her funeral, the sky was a soft gray, the kind she used to say was “perfect tea weather.”

I stood beside her favorite garden bench, the one where she told me stories, offered advice, and taught me how to find beauty in small things. I felt hollow and whole at once.

After the guests had left, I sat alone with my thoughts. And slowly, like petals falling, her words began to return — all of them.

“Kindness is not weakness.”

“Take your time, but don’t waste it.”

“People will come and go, but the love you plant in them will bloom even after you’re gone.”

Now, years later, I tell her stories to my daughter as I braid her hair on our own little veranda. She asks me questions with wide eyes and open wonder, and sometimes I hear echoes of myself in her.

And when she feels unsure, when she comes home with tears or triumph, I offer her the same advice that shaped me.

Because the truth is, my mother never really left. She lives in the lessons, the late-night thoughts, the strength I never knew I had until I needed it.

She lives in every word I pass on.

And I hope, one day, my daughter will sit with her own child and say:

“My mother once told me something important...”