The Echo in My Mother’s Laugh

The Echo in My Mother’s LaughGenre: Poets / Personal EssayChallenge Fit: Things You Can’t Say Out Loud

There is a sound I’ve known since birth, though it took me years to truly hear it.

My mother’s laugh.

At first, it was just music. High and unbothered, like wind chimes on a balcony that doesn’t know it’s facing the sea. As a child, it meant warmth, safety, sometimes even approval. She laughed at silly things I did, at our dog chasing its tail, at soap operas that made her cry a second later. It was a sound stitched into the fabric of our home, light and familiar.

But as I grew older, something shifted. I started noticing the crack just beneath it. A ripple in the sound, a hesitation too fast to catch unless you were listening. Really listening.

Her laugh had layers. And beneath its sparkle lived a story.

When I was fifteen, I asked her about her childhood. She smiled, told me about mango trees and rainwater baths. But she never talked about the bruises. I only found out from my aunt years later that their father was not just strict, but violent. That he once burned my mother’s books in a drunken rage. That she had to hide her joy under the bed with torn pages and broken pencils.

I started hearing it then.

In her laugh, the echo of a girl who had learned to make herself small to survive. A laugh stretched too wide, trying to reach all the parts of her that hadn’t been allowed to exist. A laugh that was, in some moments, a rebellion—and in others, a mask.

She laughed at funerals.She laughed when she was scared.She laughed in arguments, short and sharp, as if each giggle might slice through the tension before it grew teeth.

When I was nineteen and told her I wanted to become a poet, she laughed.

Not unkindly.Not cruelly.But nervously. As if she knew what it was to want something too deeply.

"Writing doesn’t feed you," she said, after a pause.I nodded. But I kept writing.

I wonder now if her laughter was also trying to say: I wanted that too, once.

Sometimes I try to imagine her at my age. Young, fierce, full of questions. Did she have a notebook she hid from her father? Did she write poems about mango trees and the heat of silence? Did she ever imagine a life where no one laughed at her dreams?

I don’t know. Because we don’t talk about those things.

In our family, we show love in chores, in folded laundry and hot meals. We talk about the weather and politics, but never the night she cried behind the bathroom door or the way her hands tremble slightly when she’s anxious.

We don’t say: I remember what you survived.We don’t say: I see you carrying all of it, still.

But I hear it. In her laugh.

When she laughs now, I hear the defiance. The woman who kept her children safe even when she didn’t feel safe herself. The mother who stitched stability from scarcity. Who gave us books even when hers had been burned.

Her laugh is the anthem of survival. But it’s also a song of longing.

I think about what we inherit, not just in DNA but in echoes. I have my mother’s smile, her stubbornness, her fierce independence. But I also carry her silences. Her way of avoiding confrontation. Her tendency to clean when she wants to cry.

And her laughter.

Mine, too, sometimes bursts too loud at the wrong moments. Mine, too, hides tremors. Mine, too, is sometimes a way of saying, “Don’t look too closely.”

I want to break the echo.

I want to sit beside her one day, maybe when we’re both too tired to pretend, and say:

Ma, I hear you. In every laugh. In every pause. In every joke that lands just a beat too late. I hear the little girl who wasn’t allowed to be soft. I hear the woman who survived by laughing when she wanted to scream.

And I love you. Not just for the joy you shared, but for the pain you hid so I wouldn’t have to carry it.

Maybe I’ll never say it out loud.Maybe she wouldn’t know how to hear it if I did.

But I will write it. And maybe, when she reads this one day, she’ll laugh.

And this time, it will be free.