The night was heavy and quiet, the kind of quiet I used to fear. The kind of quiet that made all the hard truths and sharp edges of the week echo louder in my chest. A show murmured faintly in the background, but I wasn’t really watching. I was sitting with my thoughts — and then, out of that silence, my son walked in.
He looked at me and said, simply, thank you.
If only I could have told him right then what that meant to me. How his two little words cracked the weight of that night wide open and let a little light in. How these late-night conversations we have — about his dreams, his fears, his future — fill my soul in a way I didn’t even know was possible.
That night reminded me of something I’ve come to know as my second truth:
I will never love my children with conditions attached.
It hasn’t always felt that simple.
When my children were first born, I carried this quiet fear that I would somehow love them like I had been loved — in pieces, with strings, with expectations they’d never quite be able to meet. I worried that their failures would reflect poorly on me, that their successes would define my worth as their mother.
For years I let that fear hover over me — terrified that my love would feel to them the way love once felt to me: earned. Fragile. Conditional.
But the more I’ve watched them grow, the more I’ve sat beside them through both triumph and heartbreak, the more I’ve realized: their path isn’t mine. Their story doesn’t belong to me. And their mistakes, their victories, their choices — none of those have ever, or will ever, change the way I love them.
That quiet night, watching my son talk about his dreams, I saw so clearly that my only dream has ever really been this: that he — and his sister — find happiness.
In that moment, he reminded me of the ocean. Determined and free, but still learning how to swim against the currents. And me? I just want to be the shore he can always return to — steady, waiting, cheering him on no matter how far he drifts or how many times he sinks before learning to float.
Love — real love — is letting them chase the waves even when it scares me. Love is letting them take risks, be selfish for their dreams, even when it leaves me standing on the sand alone for a while.
Growing up, I believed love was something I had to earn. Something that could be taken away if I didn’t measure up. But my second truth — the one I cling to now — is this: my love for my children comes with no strings, no scorecard, no conditions.
It just is.
And that quiet night, when my son whispered thank you, I finally believed it.
— Masked Mom
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