There is a saying so old
it has stopped being a warning
and become simply a truth:
“Like mother, like daughter.”
Biology has proven it
History has etched it
Psychology names it
Religion blesses it
and Nature, patient and unbothered
keeps demonstrating it.
Generation after generation
in the quiet repetition of hands
and habits and silences pass it down
like heirlooms nobody asked for.
I spent years believing
I would be the exception.
I remember watching my mother cook
Not helping but watch
The way she stood over the pot
with a kind of ownership
steam rising around her
like something sacred
a wooden spoon moving in slow
deliberate circles.
She would cook enough
for a village when there were
only five of us, and then and
this was the part that confused me most
as a child, she would ladle out
the best portions and send them to the neighbours.
The meat
The thickest cuts of fish
A bowl covered in foil
carried next door or down the street
to whoever was celebrating
whoever was grieving, whoever
simply existed nearby.
We would look at our plates
and count what was missing
“Mummy, why are you giving people
our food?”
She never answered with frustration
She would just look at us, calm
as still water, and say, “Don’t worry.
It is for your own good.”
We did not understand that then
We were children, and children are
honest in their selfishness.
We wanted the meat
My mother was a woman
of extraordinary contradictions
and I did not know it at the time
because I was too busy resisting her.
She was strict in the way
mountains are strict: immovable
massive, present in every direction
you turned.
Rules were not suggestions in our house
She spoke softly to my father
even in disagreement
She blamed herself for things
that were not her fault, carrying
responsibility the way some people carry
a handbag always, even when it was heavy
even when they could have put it down.
She was a perfectionist who cooked
and cleaned and organised and gave
and gave and gave. And when she was
angry, she did not shout.
She went silent.
That silence was its own language
dense and particular. The kind of
silence that fills a room so completely
there is no space left for anything else.
We would realise we had crossed a line
not because she told us, but because
the house changed temperature
She would stop speaking not coldly
not dramatically. Just stop
The way a river stops at a dam.
And then she would begin to do
everything herself.
The dishes we were supposed to wash
The errand we said we would run
The work she had asked for three times
before deciding not to ask again.
We would watch her do it all
and feel the guilt settle on us
like dust.
Only now do I understand
that this was never punishment
It was simply her language for
“I am tired of asking.”
It was love, worn thin at the edges
I did not inherit her silence intentionally
I want to be clear about that.
It arrived like weather unannounced
already happening
I noticed it first in small things
The way I hold a pot with my bare hands
without thinking, the heat somehow
familiar and manageable, not because
anyone taught me but because I watched
her do it a thousand times, and my hands
remembered what my mind forgot.
The way I insist on things
My principles, which I defend the way
one defends a home calmly, firmly
with no intention of leaving.
The way my standards for myself
are higher than they are reasonable
and I blame myself when they crack.
Then there was the birthday.
A friend called and asked if I would
handle the cooking for her celebration
I laughed
I told her I barely knew
how to cook for myself
How was I supposed to cook
for a crowd of people who would
have opinions and expectations and
probably compare the fried rice
to their mother’s?
But I said yes.
I do not know exactly why
Maybe I was curious
Maybe I could not help it.
I cooked that day with a focus
I did not expect to have
stirring and seasoning and tasting
with a seriousness that felt older than me.
And when it was done
when people moved toward the food
and came back for a second serving
and someone asked
“Who cooked this?”
I felt something rise in my chest
Not pride exactly
Something quieter
Something like recognition
I stood there and thought of my mother
I thought of the way people in
her community would call for her
specifically when there was an occasion.
“Ah, this one now, you know how she cooks. She has to be there.”
I thought of how I had watched
this happen my whole life and assumed
it was simply her gift
something specific to her
sealed inside her person
and not transferable.
But there I was
Around that same time
I was reading a book
Things I Wish I’d Known Before
We Got Married by Gary Chapman
and somewhere between the pages
a question I had never thought
to ask stopped me completely:
“What is my mother’s love language?”
I had read about love languages before
in the abstract a concept that applied
to other people, to couples in counselling
to friends who were figuring out
why they kept misunderstanding each other.
I had never applied it backwards
Never turned it toward the woman
who raised me
like a lens aimed at the past
But I sat with the question
And then I knew.
Acts of service.
The food given away
The silence that meant
“I will just do it myself.”
The pots carried, the errands ran
the neighbours fed on birthday mornings
when we sat with nearly empty plates and
did not yet understand what we were being taught.
She was not withholding from us
She was showing us: this is how
you love a community
This is how you make yourself indispensable
This is how you pour yourself
into the world until the world
pours back
“Don’t worry. It is for your own good.”
It was not a proverb
It was a prophecy.
I am not yet a mother
I do not have children to confuse
and shape and love imperfectly
and silently.
But I am already doing the things
I swore I would never do.
I am strict with myself
in a way that exhausts me
I give to people before I think
about what is left for me
I go quiet when I am hurt
rather than making a sound
I pick up the task that was not done
and do it myself, and I do not
say a word about it.
Because my mother did not say a word
And her mother likely did not either
And somewhere back
in the long chain of women I come from
someone decided that this was
the shape of love: generous, silent, inexhaustible.
I used to think nature
could be outsmarted
That if you saw the pattern
clearly enough, you could
step outside of it
That awareness
was the same as escape.
It is not.
But I am beginning to think that
maybe the point was never to escape
The apple does not fall
far from the tree
and perhaps, if the tree is good
if the roots go deep and the fruit
is sweet, even when it does not know it
falling near her is not a failure.
It is simply coming home
My mother does not know I have
been thinking about her like this
She does not know that I stood over
a birthday pot in someone else’s kitchen
and felt her hands in mine.
She does not know that I read a book
about love and found her on every page.
She does not know that the silence
I learned from her has saved me from
saying things I would regret
that the stubbornness I resented
has held me upright in rooms that
tried to knock me down
that the habit of giving even when
I am hungry, even when the plate
is almost empty, has made people
trust me in ways I cannot always explain.
She just goes on being herself
Cooking for crowds
Carrying the meat next door
Going quiet when the words run out.
And meanwhile, I am becoming her
Not all at once
Not in every way
But in the ways that matter.
In the ways that are written somewhere
deeper than memory in the body
in the hands, in the particular way
we both love people: loudly through action, softly through silence
extravagantly through food.
“Like mother, like daughter.”
I used to hear that and brace myself
Now I hear it and breathe.