When I was little, I never cried. I’ve heard the story of the day I was born so many times, how I didn’t make a sound, just glared at everyone in the room. I wasn’t one that needed to be rocked to sleep or wanted to be held and cuddled.

My parents had some slight concerns about my lack of emotional range, considering I had no issues showing anger and defying any type authority. At 8 I was diagnosed with ADHD, and a lot of things began to make sense. Still, to everyone else, I was just “one of those kids” that every classroom had, every teacher had to deal with, and every parent warned their children about.

Not my mama. I struggled as a kid to share certain emotions, which led to pent-up frustration, and the only outlet I knew and was comfortable with was anger. This led to your typical detention for fights at school or being sent to the principal’s office for talking back to teachers. Being a teacher herself, my mama was able to look at me from two different perspectives: mother and teacher. Her solution to help me didn’t happen overnight, but it was something that happened at night that led to it.

I don’t remember the first few times it happened, but I clearly remember the first time I woke up in the middle of the night in my mama’s arms. I was about 8, right when I had really started acting out. The very first thing I realized when I woke up was that I was crying. The second was that I was in my own bed, in my mama’s arms. She just held me until I fell back asleep, and in the morning, it came back to me as a dream.

I knew it wasn’t, though, because of the way I felt-calm, and not anxious, not angry, not so full of emotions that I felt like I could burst. These incidents didn’t happen often, but I remember how I felt every time I woke up crying in my sleep, because my mama was always there, silent and comforting. I don’t ever remember a time waking up from crying in my sleep and she wasn’t there. We never spoke about it until I was much older.

I’ve had a love for books and reading before I had a love for anything else. I was reading The Babysitter’s Club books in kindergarten. Books were both my reward and punishment. After one particularly bad night, I’d asked when I could have my books back. I was still on restriction, and the only books I had to read were for school. So, my mama suggested I write my own story to read.

When I asked why I'd want to read my own story, she asked me why I read stories others wrote. I didn’t have an answer right away, but the more I wrote (which was a lot, because let’s face it, I was in trouble a lot), the more I began to see what my mama was teaching me. And it wasn't long before I stopped crying in my sleep, because she showed me how to release the feelings inside of me that I didn't know how to.

We read to escape. We put ourselves in the shoes of others, either to escape our own reality, or to feel less alone. It’s a magical thing to see yourself written on the pages in someone else’s words. But these words we read come from emotions that someone wrote. And this is what I learned.

Writing was safe for me. I could put myself in the form of another person, write about the feelings I couldn’t articulate with my voice, and turn it into a story that played out how I wanted it to, even if that’s not how it really happened. It was an outlet in the form of creativity, and my mama taught me to use the best and worst parts of myself to make something that wasn’t self-destructive.

Instead, it became life-saving, quite literally a few times, and today, I can say that I am a published writer. It's bittersweet that you're not around to see this dream of mine come true, a dream that came from your love.

Mother’s Day is just a few days away. It’s going to be a hard one. This day was easier to get through when I had the hope of being a mother one day, when I would be able to celebrate the occasion with some happiness. It won’t ever be that way, though, and this year will be my first without a mother, and knowing I will never have my own kids to celebrate with, because the word “mother” is not a presence in my life.

But I can write about, and I can write to you, mama, like you showed me. That’s what will save me.