Mom,

I think mothers are supposed to be flowers

Chrysanthemums, and lilies, and peonies, and roses

But I could never compare you to a rose

Roses are so pretty and so delicate

You – are not a rose

You are steel

Cold and hard

Molded into buildings because you’re the toughest thing man could find.

Roses wilt when you touch them.

There is no way you are a rose.

No way you’d fall under the weight of someone else.

You may have small shoulders

But they carried my sisters and I without trembling.

Sometimes when the world got a bit too heavy,

You’d sway the slightest bit –

Like a skyscraper in Chicago’s wind

But I’ve never seen wind break steel

I’ve seen it cut down flowers, though.

That is why you are no rose.

You’re too strong for that.

See roses are beautiful and brutal – but never at the same time.

Their thorns and petals do not meet.

You – you are beautiful and brutal always at the same time.

You invite people in and let them forget that you are stronger than them,

Bigger than them, made from tougher stuff than them.

You offer up a hug, let them rest their head on your collarbone

The same collarbone that held your children

Let them hold your shoulders as friends do,

But those shoulders built a house.

Roses have delicate bones.

Spines made of glass.

Roses could never survive a flood.

Sometimes steel buildings get washed away

But you rebuild yourself

Always rebuild yourself

With blueprints that have learned from their mistakes.

Flowers don’t learn from their mistakes.

They die – over and over again

I think you’d get annoyed being a flower.

I think if you were a rose, you’d turn yourself into an evergreen

Out of sheer force of will

Anything to get out of that mundane cycle

Since I was little, you and your sparkly shoes never did mundane.

Mom, you are sharp edges and harsh corners

Sturdy and unforgiving – and that’s hard sometimes, I won’t lie

But see, I grew up in Chicago

Where the wind would knock over children

And now, I live in New Hampshire

Where blizzards knock on our door once a week in the winter

A rose’s petals couldn’t protect me from a storm or life’s brutality.

But you did.

And maybe that’s why you forged yourself like this.

It would have been so much easier to be a flower.

People love fragile things.

We handle them carefully.

We acknowledge their delicacy.

We do not acknowledge you

We just expect you to be there.

I just expect you to be there.

It might be that I’m just now big enough to see around you

– to see what you’ve been shielding me from

All this time I’ve been beating you up from the other side,

Begging you to move out of my way

While you braced yourself against the bitter cold that this world brings

And you took it

Bore the weight of the world for me, and me

Blocked the wind and the rain so my precious garden could survive

Because we all know roses aren’t made from sturdy stuff

So I’m sorry mom.

I think I saw what a rose looked like when it opened its petals to the sun

Like a perfect invitation

And I wanted you to be one with me

But you saw what happens when the sun sets

When winter comes

When someone cuts you at the stem to watch you die in their hands

You saw what this world was capable of

And you could have withered at the sight of it

Could have stayed a flower and lived in bliss till the storm hit

But you became steel

Let me live out my flower dreams

While you blocked me from the wind

And it must have been

-so hard.

And I did not know.

When a rose takes a beating, you can see it

See the brown spots on its soft petals

When steel takes a beating,

It just gets harder, stronger.

That’s what makes steel such a magnificent thing.

If only we’d take more time to admire it.

If only I’d taken more time to admire it.

But roses get all the attention.

Most people would like to live in gardens with pretty flowers

With chrysanthemums and lilies and peonies and roses

But I have been allowed to live in those gardens my whole life – and let me tell you

I am so glad that I have a steel building to call home.