What She Built From Nothing
She didn't have a model for it. She became one.
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
— Simone Weil
The first memory I can remember is a hallway.
I am small enough to reach up for my father’s hand and still hold it. We are walking toward a room, and when we get there, my mother is sitting in a hospital bed framed by a window. Sunlight falls around her. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I didn’t know then what had happened in that room. My mother had just undergone a radical hysterectomy. She had gone in wanting another child and came out having said goodbye to that possibility. She had three children by 25. Her body, in giving us to her, had also taken something from her.
What I knew was simpler: she was there, and being near her felt like home.
That was the first thing she gave me. I just didn’t know yet how hard she had worked to have something to give.
What She Chose
My mother had a difficult childhood. Her father died when she was four. Her mother, a young widow with four small children, couldn’t emotionally find her way back to them. My mom grew up without a stable home. She learned early how to take care of herself.
She met my father at 15, and when she had nowhere to go, he brought her home. My grandparents welcomed her in and gave her something she had never had: a place that felt like hers.
My mother took that gift and made it the whole architecture of our lives.
Our house was not always full of money. But it was always full of love and laughter. I understood even as a child that this was not an accident. It was something she had decided to build for us, because no one had built it for her.
The Gift She Passed Forward
I learned what real listening looks like from my mother. She doesn’t give you her answer. She helps you find yours.
From growing up in Montana, moving across the country, to traveling the world, my mother has been a safe harbor. Not someone who tells you where to go. Someone who makes it safe to figure it out for yourself. When I failed at something, I was never made to feel less than. The question was always the same: what did you learn?
When I first decided to move to New York City, I made a trip home to say goodbye. She cried. Then, in the middle of that goodbye, she made me laugh. She said she had “raised her kids to be way too independent.” Then she told me she was proud of me for following my dreams, and to always live up to who I am.
She didn’t make my decision smaller to make her grief easier. She held both at once.
That is what she taught me: you love people where they are, not where you want them to be. You make space for who they’re becoming, even when it costs you something.
Where the Compass Points
In the ENOUGH Compass, the final coordinate is Honor What’s Yours. It asks a question most of us avoid: what do you know is true for you, even if you can’t explain it to anyone else?
My mother had every reason to pass forward what she received: loss, instability, and a childhood that moved too fast. Instead, she looked at her own life and decided what she wanted to give.
That is the most honest version of this coordinate I have ever witnessed. She honored something she had to build from scratch, then gave it freely to everyone she loved.
This is scarcity versus sufficiency with love.
Scarcity says: you can only give what you were given. If your childhood was hard, that becomes the template. That’s what you know how to do.
Sufficiency says: love is a decision. You can choose what to pass forward. You can build the home you never had and give it to someone else.
What I Carry
As long as I can remember, she has signed every card with XOXO.
Fifteen years ago, I had a design created to honor what she means to me. It centers on the philosophy she lived more than she ever articulated: love and laughter. The two things she built our home around and the foundation of who I became.
So I had it tattooed: XOXD. Love and laughter, made permanent.
That’s what she gave me. Not a formula for success or a map for navigating the world. Something simpler and more durable: the belief that a life built around love and laughter is a life well-lived, and that both are always a choice.
She built that from nothing. I carry it on my skin.
A Small Practice
This week, think about one foundational thing you were given, not a possession but a way of moving through the world.
Name it. Say where it came from.
Then ask: how are you passing it forward?
That’s how love survives. Not through monuments or achievements, but through the small daily choice to give someone else what mattered most to you.
See you next week.
P.S. Who taught you how to love? Reply and tell me about them.