There are some things a man notices later in life that hit him all at once … like a train he heard coming for years but never stepped close enough to the tracks to feel.
One day you catch your reflection in a window or a rearview mirror … and there they are.
Your mother’s eyes.
Not metaphorically … not poetically … I mean the same eyes.
Same shape.
Same color.
Same tiredness when the world gets heavy.
Same spark when something beautiful catches you off guard.
I carry my momma’s eyes in my face like a family heirloom.
And when I look at my children … sometimes I wonder if they see her looking back at them too.
My momma was the one who kissed cuts that felt catastrophic when I was little … who pressed bandages over skinned knees and scraped elbows with the kind of care that made pain feel survivable. Back then, she seemed to know how to fix everything. Or maybe she just knew how to make you feel less alone while it hurt.
That’s a kind of magic mothers carry.
She taught me how to love my children without ever sitting me down to explain it. She taught it through repetition … through sacrifice … through showing up every single day whether she was tired or not. Love wasn’t a speech in our house … it was action. It was consistency. It was staying.
And gentle Jesus… we do not agree on everything.
We are both far too stubborn for that.
I got that from her too.
That hardheaded refusal to bend just because the room gets loud … that fire that rises in your chest when something feels wrong. We’ve butted heads plenty over the years, sometimes hard enough to shake the walls, but even then … underneath every disagreement … I’ve always understood her.
Because I am, in so many ways, my mother’s son.
And my momma is not a soft woman.
She is fierce.
Not loud for the sake of being loud … not cruel … not bitter. Fierce in the way Southern women so often are … forged by hardship, responsibility, sacrifice, and the understanding that nobody was coming to save them, so they learned to carry that weight themselves.
She rarely asked for much in return for all she gave.
That’s the part that gets me now.
As a child, you think mothers are endless things. Endless patience … endless meals … endless comfort … endless strength. You don’t realize until you’re older that every bit of that cost them something.
And still she gave it.
Of all the things my mother handed down to me … the eyes, the stubbornness, the humor, the temper, the tenderness buried underneath steel … I think I’m most proud to have inherited her fire.
Not rage.
Fire.
The thing that keeps you standing when life tries to knock you down.
The thing that refuses to let bullshit be the final word.
The thing that makes you protect the people you love with everything you’ve got.
That fire shaped me before I even understood what I was becoming.
It’s in every word I write.
Every fight I pick.
Every time I refuse to bow my head to something I know is wrong.
That’s her.
Still burning.
So today, on Mother’s Day … I’m thinking about my eyes again.
The ones I inherited.
The ones that watched over me when I was small.
The ones that carried exhaustion and strength in equal measure.
The ones I see staring back at me every morning now.
And I realize maybe that’s what mothers really leave us with.
Not perfection.
Not agreement.
Not some polished little story.
They leave pieces of themselves in us … until one day we wake up and realize we are carrying their love, their scars, their lessons, and their fire into the world whether we meant to or not.
Happy Mother’s Day, Momma.
Thank you for the eyes.
And even more than that … thank you for the fire.
