She would’ve been 70 today.
And it’s strange—how you can ache for someone longer than you ever had them.
Stranger still, how they can shape your life from the grave in ways the living never could.
I was only nine when she left.
Nine.
Too young to understand what death really was, too old to forget the sound of her voice.
I didn’t get to see her grow older.
Didn’t get to watch her become softer with time, or stronger in the ways women do when they’ve lived enough life to stop apologizing for it.
I never saw her with laugh lines or reading glasses or salt-and-pepper hair.
I never got to roll my eyes at her unsolicited advice or call her at midnight crying over something I thought would break me.
She didn’t get to teach me how to take care of myself. Didn’t get to warn me about the men who would mistake me for someone who needed fixing. Didn’t get to show me how to age with grace, or fall apart and get back up again. She never met the woman I’m becoming. And I never met the woman she was becoming, either.
Still—
she’s in me.
In the ways that can’t be measured.
In the things I know without knowing how.
In the way I protect my heart like something sacred because she wasn’t here to show me how to hand it over gently.
As I wrote in Unwritten by Her, Authored by Me:
“I’m building a life she never got to finish. And in that life, I let myself believe that freedom is possible—even when guidance wasn’t.”
That’s what her absence made space for:
My voice. My path. My own permission to create a life with no blueprint.
She gave me her beginnings.
And when grief became a second skin—tight some days, breathable on others—I learned to wear it with intention.
From that ache came SinajOnline.
From that silence, a platform built for those who never had someone to shape them,
but chose to shape themselves anyway.
As I said in The Good That Comes From Grief:
“Grief didn’t make me bitter. It made me brave.”
So yes, I grieve her still.
Yes, I wish for her still.
But I also live for her.
Write for her.
Speak for her.
And celebrate for both of us.
If your mother is gone, too. If you never got the years you deserved, or the love you needed. I hope you know that longing is its own kind of love. And love like that builds things.
It builds people.
It built me.
Happy 70th, Mom.
Wherever you are, I hope you see all of this.
Not just the sorrow
but the soft, stubborn joy of a daughter becoming someone
she never thought she could be.
For both of us, I’ll keep going.
