My mom was supposed to be a lawyer, but instead, she had me.

I think about that sometimes — not in a dramatic, self-pitying way, but in the quiet moments where I catch her staring off like she’s remembering a version of herself I’ll never know.

The version who argued cases instead of formulating grocery lists. The one who memorized laws instead of birthdays and utility bills. The one who chose a dream too big to be contained inside of a three-bedroom bungalow.

You see, my mom was supposed to be relentless. Sharp. Luminous.

But then I came.

Not like a miracle or a blessing, but an interruption that never gave her the chance to bloom into the woman she was becoming. I arrived before she could stretch into herself completely — before ambition could ripen into reality.

I took so much from her without even knowing it.

I took her time; her momentum; and the future she was building for herself and bent it toward me instead. I turned courtrooms into classrooms, legal pads into laundry baskets, late nights studying case files into late nights rocking a feverish child to sleep. I rerouted the river of her life until it no longer flowed toward her dreams, but toward mine. And she let me.

That’s the worst part.

I always wonder in the most uncomfortable way: what did I cost her?

Because love doesn’t erase sacrifice — it only makes it harder to name. And I know she’ll never say it like that. She’ll say I was worth trading for a juvenile dream. But there’s a difference between what’s true and what’s allowed to be spoken.

Sometimes, it feels like I arrived at the exact moment her life could have gone somewhere else. Like I closed a door she didn’t even get to fully open. I am both the reason she stayed and the reason she didn’t leave.

I don’t think she could ever regret me.

But I do think she lost something when she chose me.

If there is another life — one where I don’t arrive too early, or at all — I hope she doesn’t hesitate or look back. I hope she becomes the woman who never had to trade her dreams for someone else’s existence.

I hope she is loud, brilliant, and everything she was before the world asked her to shrink.

Even if that world doesn’t include me.

Because if loving her means anything, it means wanting a version of her that never had to deconstruct herself just to make room for me; whose eyes never dimmed from exhaustion; who never had to tuck her ambitions away into drawers beside unpaid bills and sewing kits.

I want her to exist somewhere untouched by sacrifice. Somewhere she never had to look at a cradle and quietly choose it over herself.

And maybe that is the cruelest part of loving your mother deeply — realizing that your life may have begun where hers was forced to pause.

- Valerie Rose V. Ferido

(Photo by Ma. Louela Luna/FEU Advocate, Illustration by Mary Nicole Halili/FEU Advocate)