The Mother was more than just a caregiver, she was an angel, an idol, a god.

When we first appeared in the home, scared frightened children too familiar with abandonment and abuse to feel comfort, The Mother took us all in willingly.

On the first day of each child’s admittance to the house, The Mother would sit with them for hours, offering them and only them her undivided attention.

In exchange for boarding and a family to belong to, we would offer The Mother our stories, trusting her with our deepest wishes, our most secret confessions.

She’d take this all in with those soft glittering brown eyes, cocking her head to the side and nodding slowly to show she was listening.

Before The Mother, no one had ever bothered to listen.

We would unload everything on her, our mistakes, our wrongdoings, our deepest regrets. As though she were some intermediary between heaven and hell, a sentient being able to absolve us of our sins.

The Mother, like mothers should be, was gentle, kind, and charitable, giving us food, shelter, love, and kindness in abundance.

Whatever vices we held from our past lives- a sibling we still remembered with affection, or a childhood toy we refused to part ways with- were easily dimmed in comparison to The Mother.

She, above all else, became that unspoken core to our beings, a part of her rigid structure tenting the collapsed spaces in our hearts and making us whole again.

She was loved by all of us dearly, and wholeheartedly, despite the little we knew of her.

She would feed us tiny morsels of herself now and then, telling us an anecdote from her childhood or speaking in passing of her own mother, but those moments were rare. The Mother was someone we never really knew, but whom we allowed to consume us all the same.

We didn’t learn this until later- much, much later- but The Mother never let go of the secrets we whispered into her willing ears in our moments of vulnerability.

She remembered and she waited, collecting them like shiny coins to bargain with later.

She was shrewd and sharp, knowing just how to needle the right information out of people and hold that information indefinitely.

Where we had once thought her trustworthy, a keeper of many dark secrets, we now saw the severity of her depths.

For despite how much we loved The Mother- and we did, for she was more a mother than we were ever privileged to have- we could never leave her side no matter how much we may have wanted to.

The mother had each of us wrapped around her fingers like jewel-dipped rings, our secrets and our sins her currency that bought her our obedience.