Some women give birth.
Some women give you a place to cry without asking why.
And somewhere between burnt toast, night prayers, and tired hands,
the world keeps confusing wombs with motherhood.
A mother is the voice that softens your name after the world weaponizes it,
the hand that checks if you ate while pretending she is not hungry.
She is not always “Mama”—sometimes she is a sister, a grandmother, a neighbor,
a woman folding your pain like laundry no one else would touch.
But no, not all women are mother figures
some are still learning how to mother the child inside themselves.
Some carry gardens; some carry storms; some were never shown tenderness enough to give it.
And maybe being a woman was never meant to mean sacrifice, but choice.