I went for an early morning drive with my son Vale, sometime around 5:30am, to keep him from waking up everyone else at our AirBnB. We were visiting Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, from Boise, for an extended 4th of July stay. At some point I looked down and noticed this:

This may look like nothing to you. Or it may look odd, as it did to me some 25 years ago when I first noticed my Mom’s favorite mug, rimmed with red lipstick, sitting in her Oldsmobile cup-holder. The coffee was always burned, cold or lukewarm at best, and not made to conform with my righteous standards.

And boy how hard it must have been for anyone close to me to attain my approval, given my righteousness and arrogance. Especially my Mom. I remember feeling ashamed that she had resorted to working retail or even cleaning homes to support herself, and us, after the hardships of the Iranian Revolution stripped our family of any sense of place or security. I was seeking my own fortunes as a young professional, determined to make a better life for myself, so seeing her mug was a strange motivator to me. I didn’t drink bad coffee, or use a mug in a cupholder.

I was better than that.

Years later I found myself broken. All the things I thought I knew turned out to be false, chief among them being the idea that my Mother didn’t live her best life. Nothing I have believed has turned out to be so untrue, and it has taken me 18 years to process this. That’s when she died. Eighteen years ago, a few months after her grand-daughter Hanna was born.

I only started to mourn her death a few years ago. And this was only made possible when I began to forgive myself, and accept who I am. In doing so, I was able to gently put down my armor and let the light in.

And the light eventually led me to see that I am just like her.