I Mother Through Mentorship

By Miss Dee
Miss Dee is a lifelong mentor, storyteller, and keeper of quiet legacies. From her small home in Tobago, she has nurtured generations with patience, wisdom, and the kind of steadfast love that leaves no official record but changes lives all the same.

There are some things a woman never says out loud. Not at the dinner table. Not at church. Not even to herself in the mirror.

I never had children.

It wasn't for lack of wanting. Or trying. Life just... slipped past me. One day I woke up, and the house was too quiet, and the years were already stitched into my skin.

There was a time I thought it made me less. Less woman. Less worthy.
But time has a way of teaching you the shape of your own life.

What I had were open hands. A listening ear. A front porch where the neighbourhood kids knew they could come sit when the world got too heavy.

They never called me 'Mom.' They called me Miss or Auntie or just by my first name.
But when they needed someone to teach them how to write a letter, how to open a bank account, how to believe they could be more than their mistakes—they came to me.I mothered without stretch marks.

I mothered without a crib in the next room.
I mothered in the long, quiet way that never makes it into family photo albums.

Now, they send me postcards from cities I’ve never been to. They call on holidays, they say "Thank you" in ways they probably don't even realize.

I didn't miss motherhood.
I lived it.

Just not the way anyone expected.
And maybe that's the oldest kind of love there is—the kind that doesn't need a name to be real.

My Mom, My First Data Analyst

By Simone "Sim" Blake Simone "Sim" Blake is a tech strategist, sarcasm enthusiast, and professional dot-connector based in Toronto. She firmly believes Caribbean moms invented predictive analytics long before Silicon Valley caught on. Before I ever touched a spreadsheet, my mother taught me about pattern recognition—with one look. You know the look. The "don't even think about it" squint. The "I already know what you did" side-eye. The "you're lying and your left eyebrow just twitched" stare-down.

Forget ChatGPT. Caribbean mothers have been running predictive models on their children’s behaviour since forever—no WiFi required.

When I was eight, I thought I could sneak cookies before dinner. Rookie move. She didn't even look up from her Bible.

"Simone, put it back before you embarrass yourself."

Embarrass myself? The data was clear: any deviation from her expected outcome—clean kitchen, cookies intact—triggered immediate corrective action.

When I tried lying about where I was after school? She didn’t yell. She asked three calmly placed questions, cross-referenced my answers against known neighbourhood patterns, and shut me down with an audit worthy of the IRS.

What my mom really taught me was survival by instinct and observation. Read the room. Notice who’s missing. Watch for the slight change in tone, the way someone's voice tightens just before bad news.

She didn’t call it "data." She called it "sense."

Turns out, that sense kept me alive more times than I can count—navigating schools where "different" meant "target," offices where unspoken rules mattered more than written ones, and cities where you had to clock danger before it clocked you.

Before AI, before algorithms, before all the buzzwords that turn real life into code, there were women like my mother, training daughters like me to see beyond what’s said.

If survival is pattern recognition, my mother was—and still is—the best damn data analyst I’ve ever known.

Love Built This Home: LGBTQIA+ Families Speak

By Jordan Rivers Jordan Rivers is a writer, community organizer, and proud parent based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They believe family is not defined by tradition, but by tenderness and truth. There are houses built by blueprints, poured concrete, and sweat. And then there are homes built by something harder to measure—love that had to fight for the right to exist at all. Ours is the second kind. When my partner and I decided to have a child, there was no roadmap laid out for two Black, queer people trying to build a family in a world that often pretends we don't exist. There were only questions. Only side-eyes at clinics. Only forms that asked for "Mother" and "Father" with no room to explain ourselves.

We built anyway.

Our son's first crib wasn't bought—it was handed down by a trans auntie who knew what it meant to piece together a dream. His first birthday cake was baked by a neighbour who didn't blink when two dads showed up for parent-teacher night.

Love built this home. Love patched the cracks when family turned away. Love paid for fertility treatments we could barely afford. Love stood in the courtroom when we had to fight just to have our names recognized equally.

Every day we parent against a current. Every day we mother, father, and family in a language that didn't come pre-written for us.

When our son says "My parents," he says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. Because to him, it is.

He doesn’t know the paperwork it took to make that true. He doesn’t know the prayers whispered at 2 a.m. He just knows the love that wraps him when he falls asleep.

And maybe that's the real blueprint. Maybe that's all that ever mattered.

Love built this home. And love will keep building it, brick by beautiful, stubborn brick.

What I See Without Sight

Anne Mok is the founder of Purpose In View and a strategist whose work sits at the intersection of impact, inclusion, and innovation. With a background in human-centered design, Anne brings clarity to complexity—and heart to strategy. Motherhood, to me, is both an anchor and compass—a quiet strength wrapped in my mother’s soft cardigan, and a fierce tenderness that refuses to fade, even as the world I once saw clearly grows dim. I’ve learned to mother with less sight, but more vision—listening for laughter, feeling the shift in breath, sensing what’s unspoken.

I began to lose my vision during one of the hardest chapters of my life. I often felt like I was failing, fumbling in the dark. But love became the thread that held us together. Years later, I stood at the edge of my daughter’s wedding aisle. I couldn’t see the shimmer of her dress, but I felt the hush of the crowd, the stillness in the air, and the warmth of her hug before she stepped into a new chapter.

I carry a quiet grief—watching life’s most beautiful moments blur: my youngest daughter’s graduation, my son growing into a gentle man, my eldest glowing as a bride. I longed to see them clearly, and yet I smiled, celebrated, and mourned all at once.

There’s also the deeper ache of mothering without my own mother’s voice to lean on. In her absence, I’ve become the support I once needed.

I’m letting go of perfection and reclaiming softness—as strength, not weakness. To mother is to tend—to hearts, to healing, to hope. Sometimes, when I walk with my white cane tapping gently ahead, I remember: I may not see the path, but I still move toward the light. And that, too, is a way of mothering.

For Big Hannah: Grief, Purpose, and the Fight to Save Mothers

Rebecca Stevens Alder is a global health leader, equity strategist, and advocate for social impact. With over 20 years of experience shaping access to healthcare across the public and private sectors, she brings both personal purpose and professional rigor to every initiative she touches. Almost 24 years ago, I was pregnant with my first child, Nathan. My cousin, ‘Big Hannah’, as I would affectionately call her, was also pregnant with her first child. I lived in Switzerland and she lived in my home country, Sierra Leone.

We would talk weekly during our pregnancies. It was one of the highlights of that time in my life. ‘Big Hannah’ made fun of the fact that though she was younger than me, her baby would be older than mine. We laughed heartily each time she teased me about that.

A month before I was supposed to give birth, my Aunt called me from Freetown to tell me that ‘Big Hannah’ had started having contractions the night before and was rushed to hospital. The entire family was looking forward to her coming home with the baby.

She never did.

‘Big Hannah’ died in childbirth, and her baby died too.

That day, I cried until I could cry no more. I had lost my dear cousin, but most of all, I had lost my close friend and my confidant. Someone I deeply loved.

Yesterday marked the launch of the Beginnings Fund - a new initiative funded by the Gates Foundation, ELMA Philantrophies, the Mohamed Bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Delta Philanthropies and other anonymous donors to deliver lifesaving interventions to mothers and their newborns in Africa. In partnership with governments and local partners, the initiative aims to prevent over 300,000 avoidable deaths and improve the quality of care for 34 million women and newborns by 2030.

If the Beginnings Fund had been around 24 years ago, maybe, just maybe, ‘Big Hannah’ would still be alive today. I’ve been working with the Beginnings Fund over the last few months to change the trajectory of the lives of mothers and their newborns in Africa. It’s a promise I made to myself the day ‘Big Hannah’ died and for as long as I can, I’ll continue to do what I can to make a difference.

Parenting While Healing

Anika Reyes is a writer, mother, and trauma recovery advocate based in Atlanta. She believes every child deserves a parent who chooses growth over silence, and every parent deserves the grace to begin again. Some nights, I tuck my daughter into bed and cry in the hallway. Not because she’s hurt me. Because loving her has shown me every place I’m still hurting. Nobody warned me that parenting while healing would feel like holding a mirror up to every wound I thought I’d buried. Nobody said that loving a child—truly loving a child—meant learning to give them what you never received.

When she throws a tantrum, I hear echoes of my own mother’s voice, sharp and cutting, rushing up my throat. I have to swallow it down—choose a new script—because my daughter deserves a different ending.

When she asks for one more story, one more hug, one more ounce of patience I feel too broken to give, I have to find a softness inside myself that no one taught me was safe to have.

There are days when I feel like I am failing. Failing her. Failing myself. Carrying too many ghosts in a house meant for growing things.

But then— She laughs. Full belly, head thrown back, sunlight-loud. She runs into my arms like I’m the safest place she knows. She tells me, "Mommy, you make me feel brave."

And I realize: Maybe the healing doesn’t have to be finished for the love to be real. Maybe every time I choose patience over anger, softness over silence, presence over running—I am rewriting a story generations long.

Maybe it's not about being perfect. Maybe it's about being present.

I am parenting while healing.
And somehow, some days, love is enough.

My Mom's Silence Shaped My Loudness

By Tasha "T" Daniels Tasha "T" Daniels is a spoken word poet and cultural worker based in Brooklyn. She believes survival sometimes sounds like silence, but healing demands volume. My mother didn’t teach me how to speak. She taught me how to vanish. She taught me with a raised eyebrow. A tightened jaw. She taught me with every "Don't make noise." Every "Stay polite." Every "They're already watching you—don't give them a reason." Her silence was armor. Her stillness was a survival tactic.

Not because she didn’t love me—
because the world taught her that loud Black girls don’t grow old.
They get corrected.
Dismissed.
Buried.

I grew up learning the art of shrinking.
Perfecting the science of quiet.
Mastering the skill of being almost invisible.

But silence is not peace.
And survival is not freedom.

One day, I chose noise.
Not accident. Not apology. A choice.

I got loud.
Loud when they whispered.
Loud when they side-eyed.
Loud when they mislabeled me, misplaced me, misnamed me.

My mother’s silence was a survival map—
but my loudness is a battle cry for liberation.

I don't owe anyone an explanation for my volume.
Not then.
Not now.

If my voice rattles the glass, let it shatter.
If my words crack the walls, let them fall.

I am not building a life that fits inside their rooms.
I am building a world where no daughter has to unlearn herself just to survive.

My mother fought to stay alive.
I fight to live out loud.