Maria, I hardly know how to speak this, but it feels as though, at some point, the word “no” was taken from you. And still, you did not flee. You did something astonishing: you let something vast move through you, and it did not break you in two. Since then, I cannot think of you as merely someone’s mother, but as the moment when life chose not to remain a story already written. And that unsettles me, a little because it feels like growing up, like discovering that what truly matters never asks permission to matter.