I Thought My Mom Was Wrong. This Is Me Eating My Words.

ROOM SERVICE:

I was sitting in a room today listening to women talk about wombs, mothers, blood, and business.

In the most lived-in way. Women in similar chapters of life, sipping lattes, dressed exactly how you’d imagine Brooklyn women on a chilly spring day.

The room was held by Beatrice Dixon and what she’s built with The Honey Pot Company. I’ve never felt more at ease in the energy of strangers.

There were stories about the first time we realized something was different in our bodies. About mothers. About lineage. About how we’ve been taught to be disconnected from the very thing we live inside.

At one point, Sasha Bonét spoke about her mother.

In The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters (my spring read!) she writes about childbirth turning from ordinary to life threatening in minutes. Her mother’s body pushed past its limits. A room where the outcome is no longer certain. It’s not just a medical emergency. It’s a rupture.

She said her mother stayed calm through it. The assumption was that she didn’t want to be an inconvenience to the medical staff.

But Bea’s mom, sitting in the audience, offered a perspective shift that stopped my mental chatter

“Maybe she wasn’t trying to be convenient.
Maybe she was trying to stay calm to keep her baby alive.”

That sentence is going to live rent free in my head.

Because if I’m being honest, I grew up watching my mom and asking different questions.

Why didn’t you fight back.
Why didn’t you leave.
Why did you tolerate that.
Why didn’t you protect me.

I thought I was seeing clearly. I was a child trying to make sense of something I didn’t have language for.

“We read our mothers’ restraint as weakness. Their silence as passivity. Their endurance as lack.

But what if they weren’t shrinking. What if they were regulating. As best as they could.”

Our mothers were eldest daughters in their own lives. Navigating systems (marriage, jobs, societal expectations) they didn’t choose. Making decisions without language, without research, without support.

No Google. No therapy. No hormone panels. No framework for what was happening in their bodies.

Just instinct. Pressure. Responsibility.

They didn’t have the luxury of falling apart. So they learned how to stay steady. Even when their minds and bodies were not.

And now here we are: with information and options. With language and content for everything they felt but could never name.

Hormones. Burnout. Fertility. Nervous system.

We are the first generation trying to understand womanhood instead of just surviving it. And still, so many of us feel lost.

Because knowing more doesn’t mean we know how to live differently.

For years, we were given plastic and silence as the standard for feminine care. We were told pain was normal. Discomfort was expected.

Now we’re returning to herbs. To rhythm. To the body.

Because we’re finally asking better questions.

My mom didn’t have access to any of this. But she had something else…

A resilience that didn’t ask to be seen. A way of moving through life that was about survival, not optimization. She had prayer.

And for a long time, I judged that.

So this is me correcting myself. Out loud.

I misunderstood my mom. Maybe some of you did too.

She wasn’t behind. She was first.

And that strength I carry as an eldest daughter, the thing that makes me capable, sharp, and able to hold so much, is not separate from her.

It is hers.

xx

Michelle

ON MY GRANDMOTHER’S TABLE

Golden Mung Bean Khichdi

Ingredients
• ½ cup whole mung beans (soaked if possible)
• ⅓ cup basmati rice
• 3½ cups water
• 1 tbsp ghee
• 1 tsp grated ginger
• ½ tsp turmeric
• ½ tsp cumin seeds
• ½ tsp coriander seeds
• ½ tsp fennel seeds
• salt to taste

Toppings
• nori strips
• toasted brazil nuts
• basil
• cilantro
• lemon or lime

Instructions

Rinse mung beans and rice

Heat ghee → bloom spices (~30 sec), add turmeric

Add beans, rice, water, salt → simmer 25–30 min

Finish with lemon

Top with herbs + crunch