Whatever your relationship with your mother, and they are never simple, she was your first study in what a woman's life could look like. How she carried herself under pressure. What she sacrificed and whether she named the sacrifice. How she loved and whether she protected herself within the loving. How she related to her own ambitions, her own needs, the parts of herself that existed outside of what she gave to others.
My mother was the first leader I ever knew. She left formal employment when my siblings and I were young and built, in its place, a series of businesses with her own hands. A small grocery shop. Green grocery farming. A tailoring shop where she made clothes through the years we were growing up. She did not separate her working life from our upbringing. She folded us into it. By the time I was a child still learning the world, I was selling tomatoes at the market. I was sewing buttons in the tailoring shop. I was serving customers in the shop, handling money, keeping account. When she had to be absent, I managed the tailoring shop in her place.
I did not understand at the time that this was an apprenticeship. It felt simply like the texture of our life, like what was expected, like what every child surely did. Only much later did I recognize what she had actually given me. Responsibility came early, and it came real. Not the symbolic responsibility of chores invented to build character, but the genuine kind, where the shop either ran or it did not, where the customer was either served well or lost, where my mother either returned to find things handled or did not. I learned the weight of being trusted with something that mattered before I was old enough to know that was a thing being learned.
So when I describe myself as the accidental manager, I have to be honest that the word accidental was never quite right. The roles that found me in my professional life found someone who had been managing since childhood, who had stood behind a counter and held the responsibility of a small enterprise in her hands before she was tall enough to see comfortably over it. My mother had been steadily building a manager all along. I was simply the last to notice.
I look at my own mother and I see things I have inherited that I did not choose and things I have chosen to claim. The strength that was always there, quiet and structural, not announced. The capacity to hold things without displaying the holding. The warmth that was never confused with weakness even when others tried to confuse it. These are her gifts in me, operational long before I named them.
I also see things I have chosen differently. Places where her generation absorbed costs that mine has been slowly, imperfectly, learning to refuse. The progress is not complete. But it is real. And it rests, in part, on what she carried so I would not have to carry it quite the same way.