dear mama, I forgive you

a love letter to my mother

May 06, 2025

Hi Sad Girls,

It’s time for another Sad Girl Submission! Every week, I’ll share personal essays from fellow Sadgirls in our community. This allows us to share our experiences with each other and normalize emotional expression.

This week’s essay is from Amy Cheng, a writer-turned-social worker who is passionate about feeling all the feelings, crime documentaries, a hot beverage on a cold day, and spending time with her kitties. She writes honest heart pulp in the form of prose and personal essays. Check her out, here!

If you’d like your essay considered for a future post, check out this post.

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From that day on, I was destined to make my parents proud, so that they could find no reason to blame me for their own disappointment.

My mother rarely talks about her upbringing in Taiwan, as if recalling a single memory is too painful to attempt. I get it. I can only imagine the years of life stolen from her as she bore (and continues to bear) the generational traumas of our lineage.

The dismissal in her voice when I inquire more readily of her past tells of the shame she likely felt as a young girl; her parents punished with a tough hand, when she merely wanted to be loved. She used to tell me with tears in her eyes how she dreamed of having a daughter, this tiny fetus that represented her grief, and the future she could only hope to have.

I came into the world bearing this hope. I was a premature C-section delivery, likely kicking and screaming, and still the nurses cooed over my full head of hair and told my mom I was an angel. Alone in the hospital, she agreed. From that day on, I was destined to make my parents proud, so that they could find no reason to blame me for their own disappointment.

If you ask any of my ex-therapists from the past decade, they’ll tell you how hard I strove to be the perfect daughter—how I had a front-row seat to the highlight reels of my parents raising two children in a foreign land. In fact, it would be downright disrespectful of me to not do well in school and graduate top of my class. If I am to be good, mustn’t I also attempt to be great? Surely, this would win my parents over.

Many moons passed while I watched the youth slip away from my mother’s face, exhaustion etched into the lines around her mouth. She carried a quiet fortitude within her frame, silent yet tenacious. Her hands were always soft and agile, working quickly in the kitchen with various concoctions like a witch and her brew: a dash of soy sauce here, a couple drops of sesame oil there. Smells of freshly-cooked rice wafted up the stairs to where my sister and I played before dinner.

I promised myself to stand by my mother always, to fight for our relationship no matter how painful it got. I was tempted many times to revoke my commitment. It seemed that, regardless of how much distance I tried to put between us, I was never far from her reach. Each new city I inhabited felt like playing adult when in reality, I was still my eight-year-old self, hungry for love and acceptance. It took a while before I realized that my mother and I were the same.

“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

One of my favorite writers skillfully captures the tension of two people, himself and his mother, caught between disparate worlds. Worlds where wounds reside in a perpetual state of agony, begging to be tended to—holding onto the fresh sting of being cut over and over again by the only person you want to be known by.

Much like our ancestors, my family sowed seed in fertile soil that promised bounty. The roots took shape and grew gnarled and ugly, becoming deeply-entrenched in the ground from years of hardening.

And miraculously, after slowly pruning them back, the roots began to reveal themselves as forebears of the future, welcoming pollinators, infant branches, and the awakenings of flowers—flowers that will one day grace the dining table in my apartment, prepared and set with a warm home-cooked dinner made for two.

Note from Jacque:

Thank you for sharing, Amy! I hope anyone dealing with the pressure to reap what their parents have sowed, sees themselves in your words.