Yesterday was the eve of my 30th birthday—and the anniversary of my mom’s passing. For the past seven years, these two truths have lived side by side, creating a quiet clatter that’s made every birthday since I turned 23 feel like a threshold between death and new life.
When I was a child, my mom used to hold me in her lap and call me her treasure. I felt the way she wanted everything for me that she never got to experience herself. Even from her bed in a nursing home, she told me not to stay and take care of her—to go, to keep living my life.
She was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s when I was 20. Our mother-daughter roles reversed as minor lapses in memory turned into forgetting how to dress, how to cook, how to eat, how to speak. I fed her. Helped the nurses clean her diaper. Tucked her into bed at night.
For a long time, I was driven by a fear of becoming her. I was ambitious because she wasn’t. Career-minded because she lacked one. Skeptical about marriage because she was miserable in hers. Focused on money because it limited her freedom.
I brought a pocket-sized framed photo of my mom to work with me yesterday. And as if we were on FaceTime, I carried her around the office and showed her the life I had built: my name on the building’s signage, the 2,500 square foot studio filled with garments I designed by hand, a view overlooking the Manhattan skyline. I showed her a life she could’ve never imagined.
I carry the weight of her unlived life—the chances not taken, the love not felt, the time not given. Looking back, I see how every hard decision and courageous leap traces back to her. No longer from a place of fear or resentment, but a quiet commitment to live a life as big as the one she dreamed for me. To stand on her shoulders and make full use of the opportunity her sacrifices have afforded me.
Over the last decade, I’ve felt my world expand and collapse and have torn it down myself a few times. I’ve loved, I've been heart broken, broken other people’s hearts, and broken my own too. I’ve taken risks, I’ve grieved, I’ve pivoted, I’ve built something out of nothing. There were seasons I was wide open, and seasons I shut down completely. My twenties gave me proof: that I follow through on my word. That I’ll persist under pressure. That I know how to begin again.
And today, I find myself at the doorstep of 30 feeling grateful, giddy and at ease. I’ve never felt more self-assured, more at home with uncertainty, or more alive than I do right now. 30 is a threshold: I’m open and eager, ready to build, wide eyed about love, and excited to see how I’ll surprise myself in this next decade.
Let’s fucking go.
Big Hugs,
Nasrin
Nasrin