By Tawnia Lives

(Read this as a love letter to the women who came before — honoring both their tenderness and their tiredness. It’s a prayer, not a protest.)

She was the heartbeat.
The keeper.
The one who made sure everyone else was okay.

And she believed them when they called her strong —
because she loved them.
Because she had been raised to understand love as endurance,
as carrying what others dropped,
as holding the weight so no one else had to feel it.

She cooked when she was sick.
She comforted while she was hurting.
She smiled through silence,
becoming the shelter she never received.

It was love.
It was always love.

But it was also labor —
invisible, unending, unpaid.

The matriarchs didn’t just raise families.
They carried entire generations on their backs.
They held the stories no one could speak aloud.
They stitched together the fractures of everyone else’s choices.
They absorbed what would have broken the people they protected.

They were the family’s first responders —
emotional, spiritual, unseen.

And yet,
when they grew weary,
the world called them ungrateful.

When they said no,
the world heard abandonment.

When they rested, even for a moment,
guilt followed them like a shadow whispering
all the ways they were failing
simply for needing what they had always given.

Still,
they loved.

They loved in casseroles and late-night prayers,
in soft warnings and hard forgiveness,
in the quiet, steadfast language
of never giving up.

But love should not require depletion.
It should not demand the erasure
of the one who gives it.

The new matriarchs know this now.

They are still loving —
but they are loving differently.

With boundaries that protect tenderness.
With rest that honors the body’s truth.
With clarity that does not shrink to be acceptable.
With a kind of courage that refuses to become self-abandonment.

They are learning that to set something down
is not to stop loving it —
it is to love it better.

They are teaching their children
that love is not sacrifice —
it is sustainability.
That care is not control.
That empathy is not exhaustion.

They still pray —
but now they include themselves.

They still carry —
but now they ask for help.

They still love —
but now,
they are included in their own devotion.

It was love.
It was always love.
But it was also everything
love was never meant to carry alone.

The new matriarchs are still loving —
but they are loving differently now.

— Tawnia Lives.