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In this reflective piece, I explore my mother’s experiences and the essence of motherhood itself. As you read, you may come to realize that we often overlook the pain our mothers endure—not because we lack love, appreciation, or empathy, but because we see them as invincible.

Real Moms Never Cry

Thirty years later she died, and with that, the grief over my dad, abated. I never thought the pain for his loss would weaken, until she left. Grief is strange that way. It rewrites your pain, shifting the weight from one loss to another. Come to think of it, death is a lot like love: sometimes it takes a new loss to dull the ache of the old one. The scars never really fade though—they just settle into the background of who we are.

I’ve never seen my mom cry. When she was sad, hurt, or confronted, her big, light brown eyes would redden and fill with water—but the tears never fell. It was strange how her pain was still so palpable, even as she swallowed it down. She had a way of gulping back both the tears and the hurt, a natural at it.

It still shatters me every time her eyes turned red, every time I watched her swallow the pain. I saw those sorrows pile up over the years, one heartbreak stacking upon another—when Teta, her mother, passed on that snowy winter day, when Baba, her childhood love and lifelong companion, slipped away, when she lost her superhero brother, the one she swore had healing hands, and when Khalto Sawsan, her eldest sister, collapsed while watering her garden in that far-off Bekaa village.

Mom, like all our mothers, shed countless tears over the years—tears we were too busy to notice or ones we only recognized when it was too late.

What we did hear—or maybe what we chose to hear—were Mom’s jokes, the best mom jokes ever. You know how our moms expect us to laugh at their little stories, the village gossip, or the absurd politics they spend hours watching on TV, convinced they’re too untouchable for any of it to truly affect their lives. And we laugh—not because it’s always funny, but because we love them.

For most of her life, Mama was healthy—or at least, she believed she was.

One summer, during our day3a (village) vacations and not long after my dad passed away, Mom had a terrible stomachache and lay moaning in bed. I remember standing there with my younger sister, Taline, giggling at the strange sounds she made. We couldn’t believe that this strong, unshakable woman could actually feel pain.

We thought she was exaggerating—maybe even faking it. In our minds, moms aren’t entitled to pain. The superhuman strength they display as we grow up make it hard to believe they could ever be vulnerable.

Fact: When people are not used to seeing us in pain, it becomes difficult for them to believe it when we truly are. If we never cry, and then one day we do, no one notices. It’s what we have trained them to expect from us. It is what our mothers have mastered as an art.

My mom had it all—she looked good, dressed well, and dyed her hair that deep burgundy shade that made her big brown eyes stand out. She was obsessed with cleanliness—“When sweeping, don’t skip a square. Dusting first, sofas next, then the floor,” she would say. She cooked with such grace, always challenging us to guess the dish before we even stepped into the kitchen.

It was unthinkable that someone who had always run around, laughed so loudly, and did it all would one day run out of breath—for real.

Believe it or not, my mom cracked jokes and criticized everything the moment she removed her breathing mask—the one she had to wear almost all day and night for the last four years of her life after her lungs started failing. Yes, for four years she was attached to that mask, the one that sagged her beautiful skin and tore out bits of her hair every time she adjusted it.

Year after year, her lungs grew weaker, and from that moment on, it became a truly breath-taking journey—in every sense of the word. That last summer was the hardest for Mama. She pushed us away, refused to see a doctor, and insisted she was fine.

My older brother, Hammad, begged her—he was her favorite—but she wouldn’t listen. Taline and I pleaded, even threatened to leave for Beirut, but she didn’t care. Maybe she wanted us to go, tired of pretending she was fine. Even Ali, the youngest, tried to work his magic—the undeniable pull of the baby of the family—but it was all in vain.

By then, Iman—her secret favorite, her first, the one who had the tightest grip on her heart—had already spaced herself as she got consumed by mom’s stubbornness. I remember the very few times I approached mom to help her around her illness and she would say, ” no Iman knows, you don’t.” Not sure whether I was relieved or jealous – I was surely defeated.

I regret leaving her up there that day. I regret not dragging her to the doctor against her will.

That August, I traveled back to Dubai and, somehow, let myself forget how sick she was. I told myself I was returning for work, but deep down, I knew I was escaping the weight of her illness.

I ask myself now—had she ever done that? Had she ever left us when we were sick, just because we nagged or refused to take our medicine? Of course not. She was always a better mother than any of us were children.

Back at work, I called her every morning. She would text, and in the afternoons, we would exchange pictures of what we had cooked. She took pride in the way I followed her recipes—unlike my sisters—and I was always eager to show her, to remind her that everything I knew in the kitchen and around the house, I had learned from her.

Her voice grew stronger, and she seemed to be getting better—or at least that’s what we all wanted to believe, including her. The day she got better, she asked to see her doctor.

It felt like waiting for a storm to pass, only to step outside and see the devastation left behind. And the damage was massive.

Yesterday, and it will always seem like yesterday, when I looked at her, I saw a single tear resting on her lower lash. It clung there, refusing to fall, refusing to dry. Instinctively, I reached for a tissue and tried to wipe it away, but it wouldn’t budge. It was the last tear she would shed. She managed to swallow it—almost—but this time, she missed.

She was scared. And I felt numb to the idea that she might leave—just as Baba had, without warning, without excuse.

And yet, once more, she came back to us, laughing loudly, cracking jokes on the phone, as if nothing had changed.

She was losing a lot of weight though, and I remember her saying joyfully, “Look at me, there’s nothing much left.”

What I did not realize was that she wasn’t just talking about her weight. She saw herself fading in the mirror. I didn’t.

Then came the 6:30 AM call I couldn’t bring myself to answer. My sister’s voice all the way from Lebanon was raw and trembling: “I think Mom is dead.” The words were blunt, shattering, and final. I froze, disbelief chewing at my chest, waiting for a confirmation call as if death needed a second opinion. Pulling over to the side of the road, I raged, unleashing wails of anger, piercing cries of madness, so loud they tore through me. My hands shook as I dialed my school, barely able to form coherent words between the sobs. All I could do was repeat it, over and over as if they were deaf or responsible for my mom’s death, I screamed: “Immeh metit-my mom is gone.”

And then, she was gone.

There was a funeral—a surreal farewell for the woman I believed was too fierce to die, too in love with life to ever let go.

She left with plans still unfolding, dreaming of a great summer to make up for the last, the one that had drained her and left everyone unhappy. But she never got the chance. She died.

And now, there are moments when I forget, moments when I catch myself waiting for her voice or picturing her smile. But then reality crashes in—she’s not here.

She is gone.

Now I just want to call her, to ask for recipes. I still instinctively reach for my phone after a long journey, ready to text her: “Mom, I arrived safely and all is well.” I still expect her 10 a.m. check-ins, those texts where she would reassure me that she was fine and give me a briefing on the weather.

I remember a time when I was in Beirut, and she kept calling. I didn’t pick up, convinced that whatever I was doing at that moment was more important.

Frustrated, she called my brothers and sisters, panicking simply because I hadn’t answered. I remember feeling so annoyed, thinking it was too much—I wasn’t a child anymore. I was a mother myself, and I never did that with my own children.

I thought she was overreacting.

Now, I understand. She was a better mom than I am.

She did that the night before she left—she said she was doing very well.

I want to look at my phone and see her text again: “صباح الخير ماما، كيفك حبيبتي، انا منيحة الحمدالله.”

My mom always responded to texts I never even sent, she responded to questions I never even asked.

She was the greatest gem, a gem I got for free at the Jeweler’s store.

How often have you seen your mom cry? Moms don’t really cry for their own pains; they cry for ours. The few times we do see those tears, we get annoyed, as if they aren’t entitled to them. But if we look deep inside ourselves, we realize just how immense the pain we’re suppressing is, and how massive the tears we’re trying to hide. These are our mothers.