We Mothers Hold On: An Exclusive Guest Post from Thao Thai, Author of the book Banyan Moon, Our July Discover Pick 

The world fell away the first time I felt her heartbeat pressed against mine, skin to skin under the inconstant lights of the hospital room, a bulb on its last legs, ice chips in melting on the side table, my husband snapping photos to capture the uncapturable evanescence of this moment. Love at first sight. The nurses itched to take her away, my NICU baby who needed more care than I, her mother, could provide. But I couldn’t relinquish the irresistible smallness of her, those thin rice-grain fingernails, the lips that opened like purple-hearted pansies. I was afraid, maybe, that she would vanish the second she left the room; a mirage of hope. So for as long as I could, I kept holding on. 

And that’s what motherhood is to me, a rebellious negotiation between my flickering heart and the rest of the world. We mothers hold on, through the hours of colic, the first bone breaks on the playground, the times another kid pushes yours. Those fevers that keep us up, the fleeting joy of a butterfly kiss dropped on a summer day; it all compounds together into something that’s less of a feeling, and more of a question. How do I love this person best? And within the question, so many more. Like: How do I protect her from myself?  

I came of age during the sitcom era: bunk beds cornered in tidy suburban bedrooms, laugh tracks, Amy Matthews and Maggie Seaver, mothers whose care shone in nutritious after-school snacks and knee-to-knee confidences on floral sofas. My own mother wasn’t like that. We had a yawning space between us. Questions, instead of answers. Probably for too long, I wished for a sitcom kind of love. It felt safe and simple, words that never defined our relationship. Into my adulthood, we had moments of separation, years where we seemed to talk about nothing. I never asked why; I only accepted that this was the way it was between some mothers and children.  

After I gave birth to my daughter, the questions returned. I wondered how my relationship with her would evolve. Would there be silences that stretched like a too-thick quilt? Would we have a sitcom love? Did I even want that? I worried the years would pass without us really knowing anything important about one another. 

When my mother came to visit for the first time after my daughter was born, she was uncertain around the baby. She didn’t know how to change a diaper or how to calm colic (none of us did!). I caught her biting her lip often, as if to cut off the advice she wanted to give. But in quiet moments, she admired each birthmark, each sweet, sparse thread of hair. “She has your toes,” my mother would say. A detail only a grandmother would notice.  

In the dark witching hours, she placed the sleeping baby on her chest, rocking until a thin beam of morning slipped under the blackout curtains. Love at first light. The whole time, my mother’s hand patted the baby’s back in a tireless drumsong only they could hear. Watching them from the doorway, I could almost see the image blur, until it was me as a baby in my mother’s arms, both of us still holding on. 

Later, she’d tell me everything. If there was a gulf before, it shrank the moment she let me into her past. Her words, a seam to repair a near-impossible rend. She talked about how, as an immigrant and single mother, a survivor of the Vietnam War, a talented teacher who couldn’t practice her skills in a new country, she moved through the world with a kind of confusion that bled into our relationship. No wonder. Motherhood is hard enough without all those added layers. “I regret it,” she said, the droop of her mouth adding emphasis to her words. “I wanted to be a different mother to you.” 

I couldn’t stop thinking about the secret spaces that mothers inhabit, full of hopes and worry, seething resentment and blustering joy. Nothing is simple about motherhood. And yet, we hold on, because the alternative — letting go, releasing our heart-outside-our-hearts — is unthinkable.  

I wrote Banyan Moon from a place of questioning, not only of my own identity as a mother, but of the strong line of women who came before me, each stepping onto the same path with their own burdens, their own dreams. I wanted to discover the ways that decisions refract across generations, shaping not only our current relationships, but all the ones to come. Most of all, I wished to convey the hope that, for all our glaring differences, our wildly divergent expectations, we might eventually find a way to inhabit the same spaces, if only for a short time, if only for one perfect moment of clarity. After all, what is love but a desire to be seen?