Mothers have the most divine ability known to humankind: the ability to give life.

I am stuck on the word give.

My mother died four months ago. In my 23 years with her, giver was the word most people used to describe her.

As her younger daughter, I was intimately familiar with my mother’s giving – everything from the tangible (s’more flavored lip smackers, neon sports bras, discount candy) to the not so tangible.

Even as my mother faced the loss of her marriage and then the loss of her health, she gave and gave.

Women have a fraught history of giving. The cult of domesticity reigned supreme until the twentieth century. Women were valued only for what they could physically provide – children, shelter, dinner. Some of the first feminists who fought these rigid rules – Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau – were deemed “semi women” and “mental hermaphrodites.”

Laws and culture have evolved. Yet even today in 2020, Alexa and Siri -- the robots we rely on to give us assistance – are always in the voice of a female.

Women as self-sacrificing providers are speckled throughout music, movies, and books as well. An odd yet striking example is Shel Silverstein’s female Giving Tree. The image of the tree’s withering branches holds a cautionary message: to give often means to give up.

I am conflicted by my own mother being remembered first and foremost as a giver.

As her child I reaped the rewards of her generosity. I also emulated it. I quickly learned giving to be the love language of women.

In seventh grade, I liked a boy who loved the Lakers, so I bought him a Kobe Bryant jersey, sure it would win his affection. I’d give my friends banana bread or brownies when they were successful … or sad … or angry. Something was wrong? Give. That didn’t work? Give more. What was there to lose?

It turns out there’s a lot to lose. As a teen I watched my mother – pacing around the kitchen, lips sealed shut on the end of so many phone calls. It was always a struggle for her to get one word in about herself. She had learned to stifle her needs for so long that perhaps even she didn’t believe in the value of her own desires.

I watched women of three generations in my family begrudgingly prepare meals for their husbands, swallow their own dreams and career aspirations. I grew confused … and then resentful.

Was this really the greatest expression of love?

The author Sophia Shalmiyev writes that women give up a part of their humanity when they become mothers. I think about all of the times that I came home from middle school raging at my mother over the kitchen counter when it was really my best friend or some boy or my father who I was upset with. My mother was the only one who made me comfortable enough to express that anger.

My mother’s selflessness allowed her to mold herself into whatever it was I needed – a punching bag, a best friend, an ear, a father.

When she was still here, it was easier for me to harp on what she wasn’t – which was often an advocate for herself. From the lens of a 22-year-old woman I could only see my mother’s incessant giving as a betrayal of herself (and women everywhere!). What I missed was how that giving took on an entirely different meaning in motherhood.

I was born three months early and my mother sacrificed her own life to give birth to me. Like so many women, my mother then faced a choice between a full career and motherhood. She gave up a job as a sports producer at ESPN for eighteen years to raise me -- drive and pick me up from the bus stop, be the room parent, the host of my after prom, my personal hairstylist, a therapist to all of my high school friends.

Once I saw a mother in an airport whose toddler dropped his pacifier on the ground. Without hesitation, the woman picked up the pacifier, stuck it in her own mouth, sucked off all the germs, and promptly gave it back to her child. I see my mother in that woman.

I see my mother in the woman who is strolling both a full cart of groceries and a stroller of twins at the supermarket in the midst of coronavirus. I see my mother in the woman who gives her only protective face mask to her toddler –doing whatever she can to shield her child from the ills of this world.

My mother died at just 59 years old. Sometimes I feel like she lost the act three of her life, where she would’ve finally started taking more than giving … but I’m realizing now that as her daughter, she would always have been giving to me. It was the greatest expression of her love.

I wish I had thanked her more for that.

This is my first Mother’s Day without her. I feel her presence in all that she left me: her small silver watch sits on my wrist, I have her long, bony fingers which I use to type this article, but I feel her most when I am giving. Through my mother, I learned how to be both generous of spirit yet thoughtful with what and to whom I give.

I can only hope to be as giving of a mother as she was one day.