Things My Mother Never Told Me

After Mom died, I found a box in her closet. Inside were letters she'd written but never sent — to her own mother, to my father after they divorced, to me. Letters about the loneliness she felt raising two kids alone, about the jobs she didn't take because she couldn't afford a babysitter, about the dreams she buried so we could have ours. I read them all in one night. I thought I knew her. I realized I didn't know her at all. She was a person before she was my mother, and I never got to meet that person.