To all the moms and daughters reading this,

First of all, thank you so much for reading my series! I hope I've been able to capture at least a sliver of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships can hold.

As a sort of companion series to From Your Daughter I wanted to offer other perspectives about how we view our moms and our daughters. 

To Those Whom I Have Left was a story I wrote a while back during a time when I questioned why mothers would want to give their children up for adoption. I came to realize that maybe the answer was that they didn't. It must take a lot of courage to be able to leave your child behind, or propel the child forward to a brighter future while they feel left behind. 

Thank you for reading a tale of one such mother. Thank you to the moms who do whatever they can to care for their child, no matter how difficult it may be.

Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother was honestly not meant to be as long as it is now. It began with a very different approach, but I soon figured I should work with fewer themes to not overwhelm anybody reading it. 

While writing I had to think hard about my mother's generation, as well as my grandmother's. Growing up, I came to realize how much our grandmothers give up for our mothers, and how sometimes love between them can become strained with the generation gaps. 

After all, the present is so different from the past, and I hoped to shed a little light on how lucky we are today to be encouraged to share our feelings, no matter how dark and difficult to express they might be. 

What Matters is truly a story from my heart, one that I wrote whilst thinking again about adoption. If you haven't figured it out already, adoption is a personal topic for me, one that makes me question what it truly means to be a family, a mother, and a daughter.

The protagonist from the beginning of the story is similar to me, in a way. We're both single women whose only goals are our future careers because it's what's expected of us (and we don't want to start dating just yet). We look out for only ourselves, not always regarding the advice and concerns from our own mothers, something I think we can all relate to. 

Toward the end, though, the protagonist learns that family can come into your life in unexpected ways. We never know what the future holds, so I wanted to tell a story about embracing fate, whether or not we can control it.

Her Call was a bit of a stretch, since it doesn't follow the traditional storytelling method, but I wanted to try something new, maybe touching on some more sensitive topics without explicitly stating them.

I chose to keep a lot of details of Her Call ambiguous because I think a lot of people can relate to the situation. Sometimes it's hard for us to say what we really mean in mother-daughter conversations. Sometimes we have misunderstandings, sometimes we just don't understand each other at all, and I think that's okay. The world isn't just sunshine and rainbows. 

Emotions are hard to deal with and acceptance isn't something you can just dish out at will. The conversation between this mother and daughter is a bit less empathetic than it could've been, but they both knew the past couldn't be fixed with a simple apology. They know it takes time and investment on both ends, which is what I hope for their future.

I want to give a big thanks to my mother, who continues to teach me what it means to be a mom and a daughter. Thanks to my grandma in Heaven, for lending me insights of how our pasts don't define our future. 

And once again, thank you, who've been with me on this journey. I hope you all have a Happy Mother's Day/Month!

~MintMatcha