It’s 10:00 PM. She’s awake on her phone, anticipating the moment I walk into her room and hesitantly shuffle into her bed. I rest my head on her shoulder and she rubs my hair. We talk. It’s 7:00 AM. We ride to school. I get in the car. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t call me her beautiful little girl, and that I don’t look into her blue eyes and call them my favorite part of her. It’s 6:00 PM. We have a favorite television show. It’s called, “Ginny and Georgia.” It’s about a biracial daughter and her single white mother, and the struggles and heartaches they go through together. We love this show so much because it is us, and we watch until our eyes won’t allow themselves to open any longer. My mom and my dad separated when I was young, and so I’ve lived with my mom, and just my mom, for the majority of my life. There are several things that make our relationship special, superseding that of a normal mother-daughter relationship. One: hair. I have coils. My mother grew up with a twinge of tom-boyishness. All that’s to say that she never had a clue how to do it. Yet, there I would be, on a stool, crying from my tenderheadedness, and there she would be, doing it for hours, willing to learn for me. She still does my hair at times, and I love her for it. Two: Laughter No one has ever made me laugh quite like my mother. Every now and then we have play fights. She’s ticklish, and so am I, so we laugh so hard we cry. Three: Strength I remember one day in the car when my mom had agreed to drive me to my friend’s house. I noticed her face, pale and slightly sickly. “Are you ok?” I asked. “Yes, I’m just not feeling too well.” Something unique about my mom is the amount of pain she’s dealt with due to illness. She had a stroke when I was in middle school. She lost some of the movement on her left side because of it. She got Triple-Negative Breast Cancer my Sophomore year of high school, and she’s had two major surgeries. While I did play a role in caring for her and the responsibilities of the house, she always took care of things for me, making sure to pay my school fees, drive me to my volleyball games, and attend them whenever she could. This particular day in the car, even though she was in the middle of a long battle with chemotherapy and was in pain, she said, “I am your mother and I don’t mind doing this for you.” Throughout my entire life, she has been the curtain that separated me from the harshness of the world. As I slowly uncovered this veil, I’ve learned what it means to prevail. She is the sole reason I am confident enough to pursue higher education and to take the step from childhood to adulthood. I know that if my mom can face the unthinkable with an undying love for her daughter, then I can face anything that may come my way in the future. Because of her, I am a determined, strong, and powerful young woman who knows the value of love.