Her Motherly Responsibility

I wake up, and I enter a messy room filled with a man I never liked and with boys I’d raised as my own. The sink is full of dishes unwashed, the floor dusted with crumbs and muddy footprints, and the boys are hungry and squealing like pigs. I watch my mother work in the kitchen tirelessly, like any proper woman, and she says to me: “Soon, you’ll have a family of your own, and all this will be yours,” as if it were an heirloom, a sacred gift from Mother to sentenced Daughter. To inherit her dark circles, the sweat on her brow, her hands red and scrubbed raw.

— Her Motherly Responsibility, by V.D. Golovach (2025)