There is a memory I keep returning to: I am 12, maybe 13, and my mother and I are standing in a hotel room at the Manila Peninsula. Someone has just told us we can order anything we want from room service, and the moment the door closes behind them, we look at each other and start jumping up and down.
Two people, one room, one pure and uncomplicated joy. I do not remember what we ordered. I only remember that she was there, genuinely thrilled, jumping with me, and that the whole world had collapsed into just the two of us and that moment.
My mother, Candy Dizon, stepped into motherhood at 20. By her mid-20s, she was raising two daughters alone and building a jewelry business
I cry when I think about it now. Not from grief, but from the kind of gratitude that takes over you when you are old enough to recognize how rare something was. She could have been anywhere that night. Her joy never lived separately from ours. She did not just give us experiences. She was right there with us.
The mother who could do it all
My mother, Candy Dizon, stepped into motherhood at 20. By her mid-20s, she was raising two daughters alone, building a jewelry business, carving out a name in an industry that rewards only the relentless, and somewhere beneath all of that, searching for who she still was outside of us.
My parents separated when I was two. I carry no memory of them together. What I carry instead is her, always her, pressing herself into every space that could have hollowed out into absence.
She was strict but never punishing. Laid-back but never absent. Funny in the specific way that disarms you even mid-correction. She packed our lunches. She dressed us while we were still half-asleep, guiding our arms into sleeves, braiding our hair, pulling our socks on before we had fully woken into the day. She walked into school meetings alone. She sat beside me in the hospital without flinching. She tutored me in subjects she had to re-learn herself, and even when her method did not reach me the way I needed, the effort did. That was always enough.
She never let it look like a burden.
The mother who held it in
That is one of the most quietly devastating things a mother can do. She absorbed so much so completely that I moved through childhood never truly sensing the weight beneath our feet. I never felt lacking. I never felt the ground shift. She constructed a world around my sister and me that felt full, deliberate, beautiful, and she built it without a partner to shoulder it with her, without anyone to receive the hardest days.
The older I get, the less I can explain how she did it.
She preserved our childhood on purpose. She let us remain children, while she was still, in so many ways, growing into an adult herself
She almost never cried in front of us. There were relationships I watched dissolve and heartbreaks I felt at the edges but never witnessed fully, because she absorbed them elsewhere, away from us. She preserved our childhood on purpose. She let us remain children, while she was still, in so many ways, growing into an adult herself, carrying love and grief, and ambition and financial pressure all at once, and sealing most of it behind a door she never asked us to open.
Only now, decades later, does she speak about what those years truly cost her. I am grateful she held it back until we were strong enough to receive it.
She did date. And when I was younger, I resented it in the way that children do, wanting all of her, wanting her completely mine. I slept beside her until my early teens because there were not enough rooms in the house, and on the nights she went out, I would wake up, realize she was gone, and fall apart. I would put her shirt over my pillow. I would leave notes trailing down the hallway. I would knock on my grandparents’ door in tears. I was dramatic and attached and completely unable to understand that she was a person who deserved her own life, too.
The mother who was still, somehow, herself
I understand now. I am sorry now. And I am so glad she did not let my neediness take that from her entirely.
Because she never stopped being herself. That is what I cannot move past when I look at her life honestly. She became a mother at 20 and still became a jeweler, a business owner, an editor-in-chief, a writer, and a woman with deep friendships, sharp opinions, and an eye for beauty that age has only refined.
She became a mother at 20 and still became a jeweler, a business owner, an editor-in-chief, a writer, and a woman with deep friendships, sharp opinions, and an eye for beauty that age has only refined
She did not recede into motherhood. She carried herself through it, intact.
She taught me to draw, to design, to see. She clasped her own jewelry around my wrists and neck and told me I was beautiful so consistently and so sincerely that I eventually started to believe it. She introduced me to beautiful people and brought me into rooms I had no business being in, yet, because she was generous enough to want to share the world she had built.
The beauty that surrounds my life, my home, my friendships, my instinct for what is worth caring about… all of it traces back to her. She passed herself down to me before I even had the language to recognize it was happening.
What she built was not just a career or a home. It was an entire emotional architecture. She made beauty feel like something you could live inside of, something that was not a luxury but a language, a way of saying: you matter, this matters, we are worth this.
The mother who loves—just as much as she is loved
She is 50 now, and I watch her travel with her friends, mend old relationships, try new things, move through the world with a lightness she spent decades earning. She carries no bitterness about what it cost her. No score to settle. She left what needed to be left in the past and kept walking.
That is not a small thing. That is, I think, the hardest thing. She is the toughest woman in the room, so that everyone else can find somewhere to lean, even when I know she is hurting just the same.
She is the toughest woman in the room, so that everyone else can find somewhere to lean, even when I know she is hurting just the same
I am most like her of anyone in my family. I used to notice that the way you notice a passing resemblance. Now I hold it deliberately. The parts of me I love most, the drive, the taste, the refusal to choose between ambition and feeling, the belief that beauty is not vanity but necessity, those are hers. She built them in me before I knew I was being shaped.
To every woman carrying this alone right now: the tuition, the groceries, the 2 a.m. worry, the heartbreak no one witnesses, the dream you keep deferring but refuse to release… Your children do not yet have the words. They cannot see the full shape of what you are doing from inside it. But you are building something in them that will outlast every brutal morning, every room you walked into alone, every night you held the edges of yourself together so they could rest.
One day, they will understand. One day, they will stand somewhere completely ordinary and feel the whole weight of you, and it will bring them to their knees like it has brought me to mine.
One day, they will look at themselves and find you there, and they will love what they see.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. Thank you for everything.
