found mom's old photo album and I ugly cried

My dad passed away over 15 years ago. After that it was just me, my mom, and my younger sibling, all of us scraping by together.

My mom has always been this really closed-off, blunt person. For a long time I didn't really think much of it, but as I've gotten older I started noticing how much it stings sometimes. Like... why is she like this? Why can't she just be warm?

Then one day I stumbled across this old photo album from when I was really little. And next to every single photo, written in my mom's handwriting, there were little captions.

Photos with my dad had stuff like "Daddy~ come play with me~" written next to them. "Our OO's first birthday!" "I'm scared of the doggy~!" "Daddy's giving me a bath and it feels so nice~"

Caption after caption. Full of love. In her handwriting.

I was genuinely shocked. My mom had this side to her. This warm, tender, SOFT side that I had never seen in my life.

And then it hit me. She changed after dad died. She didn't get to be the sweet gentle mom anymore. She had to become something harder, because she had two kids to feed. Alone. Right now. No time for softness.

There's this lyric from Sejeong's song ("Flower Road" I think) that goes something like: "the young and beautiful season of yours that you gave up so you wouldn't give up."

That's her. My mom gave up her whole youth raising us by herself, and I realized it way too late.