My mother abandoned me at birth. The moment she did, I began to row.

Abandoned by her, abandoned by God, I found myself alone in the middle of the sea. The constellations blurred. The oars were heavier than they should have been.

In the absence of meaning, motion became my proof.

A mother is the one presence we are all promised. When she leaves, something primal in creation unravels. When God allows it, the absence becomes absolute.

This is not a story about being saved. It is about the oars I cannot put down, and the discovery that the motion I thought was saving me was the thing drowning me.

Some mornings the quiet is unbearable. The absence of God and mother opens up like a canyon. I stand at the edge wondering if the fall would feel like coming home.

The rowing proved nothing except that I could row. The stillness is teaching me something harder: I might be worth more than my movement.

I am not there yet.

For forty-three years, I have been looking for a woman I will never find. Not looking the way you look for someone in a crowd, scanning faces, hoping for recognition. Looking the way the ocean looks for the shore. Constantly, without thinking, in every direction at once.

She is the first thing underneath every feeling I have ever had. Underneath the anger, underneath the performance, underneath the love I couldn't let in and the love I gave too freely. Underneath all of it: Mom.

Not a person. I have no person. No name, no face, no voice.

She is not someone I remember. She is something I feel. A pull in the body that has no destination. I have carried it into every room I have ever entered, every relationship I have ever built, every silence I have ever sat in.

It does not fade. It does not resolve. It simply continues, the way breathing continues, without permission and without end.

I had spent forty-three years on one side of the wound. The side of the child who was left. And for one moment I stood on the other side and saw what it looked like from there. Not better. Not worse. Just impossible.

I understood then why the "I'm sorry" had come so loud. Why it kept rising, session after session, preverbal and relentless. I had always assumed it was mine. My apology to the world for needing too much, for existing, for being the baby who wasn't worth staying for.

But maybe it was hers.

Maybe the first thing my body ever absorbed was not the silence of abandonment but the sound of a mother's grief. Her sorry, pressed into me before I had ears to hear it, before I had language to hold it.

I had been carrying her apology inside my body for forty-three years, mistaking it for my own guilt.

She is in how I look at people now. The way light lands. The way I try to stay. Witnessing the breaking without rushing toward a fix.

There was a day the floor came out. The body went first. Then the breath. Then a ringing so deep it became silence. She stayed. That is not a small thing — to witness a self dissolve and not look away. Love is not rescue. It is remaining.

I am still being built from that ash. From a self that never got to form before it had to survive.

Each session brings me closer to liberation. Each session takes me closer to a loss I cannot stop. Another mother. Different terms. The body already knows. I cannot hold both; I cannot let either go. So I carry them.

Grief and liberation are the same water. One drowns you. One holds you up. I am still learning which is which.

The orphan who had no address for his love is learning to deliver it. One person at a time. In the places where someone just needs to be seen. Without being saved. Just witnessed.