The more the years go by, the more I grow into a painful realization of some things. My mum’s been gone for 8 years now, but the realization that she was more colorful and human than how we saw her, as just our super human mum, hurts. She was just a girl who lost her mum at age 12, grew up, married and had kids with a man who mistreated her for most of her life until her time was done. I knew a lot about her upbringing and life, and I remember the spark with which she’d speak about her university days and friends. I’d like to think she was happy I asked. I wish I was mature enough to empathize with the little girl within, and asked her about so much more of her as a person, her favorite things, the hobbies marriage and kids stole from her, how her mother was like, etc. It hurts so much, because she was just a girl.