For my mother, on her birthday.

The first time I ever saw my mother cry was in her parents’ living room in California. I was eight, she was thirty-three, and we were about to leave to the airport to return to our life in Connecticut.

Then, I was a raw ball of emotions who wept practically daily, and my mother was the adult I couldn’t live without. That she also felt things was a stunning revelation, and I’m embarrassed to say I begged her to stop crying.

Two years later, I went to sleepaway camp. For me, a kid who liked to spend summers trying to win stickers in the library’s reading contest and daydreaming, the camp schedule was hell. I knew the rigors would surely kill me, and wrote a letter describing a freak August snowstorm that all but buried our plywood cabin, imploring my mom to come get me. Instead, she wrote me back that she loved and missed me but wasn’t going to come get me, because, and this is a direct quote: “stick-to-itiveness is a desirable trait.”

Oh. My. God. Could the woman not see the depths of my pain?

But wait. She could. I knew from seeing her cry that first time that she felt sorrow and outlasted it. She could empathize but was not going to intervene. She knew from experience I’d emerge with coping skills and new self-respect.

My mother was quiet in her tenacity. I still like to point out every grueling step of my persistence process. But I have managed to learn that stick-to-itiveness is not only desirable, as traits go, but unending, because my mom is still my wisest counsel, steadfast, refusing to fade.