Scholarship Essay

When I was younger, I never noticed anything different about my mom. To me, she was just Mom—always there, always moving, always taking care of us. She was a constant. Something you could always rely on—like the sunrise and birds chirping in the mornings, like the sound of her voice calling us to dinner, I didn’t see the way her body quietly betrayed her, how each movement cost her something. I didn’t see it because she never wanted me to. She protected me from that, like she protected me from scraped knees and bad dreams. She made her pain invisible.

It wasn’t until I was older—old enough to understand that parents are human, that they can hurt too—that she sat my brother and I down and told us what she had been living with all along. She said she had Scleroderma—a rare autoimmune disease that slowly hardens the skin and can damage the organs inside. Even after hearing the word, even after the syllables settled in the air between us, I didn’t fully understand. How could I? She still smiled. She still worked. She still showed up, even when it clearly hurt. I thought people in pain were supposed to look different, but she still braided my hair, still clapped the loudest at my cheer competitions, and still made dinner on tired nights.

But as the years passed, the quiet unraveling became harder to miss. I started noticing the small ways her life was being stolen from her—inch by inch, task by task. She used to braid my hair before every competition. I loved the way her fingers would twist and separate the strands just right, as if she were weaving something magical into them. Back then, I didn’t realize how painful it had become for her to do even that. I didn’t see her stiffening fingers, her silent winces, her quiet breaths to steady herself. I only stopped asking when I finally noticed her hands trembling, her grip loosening. I only stopped when I realized she was pushing through the pain just to make me feel loved.

She used to fluff my pom poms at the start of every season, carefully pulling apart each clump so they would bloom like they were supposed to. It was such a small thing, but it mattered to me. Then one year, she couldn’t do it anymore. Her hands wouldn’t let her. She tried, but her fingers simply wouldn’t move the way they used to. It seemed so small, but it broke something open inside me.

It’s strange how quietly loss arrives. It’s not always a single moment, not always a crash. Sometimes it’s a slow fading, like colors left too long in the sun. Sometimes it’s something you only notice in the empty spaces where love used to live—in the things she used to do but doesn’t anymore. The missing braids, the unfluffed pom poms, the garden she no longer tended with the same careful touch. The echoes of her effort stayed with me.

Even as her body betrayed her, she refused to let it pull her away from me. During one of her most painful years—when her joints started to ache like rusted hinges and her skin pulled tightly across her frame—she still chose to coach my cheer team. She stood on the sidelines in the freezing cold, clapping her stiff hands, cheering us on with a voice that sometimes shook but never faltered. I could see it in her eyes—the deep exhaustion, the pain she could barely hide—but she showed up anyway. She always did. She was there when it cost her, when it hurt, when every step was a fight against her own body. Her strength wasn’t loud. It was quiet, steady, and relentless. It was the kind of strength most people never notice, the kind that never asks to be praised.

As her illness progressed, my brother and I stepped in to do more—vacuuming, folding laundry, cooking dinner—things she used to handle effortlessly, almost invisibly, as if a clean home and warm meals simply appeared. We learned to tiptoe through the house when her medications made the world unbearably loud. We turned down the TV , whispered our conversations, and tried to build a kind of silence that might bring her peace. We learned to pay attention to the details—how cold weather would seize her joints, how she would grow quieter when the pain became sharp.

But no matter how much we tried to help, she never really stopped. She pulled weeds in the garden with hands that could barely close around the stems. She cleaned the house when her joints screamed for her to rest. She worked full-time, even when the weight of it seemed unbearable, even when her body pleaded for her to slow down. And during the pandemic, when people were told to stay home to protect themselves, my mom—a woman with a high-risk autoimmune disease—went to work every single day. She never hesitated. She went to provide aid to others, because that’s who she is. She has always put herself last.

Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like to live inside a body that is constantly betraying you. To carry a pain that few people see, to smile through it, to keep going when every step feels like walking through mud. I wonder how lonely it is to watch your own hands forget how to hold the things you love. How much grief there is in the smallest moments, like buttoning a shirt, twisting a cap, braiding your daughter’s hair.

My dad has been her quiet protector through all of it. I’ve watched him wash her hair when she couldn’t lift her arms, drive her to every doctor’s appointment, gently guide her hand into mittens when winter made her skin ache. He has wrapped her in warm blankets, carried the weight she could no longer lift, and stood between her and every storm he could. He has shown me what love looks like when it’s not easy, when it’s not pretty, when it’s not about grand gestures but about showing up, staying, enduring. He has shown me that love is what you do, not just what you say.

The truth is, my mom doesn’t want us to see her pain. She hides it, not because it isn’t there, but because she doesn’t want her illness to swallow up our lives. She wanted my brother and I to have a childhood that feels whole, even as hers is slowly being taken from her. She wants our memories to be filled with games and laughter, not with hospital rooms and medications. She wanted to protect us from her reality, even as she was living it every day.

I’ve come to understand that real strength isn’t loud or perfect—it’s the quiet way you keep showing up, even when everything inside you is falling apart. It’s in the invisible battles, the ones fought without applause, without recognition, in the privacy of your own home.

Most people don’t know what Scleroderma is. Most people don’t see it. That’s why I want to tell her story. I want people to notice—to look closer, to ask, to care, to remember that some of the strongest people in the world are fighting invisible battles every day. I want them to see what I almost missed.

My mom’s courage has shaped me. I am who I am because I’ve had the privilege of watching her fight through the things most of us couldn’t bear. Her story is not just hers—it’s a reminder of what love really looks like, and of the quiet ways we hold each other up. It’s the story of persistence, of selflessness, of a woman who taught me that even when your body wants to quit, your heart doesn’t have to.

She has taught me that some of the most extraordinary acts of love are the ones that happen quietly, in the spaces where no one is watching. And I will carry that lesson with me, always.