The arrogant woman who had wrinkled her nose at a homeless stranger in her own foyer, who had said that some people simply prefer to live that way, was the daughter of a woman who had survived twenty years on those exact streets.

Every cruel, comfortable thing I had ever believed about the unhoused, I had believed about my own mother without knowing it.

That realization was the one that finished the work of remaking me, and I do not think I will ever fully recover from it, nor do I want to.

Because here is the thing I could no longer avoid: the woman I had wrinkled my nose at, the type of woman I had dismissed my whole comfortable life, had turned out to be the person who sang me to sleep, who saved coins for my shoes, who ran into a burning house for our family’s photographs, who threw her aging body in front of a truck to save my life without a half-second’s hesitation.

She was not a cautionary tale about poor choices.