How The Women Before Me Fuel My Determination

I inherited strength, resilience, and creativity from the two women who have always been my pillars of inspiration: my grandma and my mom. For me, ever since I was a little girl, they have been the symbols of courage, determination, and the relentless pursuit of dreams.

My grandma, since the early 1970s and until she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, used to work in a sewing workshop. I remember her thin and weathered hands delicately stitching intricate gobelins, surely for foreign customers. She was talented and could craft beauty out of mere threads.

I feel now, 35 years later, that she was also stitching dreams of a better tomorrow. She never complained (because women had to be quiet back in the days), but my dad found out later about the abuse from my narcissistic grandfather, who damaged her mentally and physically. She died when I was 11 years old, when she was only 56. Yet I feel her amazing resilience in me. She is one of my dragons.

From my grandma's nimble fingers, my mom inherited a passion for crochet, even if she is a chemist engineer by profession. The creative flame ignited after she retired, and I could feel in her this amazing desire to create. She dreams of sharing her creations with the world and turning her passion into honest earnings during retirement. This is my mom's way of breaking free from constraints, and I imagine she would like to feel my grandma proud of her.

I don't know what my mother lived through in her youth, if she had ever witnessed the abuse between her parents, or if she blocked it all and refuses to remember. She never talks about her past. The bits and pieces that I managed to put together, those I found out from my father.

My mother, when she talks about her childhood and her youth, she only mentions the times she was away traveling with the dance group or the gymnastics team for competitions. One of her fondest memories is piloting a plane, as part of a professional piloting course. I find this amazing that my mom basically knew and still knows tons about planes and even flew them. She is also my dragon.

My dragons' resilience runs deep, flowing through the veins of all the past generations before me, a unique legacy handed down from mothers to daughters.

I carry their stories within me, feeling the weight of their struggles, and their echoes in my heart. Their triumphs and the fire of their unfulfilled dreams burn in my soul. My dragons are alive with passion inside me.

Both my grandma and my mom harbored the same dreams. They hoped to be entrepreneurs, to work from the comfort of home, and to pursue their passions without fear of judgment. I have felt this drive towards entrepreneurship and freelancing in me ever since becoming a mother to my three kids.

Since becoming a mother, I have become aware of my dragons. I feel it deeply that I was tasked with breaking the chains of intergenerational trauma that have bound us for far too long. It is my purpose, my calling, to heal the wounds that linger. At least I will try to do my best, to pave the way for my daughter to thrive.

With each step I take in this self-discovery journey, my dragons are guiding me, and urging me forward, fueling the fire that burns within me.

I am determined to become an independent, empowered, and unapologetically free woman, finally breaking the barriers of the past.

To my grandmother (my high spirit) and my mom (with whom I still hope to reconnect and discuss the past): you are my inspirations, guides, and my dragons. I offer my deepest gratitude to you, and all the women before us, past generations whose blood and intuition run in me and my daughter.

My dragons' strength, their resilience, and their faith give me the courage to spread my wings, and fly high. They cheer on my claiming the crown and become the queen of my life, to create my own freelancing business, to write and to tell our stories to the world.