A strong woman looks a challenge dead in the eye and gives it a wink

For as long as I can remember, I have always been the type of woman to say “bring it on” to the higher power each and every time things have went wrong. I welcomed the challenge.

A few weeks ago, me and my daughter were in a discussion about her friends from school and one girl in particular. She said that all the kids know the mother of this girl and they were all talking about her. When I asked what this lady was like, she said, “she is just like you”. When I asked her what she meant by that, she said “she is a strong woman.”

I never knew my daughter thought of me as a strong woman. It made me feel like everything I had been working towards had finally paid off. Perhaps she feels this way due to all we have been through and the way I had handled myself in front of her.

Perhaps it was the time when we arrived here in the states to live and we had no where to go. We moved from house to house of so-called relatives that I hardly even knew and as a result, she moved from school to school during those first couple of years. She always asked me where we would be going next because the future was so uncertain.  

or

Perhaps it was the time when my mother passed away and all I could think of was getting as far away from that place as possible. I sent my daughter to Greece that summer, sold everything we had and became homeless by choice. When she returned, I’m sure she thought I was out of my mind. But she saw my mistakes and accepted them always saying we were on an adventure.

or

Perhaps it was the difficulty that came after trying to find us a place to live and bouncing around from home to home and me telling her it would not always be this way.

or

Perhaps it was that job offer a few states away during the time when we had nothing and no one to lean on. And then making the decision of taking the job even though I had no idea where we were going or even what type of place it would be. We got in our car with what little we had left and headed out on what she always called “an adventure.”

or

Perhaps it was all the times that I continued telling her that things would not always be this way or maybe it’s the fact that we are now settled, and we can finally live our lives in one place.  

She knows who her mother is and that in turn will cause her to be a strong woman as well.