a mother-daughter bond can tangle like a bird’s nest
knotted in instinct, spit, broken plastic,
scraps of care, and generations of unspoken grit.
mumma-bird builds it the only way she knows how:
delicate, fierce, desperate.
she weaves love with fear,
lines the base with silence mistaken for strength,
and packs the walls with survival disguised as tradition.
it’s not just twigs and thread.
it’s old shame, generational crap,
bits of chewed-up advice and well-meaning control,
all glued together with spit and the kind of bullshit
you don’t notice until it’s poking through your ribs.
baby-bird grows inside that nest,
pressing her softness against the structure,
learning to sit in a space never quite made for her shape.
there’s warmth,
yes,
crumbs offered from tired beaks,
songs sung over sleepless seasons.
but also sharp edges,
a musty kind of love that forgets to ask what you need,
and the quiet grief of being shaped
by someone who was shaped by someone
who never got to choose.
and then
the wind changes.
the nest groans, shifts, sheds.
baby-bird flutters, then flies.
not out of anger,
but because her wings remember something bigger.
she stumbles through sky,
lands knee-deep in dirt,
and begins again.
she gathers new twigs
some broken, some blooming.
she chooses her own kind of bullshit now.
her own kind of spit.
builds something with breath in it,
with softness that doesn’t come at the cost of self.
still, the old nest haunts her.
some parts of it still stick,
like sap on her skin.
there’s grief in that.
a beautiful, breath-catching grief.
because now she sees it:
mumma-bird was just a baby-bird once too.
doing her best.
building with what she had.
loving with tired hands and a fractured heart.
and in that seeing,
a strange kind of peace.
each time baby-bird rebuilds,
forgiveness feathers her wings.
empathy settles into the framework.
and motherhood,
no longer inherited like a script,
becomes a conversation.
mud-streaked, tear-lined, real.
not perfect,
but possible.
not tidy,
but alive.
and that is enough.