A few years ago, I visited a Vedic astrology reader. She told me something that stayed in the back of my mind ever since: “You need to help a little girl directly, without intermediary.”

At that time, I didn’t know what it meant. I was in my late twenties, busy chasing my life and some version of self-understanding. I thought maybe it meant volunteering, or helping a child in need. But nothing in my life led me to that path. So I let the message fade into the background, like a half-remembered dream.

Still, once in a while, it returned.

“How does someone, on an ordinary day, find a little girl who needs help?”

“What kind of help could she possibly mean?”

I never found the answer. And, as life went on, I forgot the prophecy entirely.

The homecoming

In October 2025, my younger brother got married. Since he had lived with my parents, the house was always full of his presence. After the wedding, he and his wife moved to another side of the island.

We accompanied him to the train station that afternoon. When we arrived home, I sat with my mother in our backyard. Her eyes looked distant, soft but heavy.

She told me she felt relieved that the wedding preparation was finally over, that all the preparations and worries had ended. Then, after a pause, she said, “But I’ll spend most of my time alone in this house after he leaves.”

That sentence lingered. It sounded less like a statement and more like a truth she had carried all her life.

The woman who led the house

My mother has always been the leader of our family. Not in title, but in energy. She was the one who made everything move: the money, the meals, the morale.

She spent her youth helping my grandfather run his business. After marriage, she carried that same spirit into our home, so it was my mother who built the structure of our days, and life.

She gave birth to me alone. She once told me her process of bringing me to this earth. Without the presence of her husband, she fainted multiple times until the late night I decided to come out from her womb.

She raised two sons through endless nights of fatigue. She never once took a break from being dependable.Her strength was always lonely.

I realize now that my mother’s life was one long, quiet service to everyone else.

The moment of realization

As I watched her that afternoon, sitting across from me, in the silence that followed my brother’s departure, something shifted.

It was as if a film reel of her life began to play in my mind. A young woman in her twenties, filled with dreams she never got to name, trading her youth for duty. A mother who became everyone’s shelter but never found one herself.

Then it hit me.

Maybe the “little girl” the astrologer meant wasn’t some stranger I was destined to meet.

Maybe it was her.

That little girl, the one who once had dreams, who grew up too fast, who learned to be strong because no one else could afford to be weak, was sitting right in front of me.

My mother was that little girl.

And she didn’t need money, or advice, or rescue. She needed someone to see her. To remind her that she’s allowed to rest. That she doesn’t always have to be the strong one.

The quiet shift

Since then, I’ve started showing up differently. I call her more. I linger longer when I visit. I ask her how she’s really doing, and I stay quiet enough to hear the parts she doesn’t say out loud.

Maybe that’s what the message meant. It was not meant to help, but to remember. That the little girl never disappears; she only grows older inside someone brave.

And that little girl, I finally realized, was my mother.