We started off in Tilly’s cottage outside of Annapolis with pictures of her and Nia as a child framed against the floral wallpaper. She had pictures of Nia’s father too, teaching Nia how to hold a fishing line, or sitting at a desk, fingers hovering over a typewriter. Sometimes, when she didn’t know I was watching, I’d spot Nia staring at the photographs too. Most of the time, Nia pored over paperwork and went back and forth on the phone with a lawyer. She tried to hide her red-rimmed eyes. She took calls on the phone in another room. She kept a steady rotation of library books on parenting and loss in her nightstand drawer. But the walls of Tilly’s home were thin. We could hear each other crying. We watched each other pick at food.

Whether by blood, by fire, or by default, to become a mother is no easy feat.

And I don’t think I ever thought of Nia as my mother. I certainly never called her Madar. But somewhere along the line she became Mom, a distinct and hard-earned title.

About a year after I’d arrived in the U.S., Mom took me to a therapist. It was only in that small, wood-paneled room with a set of building blocks and two blond-haired dolls in the corner that anyone talked to me about what had happened the year I turned ten. In that space, with Antonia on the other side of a plywood door, I was asked to talk about the specific events that had me grinding my teeth in my sleep and vomiting at the sight of a uniform.

After the fifth visit, I begged Mom not to take me anymore. My headaches were coming twice as often and hitting me twice as hard. My appetite had shriveled, and my concentration was shot. I was a taut string, vibrating at the lightest touch.

Mom stopped the appointments. She could hardly afford them anyway. She had been forced to take a leave from work until they could figure out where to place her. Just ten years earlier, women officers were made to resign if they got married. A single mother was a hard sell. Mom’s superiors suggested she leave the Foreign Service and focus on finding a husband.

But even had she wanted to, Mom could hardly search for love and marriage when I needed so much.

Grief is a tarry substance, and I was covered in it, head to toe. Everything stuck to me—a sideways glance, a phrase beyond my grasp, the sight of a girl running into her mother’s arms. And if I had tried to strip myself of it, I would have lost flesh in the process.