1. The Mother Who Pretends She’s Not Tired
This mother never says she’s tired. She cooks for seven, scrubs floors, washes laundry, tends to a bedridden mother-in-law, raises four children under ten, and runs a small shop that doubles as their home. On rare afternoons with no customers, she steals a short nap behind the counter.
Her husband once slammed a plate of bitter-melon eggs onto the floor, demanding why she, who “stays home all day,” couldn’t even cook. She didn’t explain, how she was stir-frying with a baby strapped to her chest, how the three-year-old spilled water and cried, how she cut her hand cleaning the glass shards and salted the dish twice. She swallowed the words he wouldn’t listen to and knelt to clean the mess.
She remembered how her mother-in-law treated her when she married into the family at twenty. The amount of water in the porridge had to be exact; a little more or a little less, and she would be forced to stand by the table for a scolding. When she gave birth to her first daughter, the mother-in-law didn’t spare the baby a glance, only complained to guests about having no grandson. The second was also a girl; the look in her mother-in-law’s eyes curdled into disgust. When the third was still a girl, she was ordered to give the baby away. She knelt through the night to keep her child.
Even after she finally bore a son, her mother-in-law never helped with the children. Not for a day. Not even a moment. Once, this mother prayed for heaven to avenge her. Heaven listened: the mother-in-law suffered a stroke.
Now, as she wipes and feeds her, she never complains. She knows this burden is something she once asked for.
2. The Mother Who Hides Bad News
This mother smiles through everything. Even when her husband spends his earnings on drinking, she tells the children, “Dad works too hard. He deserves to relax. He’s a good man.”
She is skilled at pulling life toward the light. When her son scores 65 on a math test, she praises him for improving two points. When her daughter’s bicycle is stolen, she says it’s good exercise to run to school every day. She wants her children to believe life is workable, solvable, endurable.
To pay their tuition, she rides through wind and rain delivering food, taking late-night orders because the pay is higher. Until overwork leads to a traffic accident, and she, with a fractured bone, has to shoulder the medical bill herself.
At night, she buries her face in the blanket to cry.
In the morning, she wears the same familiar smile.
When the children ask if it hurts, she says, “It’s fine. At least now Mom finally gets a little rest.”
3. The Mother Who Fights for Everyone Else
She is not a traditional good mother. Her voice is rough, her temper sharp, and her cooking is always either underdone or burnt. Every dish she cooks circles back to eggs: fried rice with eggs, tomatoes with eggs, pan-fried eggs, boiled eggs.
But the whole street relies on her.
She confronted Auntie Li’s ex-husband, forcing him to pay child support. She threatened Old Zhang, who beat his wife, with a low growl, “Lay a hand on her again and you’ll regret it,” scaring him into apologizing. She stood up for Auntie Wang, tormented by her mother-in-law, making the old woman think twice before hurling insults in public. Whenever trouble rises, her name is the first that comes to mind.
Until her husband is owed a year’s wages.
She marches to the construction site. The foreman curses and orders her to get lost, shouting, “No money means no money.” Security shoves her to the ground; she brushes off the dust and stands again.
For a month, she never misses a day.
At home she tells the children only, “Don’t worry. Mom handled it.”
She never mentions that the money never came.
4. The Mother Who Prioritizes Work Over Family
People call her a “selfish mother.” She works from dawn to night, flying between cities with a suitcase that never fully unpacks. She arrived at the hospital only when labor began, and went back to work as soon as her month of recovery ended.
The family does not need her income. Her father, once the director of a public security bureau, has a generous pension and bought her a three-bedroom apartment in the city center when she was in middle school. Her husband is a doctor with a steady, respectable salary.
Yet she insists on working.
Years ago, her mother had been a law graduate student, but an unexpected pregnancy forced her to abandon her studies. When she later tried to return, she found no one who could look after the baby and eventually became a full-time housewife.
Her mother often spoke of the dream she once carried: to be a lawyer with a conscience, to speak for workers whose wages were withheld, to defend the ordinary people working overnight on factory lines. She also repeated how she herself had always ranked first in her class.
Beneath those words was another weight: an unspoken regret, a life set aside for motherhood. Her mother placed all of those unfulfilled hopes on her shoulders, wanting her to fly toward the sky she never reached.
So she cannot allow herself to be confined by family, cannot become another woman filled with lifelong regret, cannot let “motherhood” bind her entire life. Even if it means asking her aging mother to take up the role of “mother” again and care for her young daughter.
She never apologizes. She never explains. She is simply trying to live a different possible life.
5. The Mother Who Is Content
This mother no longer fights fate. Her world is small: a warm meal shared with family after work.
She doesn’t ask what life means or whether it’s worth it.
She just lives each day.
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