The Work Wasn’t Easy. But It Made Me.

There was a season of my life when I carried my baby brother on one hip, a laundry basket on the other, and a quiet determination in my chest to never let anyone down.

We lived on the third floor of The Sapling, a house that felt stacked with responsibility. My mother managed the education system for over two hundred children. My father was consumed with the music program. And I — still a child myself — learned how to do the family laundry top to bottom, every Sunday.

Ten or twelve loads. No shortcuts. No complaints.

A wringer washer in the basement. Laundry lines outside. Sunlight and strategy.

I learned which shirts would stretch, how to conserve clothespins, how to bleach diapers in the sun.

But what I really learned was this:

How to take ownership. How to hold it all with care. How to find quiet purpose in the things no one applauded. There are parts of my childhood that shaped me through pain.

But this? This part shaped me through practice.

To this day, I can trace my ability to build — as a mother, a business owner, a writer — back to the days when my hands wrung water from clothes and my mind rehearsed the weight of what it meant to be trusted.

You don’t have to glamorize the grind to honor what it gave you.

The work was real. The pressure was intense. But so was the strength it produced.

If you’ve ever felt like the life you’re living was built with your own bare hands — you’re not alone. There is power in the unseen work. And you don’t need applause to be proud of what you’ve made.

-Jasmine