The Weight of Expectations: A Daughter’s Emotional Struggle

You see me sitting, and call it nothing, but you never saw the nights I didn’t sleep. You never saw the trembling hands that built a world you never keep. You see the cracks, not the castle, the fall, not the climb that came before. You count the times I stumbled, but never the blood I hid on the floor. Your words are knives wrapped in care, they cut but claim to heal. You say it’s love, ‘your kind of love’ but it’s a chain I always feel. You dream for me with hungry eyes, for the gold you never found. But, Mother, I am not your second chance, I am my own battleground. You say I’m wasting what I have, but maybe I just need to breathe. I’m not a racehorse for your past, I’m the garden you forgot to leave. I know you love me — cruelly so, a love that burns instead of warms. You think you’re shaping me for life, but you’re carving me with storms. Still, I try to smile when you speak, to earn the praise you never give. A scapegoat draped in daughter’s skin, learning that to please is to forgive. If one day you finally see — the art, the fight, the hidden scars, I hope you’ll know your love was felt, just heavy… like a cage of stars