At 24, I Lost My Job and Became Homeless

At 24, I lost my job and found myself homeless with two small children. With nowhere else to turn, I knocked on my mother’s door.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “My boyfriend won’t let you stay. I’m sorry.”

Those words crushed me. Hurt and angry, I told her to forget about me.

Five weeks later, she passed away. It was sudden — or so I thought.

That night, her boyfriend came to see me, crying. What he told me made my knees weak. My mother had been seriously ill for months. She never told me because she knew I was already drowning in my own struggles. She didn’t refuse me because of him. She was trying to protect me — from seeing her fragile, from carrying the weight of her sickness while raising my children.

He told me she had argued with him, wanting to let us stay, but she feared we would watch her slowly fade. Before she died, she made him promise to give me the small savings she had secretly set aside for my kids.

When I heard that, I broke down.

All that time, I thought she had turned her back on me.

But even in her final days, she was still thinking of us — still loving us the only way she knew how.