She who holds us all: The Lebanese mother

There is a woman in every Lebanese family who bears the weight of those who came before her and those who came after. She is the Lebanese mother and grandmother, carrying burdens that were never meant to be hers.

Lebanon's grandmothers, the “tetas”, are the quiet archivists of a country that keeps losing its memory. They remember the names of streets that no longer exist, the faces of people who left and never came back. They carry all of this without being asked, because someone has to, and they have always been the ones who stay.

They survived the civil war. They survived displacement. They survived the slow grief of watching a country dismantle itself, of sending children abroad and spending decades on phone calls instead of Sunday lunches.

The many languages of maternal love

The words “I love you” are never enough for the Lebanese mother. They are often accompanied by a “to2borne” (“bury me”), a phrase that only truly makes sense within the Lebanese language of love. It is in the “Mloukhieh” that took three hours to make. It is ironing a school uniform at midnight, or slipping money into a pocket without saying where it came from. It is silence in the car when you were falling apart, because she knew you did not want to be asked.

Some mothers nurture through food, elaborate, time-consuming food, as a love letter written in rice and seven spices. Others through discipline, holding the household together with a firmness that gets misread as coldness. Some through sacrifice so normalized they do not even name it sacrifice. And some through a particular kind of silence: the silence of a woman who absorbs the chaos of a dysfunctional state and a fractured society so that her children can pretend, for a moment, that everything is fine.

The ‘strong Lebanese mother’

In Lebanon and within the diaspora, mothers are often described as “strong.” While intended as a compliment, and rightly so, this label can also obscure the complexities of their experiences. The "strong Lebanese mother" archetype, the woman who never breaks, who keeps the family fed and the particular chaos of raising children in this country, this image asks something unfair of real women.

It leaves no room for the mother who is exhausted, who needed someone to ask if she was okay, and no one did, because she was too competent, too composed, too reliably strong for anyone to think the question was necessary. Strength, when it becomes an expectation rather than a choice, erases vulnerability. And vulnerability is not weakness, it is the thing that makes love legible.

This Mother’s Day, perhaps the tribute is a hymn to a mother’s grit and fortitude. And perhaps, too, it is a moment to tell mothers something they are rarely told: that they are the highest form of unconditional love. The most lasting impact lives in the habits they passed down, the resilience and grit they embodied, the love they gave in forms that were not always easy. They are, in every sense that matters, the true influencers.