There is a house inside me
built from the women who raised me
and the women I am raising.
Its beams are made of morning light
and the breath held between
one task and the next.
Its floors creak in familiar ways
as if speaking
you come from us.
In the kitchen of this house
my mother stands at the sink
her hands moving through water
as if performing a quiet ritual.
The scent of lemon soap
rises like a memory she never named.
I learned devotion
in the way she rinsed a plate,
her silence the prayer
no one taught her to speak aloud.
In the living room
my grandmother’s chair waits.
No one sits in it now
yet the air around it softens
each time I pass.
She believed in work more than rest,
believed a woman should carry worry
the way others carry keys,
believed in survival
even when survival meant becoming small.
The house inside me
holds both their rules and undoings.
Every doorway whispers
a lesson I never asked for
yet absorbed anyway.
When I walk in after a shift,
still smelling of antiseptic,
still holding a story
I cannot share with my children,
the house listens without judgment.
The kitchen light flicks on
with steady intention.
I set my badge on the counter
and it gleams under the bulb
as if remembering all the women before me
who never had this choice
of leaving work at the door.
My daughter wanders in,
hair tangled from sleep.
She studies me
with the seriousness of someone
learning the architecture
of womanhood.
I bend to her level
and she rests her hand
over my heart.
This moment becomes a room too.
Tonight I walk through the house
with a new kind of clarity.
I thank the ghosts
who taught me endurance
and I tell them what I am changing.
I refuse the rule that women
must be quiet to be respected.
I refuse the belief
that exhaustion is a requirement for love.
I open the window
and let the night air in.
The house breathes with me,
a long exhale of all the women
I carry and release,
carry and release,
carry and transform
into something entirely my own.
AUTHOR BIO
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and writer living in New Hampshire. Her work explores motherhood, lineage, and the quiet revolutions inside women’s lives. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee with recent work in Rust & Moth, Eunoia Review, and The Berlin Literary Review. She writes at veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.
