Dear the Women Who Came Before Me
Living Room Letter No. 002
September 2026
Why This Letter, Why Now
September asks us to look backward—not to stay there, but to understand what brought us here. Before asking what we carry forward, our founder begins with a letter to the women whose lives made hers possible.
Dear the Women Who Came Before Me,
I’ve been thinking about you lately.
About how many things had to happen exactly as they did for me to be sitting here writing this.
How many women had to make a decision without knowing where it would lead.
How many had to begin again.
How many had to believe there could be something on the other side of whatever they were facing.
And then, eventually, there was me.
I wish I knew all of your names.
I wish I knew what made you laugh. What you dreamed about when you were young. Who you were before you became somebody’s mother or grandmother. What you wanted for yourself. What you were proud of.
There are questions I would ask now that I wouldn’t have known to ask when I was younger.
Maybe that’s part of growing up.
Realizing there were entire lives before yours.
Some of you are stories to me.
Names I’ve heard.
Faces in photographs.
Pieces of family history that made their way down to me.
But to my grandmother, Mama, you are memory.
I got to know you.
I got to love you.
I got to be loved by you.
I was your first grandchild, and I knew what it felt like to be your girl.
There was something special about being the first. I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew I belonged to you, and you belonged to me.
There are so many things I’d ask you now. Not because I didn’t know you, but because I know you differently as a grown woman.
I knew you as my Mama.
Now I’d want to know more about the woman.
I’d ask about your dreams.
I’d ask about motherhood.
I’d ask what you wanted for your daughters.
I’d ask what you imagined for me.
I’d probably ask one question and interrupt your answer with another.
And somehow, we’d end up laughing.
Then there’s my mom.
The older I get, the more I want to know about the woman beyond the title I’ve called her my entire life.
Because before she was my mom, she was Mama’s daughter.
She had dreams before she had children. She had a whole life unfolding before mine ever began.
And then I came along.
Her first child.
The older I get, the more I understand that I didn’t arrive here on my own.
There were women before me making their way through lives I will never completely know.
Women whose decisions reached farther than they could see.
All the way to me.
I don’t know if the women generations before me ever imagined my face.
But I’m here.
And I want you to know that I see you.
Even the women whose names I don’t know.
Even the women whose stories were never written down.
Even the women whose lives exist for me only in fragments.
I know there was a road before there was me.
And somebody had to walk it.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my own place on that road.
I was Mama’s first grandchild.
My mom’s first child.
And now I’m a mother raising children of my own.
Our family is small.
I’ve always known that.
But I’m beginning to understand what my place within it means.
There is something I hold near and dear about knowing that I am building a family of my own and that one day I will be its matriarch.
Not because of a title.
Because of the responsibility.
To know where we come from.
To remember.
To tell the stories.
To make sure the people coming after me know something about the people who came before them.
And I’ve realized I’m standing somewhere in the middle.
There are women before me whose lives helped make mine possible.
There are children after me whose lives I now get to help shape.
For so much of my life, I’ve only thought about what it meant to belong to the women before me.
Now I’m beginning to understand what it means to become one of them.
One day, someone may look backward and find me.
I hope I’ve given them something worth finding.
I hope they know that I thought about them before I knew their names.
I hope they know they come from women who loved deeply, laughed loudly, kept going, and made room for the people coming behind them.
And I hope they understand what I am only now beginning to understand myself:
None of us begins with ourselves.
We arrive carrying pieces of people who were here first.
So to the women who came before me:
I see you.
I honor you.
And I will carry you forward.
With love,
Mia
The Living Room