Every stitch is a temperature. Every color is a degree of endured pain. Gold here is not ornament. It is what remains when fire takes everything except the necessity to endure.
She did not choose to be strong. She wanted to be a tender flower, not a stone. But the home rested on her, the children, those beside her. And she compressed herself into crystal, because otherwise — she would have shattered.
This is not triumph. It is a threshold. One more degree — and a crack. She burns not because it is beautiful. She endures because "who, if not me."
And in this lies the greatest injustice: ice melts in spring, returns to water, to softness. But a diamond remains stone. Forever beautiful. Forever hard. Forever not what it wanted to be.
I embroidered her not as a hymn to strength. Every stitch is an attempt to ease her burden, a prayer-plea to the world: "Take this weight off women. Let them be soft and tender again. Do not leave them alone with war, fire, and pressure. Give them the right to become—"
