Dear Mums,

There's no big dramatic story with most mums. No single moment you can point to and say, "That's it, that's the one." It's quieter than that, and somehow bigger because of it. It's a thousand small things, stacked up over years, that you only really start to count when you're old enough to know what you're looking at.

It starts with the fact that she was just always there. There in the morning before school when nobody else was awake yet. There at the end of a bad day without needing to be called. There in the background of so many ordinary moments that didn't seem to mean much at the time; the lift to practice when you hadn't asked, the meal ready when you got home, the light still on when you came in late. She didn't need the effort recognised or the moment noted. She just got on with it, quietly, in the way that only someone who genuinely loves you does.

And she does love you — completely and without conditions, in a way that's actually pretty difficult to get your head around when you stop and think about it. The kind of love that doesn't waver based on your mood or your behaviour or the phase you're going through. The kind that absorbs the difficult years, the eye-rolls, the arguments about nothing, and comes out the other side exactly the same. Steady. Warm. Most of us grew up completely surrounded by that love without fully understanding how rare it was.

What takes longer to see is everything that love quietly costs. Because behind all of it — the showing up, the patience, the warmth — there were sacrifices happening that we were never meant to notice. Things she gave up or put on hold, decisions she made that were never about her, versions of her own life she set aside without making you feel the weight of that for a single second. You don't see any of it at the time. You're not supposed to. But you get older, and you start doing the maths, and the number gets pretty humbling pretty fast.

Nobody tells you that growing up also means learning to appreciate the people who made it possible. It just happens gradually, usually somewhere between your first real taste of responsibility and the moment you pick up the phone to call her about it — because she's still the first person you think of. The person who knew you before you knew yourself, who carries a version of you in her memory that you'll never have access to, and who loves that version just as much as every version that came after.

Some mums are loud in their love, who say it often and say it big. Others show it in the doing rather than the saying. But most of us had a mum who was simply, consistently, unreservedly there — loving us in ways we didn't always deserve, giving more than we thought to ask for, and making all of it look easier than it ever was.

This Mother's Day, for everything seen and unseen — thank you doesn't really cover it, but it's a start.

With love from your Sons and Daughters xx

Channel Mag's youth contributors, Billy Brown and Fantasia Nair, bring a fresh monthly feature to our pages to inspire and advise our younger North Shore readers. If there are any topics you'd like to read about, contact Liz at liz@channelmag.co.nz, and our fledgling writers will research and write engaging articles specifically for our younger (at heart) readers.