Love, Practiced Carefully

In New York City, love is loud. Survival is louder.

Sky became a mother before she ever learned how to be a woman. Nineteen, broke, and alone, she raises her son in the narrow spaces of Queens apartments and double shifts, loving him the only way she knows how: openly, endlessly, without armor. Her hands are always reaching, her voice always soft, her heart always exposed.

Evan grows up watching the world give other boys what he never had. Fathers. Money. Ease. He learns early that love doesn’t pay rent, and tenderness doesn’t keep the lights on. By seventeen, he is sharp-edged and cold, a boy who mistakes survival for strength and shame for independence. His mother’s affection feels like weakness. Her sacrifices feel like failure. Her love feels humiliating.

Sky takes every insult quietly.
Evan throws his pain at the only person who won’t leave.

Their story unfolds in alternating voices, tracing the slow erosion of a bond that once felt unbreakable. Missed school events. Food thrown away. Lies told easily. Nights Sky works through sickness and injury, believing that if she just loves harder, louder, longer, her son will someday understand.

But some understanding comes too late.

As Evan rises out of poverty and into power, becoming everything he once thought would save him, Sky’s body begins to fail under the weight of everything she carried alone. In the end, love is not enough to keep her alive.

Love, Practiced Carefully is a bleak, intimate tragedy about motherhood, resentment, and the quiet violence of survival. It asks what happens when love is real, but timing is cruel — and whether forgiveness matters when the person who needed it most is already gone.

Some days I feel like I'm all that keeps us standing.


I go to work even when my head pounds, even when my stomach twists in knots, even when my body screams to lie down. I cook, I clean, I scrub, I count, I fix. I kiss his forehead even when he flinches. I call his name even when he groans. I hug him even when he shoves me away.


I watch him grow taller every day. Broad shoulders, sharp jaw, eyes that dart like he's always calculating. He doesn't need me like he used to. Doesn't want me like he used to. Doesn't even pretend he enjoys it anymore.


But I see the boy underneath it all. The one who clung to me when he was small, the one who whispered, "Mama, don't go," when I left for my shifts.


That boy is still there, even if the seventeen-year-old hates my love.


This morning, he's silent at the kitchen table. His toast is half-eaten, eggs untouched. I move closer, brushing his hair back, and he jerks away.


I drop my hand, pretending I didn't just feel the ache in my chest. "I was just… making sure you were okay."


I nod, because arguing doesn't work anymore. Not with him. Not with this version of him.


At work, I notice every ache again. Knee stiff, back sore, hands raw from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I bend over anyway, I carry trays anyway, I smile anyway.


Because if I stop, Evan doesn't get breakfast. He doesn't get lunch. He doesn't get my arms when the world fails him.


By evening, when I finally get home, I see him at the window, staring outside, jaw tight. I call softly, "Dinner's ready, baby."


I take a deep breath and carry the plate to his room. He doesn't move. I sit on the bed's edge anyway, careful not to touch him.


I let the words hang in the air, heavy and unwavering.


Because even if he hates hearing them, even if it embarrasses him, even if it makes him flinch, I have to say them.


Chapter 11 - If I Stop, We Fall