My mother

If you ask my mother how old she is, she will smile, tilt her head, and say, “Old enough to mind my business.” Which is a lie. My mother does not mind her business. My name is Zara, and I am twelve years old. I am also more mature than my mother, who is thirty-four, single, and still eats ice cream at midnight while watching cartoons “for background noise.” She is a single mother, yes. Strong? Yes. Hard-working? Definitely. Childish? Oh my God, excessively. Her name is Amara. Amara laughs too loudly in quiet places, dances when food is cooking, and once wore mismatched slippers to a parent-teacher meeting because, according to her, “They were both slippers, Zara. Let’s not overthink life.” We live in a small apartment with a stubborn fridge that hums like it’s angry at the world. Still, my mother insists on calling our home “cozy luxury.” Luxury where? Only God knows. Every morning, she wakes me up with dramatic energy. “Rise and shine, mini-me!” she shouts, pulling the curtains like she’s unveiling a stage. I groan. “Mum, please. Normal people knock.” “I am not normal people,” she replies proudly. “I am a vibe.” This woman raised me alone since I was two. My father left early—one of those men who said “I’ll be back” and clearly meant in the next life. My mother cried once. Just once. Then she wiped her face, looked at me, and said, “Okay. It’s you and me now. We’ll figure it out.” And she did. Somehow. But nobody warned me that figuring it out would include her acting like my little sister. One Saturday afternoon, everything changed. It started with pancakes. My mother was flipping pancakes aggressively, humming off-key, when her phone rang. She answered without checking. “Hello?” she said, holding the spatula like a microphone. There was a pause. Then she gasped. “Oh! I’m so sorry, I thought this was my friend Blessing. She owes me money.” I raised my head slowly. That apology tone meant danger. The voice on the other end must have said something serious because my mother suddenly stood up straight. “Yes… yes, this is Amara speaking,” she said, blinking fast. “Wait—what?” She looked at me like I had suddenly grown horns. “You want to meet me… today?” Silence. She laughed. A nervous laugh. The one she does when she’s pretending to be calm but isn’t. “Oh, sure. Of course. That’s fine. No problem at all.” She hung up and screamed. “ZARAAAAAA!” “What?!” I shouted back, already stressed. She grabbed my shoulders. “I think I just agreed to meet a billionaire.” I stared at her. “Mum. Sit down.” “I am sitting emotionally, not physically!” Turns out, the man on the phone was Lucien Blackwood. Yes. That Blackwood. The billionaire. The tech genius. The man whose face is always on magazines looking serious and expensive. Apparently, my mother had bumped into him the day before at a café. She spilled coffee on his shoes. Designer shoes. Shoes that probably cost more than our fridge. Instead of apologizing normally, my mother said, “At least now your shoes have personality.” Any reasonable man would have walked away. Lucien Blackwood asked for her number. “Why would a billionaire like you want my number?” my mother had asked him. He smiled, she said. “Because you didn’t treat me like a billionaire.” I rubbed my temples. “Mum. You flirted with a billionaire using coffee stains?” She clapped her hands. “I know! Growth!” By evening, she was panicking. “What do I wear?” “Do I act mature?” “Do billionaires like jokes?” “Should I tell him I have a child?” I crossed my arms. “You do have a child.” She nodded. “Yes, but should I introduce you immediately or gradually like a plot twist?” That was the moment I knew. My mother was about to fall in love. And not gracefully. She put on a dress she hadn’t worn in years and practiced smiling in the mirror. “Do I look sophisticated?” she asked. I looked at her earrings. One was longer than the other. “You look like yourself,” I said. She smiled softly. And somewhere across the city, a billionaire was walking into her life— completely unprepared for the chaos, love, laughter, and the childish woman who would change everything.