My mom was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950.

Growing up the youngest of eight kids in a small house off the downtown core, she was quiet, shy, and always the baby.

Back when my mom was born, Kenya had a black majority, a brown minority, and a white cream on top. Kenyan natives, the East Indian class imported to get the economy chugging, and the British colonialists who ran the whole show.

That East Indian class included my mom’s dad who moved from Lahore, India, to Nairobi in the 1930s to help build the railroad.

The Brits took over Kenya in the late 1800s and the country didn’t gain independence until the mid-1960s so it was very much a British-ruled country when my mom was born. White people running the show. White people running the government. White people running the best schools.

My mom wasn’t born a white person.

So she wasn’t born the right person.

And she wasn’t born the right gender, either.

What do I mean?

I mean my grandparents had seven kids before my mom was born. Four girls and three boys. As my mom and her sisters tell it, my grandparents were desperately hoping for a final boy to even their numbers out and give them a solid four-four split.

Boys were the prized possession in the culture. All everybody wanted.

For generations there was more money for male education and training, which meant men were financially self-sufficient. Women, on the other hand, were dependent on husbands opening wallets every Sunday to dole out shillings to buy groceries and clothes for the family. Women also traditionally “married out” and joined their husbands’ families, taking care of their in-laws instead of their own parents. So having a son provided a cultural pension long before real pensions existed. No old-age checks once a month! Just your daughter-in-law cooking you curried lentils and serving you chai.

Even worse, the culture compensated men further by providing a dowry. What’s a dowry? I didn’t understand it growing up but a dowry is an ancient and archaic gift given by the bride’s parents to the groom’s parents as if to say “Thank you for taking our daughter off our hands.”

By the way, I really do mean ancient. Even one of the world’s oldest texts, the Code of Hammurabi, dating from almost four thousand years ago, discusses dowries in this way, as gifts for the groom’s family. And I do mean gift. A dowry often includes jewelry, property, and big piles of cash, resulting in a massive financial burden for anyone with a daughter to marry off.

When my grandparents had my mom, all those additional costs and burdens sank in. It breaks my heart to think about my mom opening her newborn eyes, slowly soaking in the sea of faces in front of her, and what was the first thing she probably saw?

Everyone’s disappointment.

How was that family burden, that sense of not being wanted, communicated to my mother? The way deep cultural norms are often communicated—like a heavy, invisible blanket pushing down on her, a force she couldn’t see but felt in her bones.

When a boy was born, friends and neighbors would say “Badhaee ho!” It meant “Wonderful, great, congratulations!” And when a girl was born? “Chalo koi nahi.” What’s the translation? “Keep going. Soldier on. Oh well—you have to keep moving.”

As my mom described it, there was a fatalist feeling of closure and finality over everything. “My life was set out,” she told me. “It was decided.” Gender, culture, and traditions all pointed to a well-worn finish line she could see in her future. Her life seemed like a sentence. Something preordained and punishing.

No sense of possibility, no options… no dot-dot-dot.

Just the end. A full stop.

As she got older, my mom watched her older sisters finishing the same sentence ahead of her, plucked from the family home one by one, married off to a man chosen by her parents, to provide him with children and home cooking while taking care of him and his parents. In the face of a life sentence ending in a full stop, my mom had a choice to make: Would she ever see past the period?

What about you?

Do you ever feel like you don’t have options?

Do you ever feel like you don’t have a choice?

Do you ever see the period at the end of your sentence?

We all have this feeling sometimes.

We all sometimes feel a fatalist feeling of closure and finality in the sentence of our lives. Maybe it’s growing up in a male-dominated culture without any visible options. Maybe it’s taking care of a sick family member and always putting yourself last. Maybe it’s feeling trapped in your job after twenty years of education and a suffocating pile of debt. Maybe your family is living in a country where your visa application to join them keeps getting rejected. Maybe they won’t promote you. Maybe they won’t release you.

What do you do when you can see the future on the path you’re walking on but you don’t like where it’s leading?

Well, there’s a crucial mindset to adopt. It’s not about giving up. And it’s not about turning around and running away. Because we both know life isn’t that simple. Commencement speech advice doesn’t always work. Follow your heart! Do what you love!

“My heart said follow him. And he dumped me.”

“I want to do what I love. But I have bills, responsibilities, and other people.”

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is simply making the decision to keep going.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is simply making the decision to continue to breathe, continue to move, continue to function, continue to operate.

A period means giving in to life’s circumstances, relenting in the face of things that look immovable, things that look impossible, things that look too painful.

A period is giving in.

What we need to hold on to in our hearts is the quiet courage to change the punctuation. What we need to hold on to is the idea that resilience means seeing the free will that exists just past the period.

We need to hold on to a desire to see past that full stop.

To see past the period.

And add a dot-dot-dot.