My school had a grotto. A small stone structure in the corner of the compound, surrounded by beautiful flowers, with a statue of Mary standing in the centre of it. Most students walked past it on their way to class. I used to stop there.
I went to a convent school, so Mary was part of the landscape — in the chapel, in the classrooms, in the conversations of the sisters who taught us. But for me it was never about the religion. It was about the feeling. Standing at that grotto, I felt something I could not explain as a child and can only just begin to put into words now. It felt like someone was there. Someone who already knew everything I was carrying and was completely unbothered by it.
Before exams, I went to the grotto. Before competitions, I went. When a friendship fell apart or someone said something that stayed with me longer than it should have, I went. I never had a formal prayer I said. I just stood there, or sat on the low stone wall nearby, and let myself feel whatever I was feeling. And something always settled.
I did not think much about why it worked. It just did. She felt like the one place I could bring the unfinished, unresolved parts of myself and not have to explain them or fix them before I arrived.
Then school ended. Life moved fast. I got married, built a home, became a mother. The grotto was far away and the years filled up with everything years fill up with. I did not make a conscious decision to step away from that relationship. It just quietly fell out of my daily life the way many things do when you are busy becoming an adult.
I spent decades building things. A home, a family, eventually a business. I became someone who handled things. Someone who showed up and delivered. And I am proud of that woman. She did what she had to do. But somewhere in all of that becoming, I lost access to the version of myself that used to stand at the grotto and just be. The version that trusted something larger than her own two hands.
A few years ago, something shifted. I started paying attention to what I had set aside. The intuition I had stopped listening to. The softness I had packed away because it did not seem useful. The need to be held rather than always doing the holding. And slowly, in a different way than the girl at the grotto — but with the same feeling — I found my way back.
Mary came with me. Or perhaps she had been there all along, waiting for me to look up.
I share this because I know I am not the only woman who has this kind of story. A connection that mattered deeply, then got buried under the weight of life, and is now asking to be remembered. It does not have to be Mary. It can be any figure, any tradition, any practice that once made you feel held. The point is not the form it takes. The point is that something in you knew, even as a child, that you needed more than just your own effort to move through this world.
That knowing was right. And it is still right now.
