My girls hate the pictures. Every so often they’ll come across old photos of themselves from when they were little, and there it is, the haircut. The bowl cut that is round, slightly-too-even, unmistakably-a-kid’s-haircut look, sitting on their heads in photo after photo. They groan. They laugh. They ask, in the way kids do, why their hair looked like that, who let that happen, what anyone was thinking. And I tell them the truth, which is very simple. Your grandma took you.

I was sick then. Really sick, in the years when I was fighting for my life and could barely manage my own body, let alone three kids and all the ordinary maintenance of childhood. Haircuts are the kind of thing that falls off the edge of the table when a family is just trying to survive the week. And my mom picked it up. She picked up so many of the things I couldn’t hold in those years, and one of them was this. She took my girls to get their hair cut, so that on top of everything else, they’d be looked after, tidy, cared for. The cuts came out a little funny. Bowl-shaped. A grandma’s idea of a good practical haircut that was low maintenance. My daughters will complain about them for the rest of their lives.

I love those haircuts more than I can say. Because here is what my girls see when they look at those photos: dorky hair. And here is what I see: my mother, showing up. Every one of those funny little bowl cuts is a day she took my daughters by the hand because I couldn’t, and made sure they were okay. Her love is in those pictures, even when she isn’t. It’s sitting right there on top of their heads.

It runs in the family, actually. When I was little, my mom used to cut my bangs, and they’d come out crooked, or wavy, a little off. So the funny haircut from Grandma is practically an inheritance at this point. She gave me crooked bangs, and a generation later she gave my girls their bowl cuts, and someday, if my girls have kids, I fully expect the tradition of the well-meaning slightly-wrong haircut to continue. It’s a love language. It just isn’t a very precise one.

But I need to say the bigger thing, the thing my girls are still too young to fully understand when they’re rolling their eyes at their old photos. We would not have made it without her. I don’t say that for effect. I mean it as plainly as I’ve ever meant anything. During the worst of my illness, my mom held our whole family up. She was the reason we got through, the thing standing between us and going under. And she did it when it wasn’t simple for her to do, when there was even resistance to her helping, when not everyone in the family thought she should. She helped anyway. She didn’t hesitate. She looked at her sick daughter and three small grandchildren and she simply stepped in and saved us, and no objection was going to stop her.

That’s who she was. That’s what those haircuts are made of. So my girls can groan at the pictures all they want. I’ll laugh right along with them, because the hair really is pretty funny. But I’ll be looking at something they can’t quite see yet. I’ll be looking at the woman who saved us, right there in the frame, in the only way she left behind. A crooked, well-meaning, deeply loved little haircut, on the heads of children she made sure would be okay.