Late on the morning of what would have been her daughter’s 27th birthday, Tamika Palmer sits at a conference-room table with a thin smile on her face, and thinks back to the day her first child was born. “I didn’t want to be a mother,” Palmer says. She was too young, she thought, still only 16, too afraid of the great challenge of caring for another life. Her labor was long, hard, painful. Eighteen hours, then an emergency C-section. Palmer was unconscious for a long while after giving birth, but when she came to, she took her baby in her arms, and the sheer reality of her child’s existence overwhelmed her. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Palmer says. “I just woke up!

It felt like too much, too fast. When Palmer took her daughter home, she listened to her cry and cry, and she wondered, then, if perhaps she’d made a mistake. “I was a kid having a kid,” Palmer says now, long after they both had grown into women. “I knew I wasn’t ready, but what could you do at that point?”

Time passed. Her daughter survived one night in this world, then two, then three. Palmer taught her how to eat, to walk, to speak. And Palmer learned from her daughter, too. “She taught me that I wanted to be a mom,” Palmer says. “She taught me how to love. She taught me …” She shakes her head, eyes distant, smile lingering, and gives the faintest hint of a shrug.

“Everything.”

[Read Jordan Ritter Conn's piece on the aftermath of the police killing of Breonna Taylor and her family's fight for justice.]