Bangladeshi mothers never say I love you but they show it in a hundred other ways

My mother has never once said I love you to me. Not once in 28 years. But she wakes up at 5am to make me breakfast before I leave for work. She calls me if I do not text by 10pm. She saves the best piece of fish for my plate without me noticing. When I was sick last year, she took a bus three hours from Sylhet to Dhaka just to make me her shorsha ilish because she believed it would cure me faster than any doctor. We are not a culture that says these things out loud. Emotions are shown through action, through food, through sacrifice — never through words. And for years I thought something was missing. I watched American movies and thought our families were cold. Now I am older and I understand. The language of love here is different. It is a mother staying up until midnight to finish sewing your school bag because you mentioned it was torn. It is a father quietly paying off a debt you did not know he knew about. I just want to say to everyone who grew up in a home like mine — you were deeply loved. The words were just hidden inside everything else.