This one is for my mother.

Ours was not a soft house. There were nights we children lay awake, afraid of what the dark might bring — nights I wished someone would come and take us somewhere safe. And then there was the night I was ten, when a knife my father threw came to rest in the table an inch from my mother. That was the night he died to me. I stopped speaking to him — and from that day I never stopped standing between her and the fear. I had become her protector, far too young.

She held our whole family together with her own hands — working, carrying, asking for almost nothing in return. I gave up what a boy gives up to stay beside her, and ours was a closeness that never needed words. More than anything, I wanted her to reach the far side of all that work and finally find a little happiness waiting there — a quiet retirement, a life that was finally hers. She never got the chance. The cancer took that from her too.

When she died, I grieved for more than a year — not because grief is long, but because she deserved so much more than the life she was given. Beloved Boy comes from that place: the fear, the love, and the loss that never quite leaves. It's all in the lyrics, if you listen closely.