Ignorance is Bliss.

Simón Bolívar once observed that ignorance can be more powerful than force. I did not fully understand what he meant until I found myself caring for my recently disabled mother.

In October 2014, my mother suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke in the left side of her brain. She remained in and out of hospitals for nearly six months before finally returning home in April 2015. Before the stroke, she was sharp, outspoken, and possessed of an exceptional memory. Afterward, her world shrank. She now speaks only a few words a day, her thoughts trapped behind damaged pathways. Because of her limited speech, she is often mistaken for being cognitively slow. Paralysis on her right side confines her to a wheelchair. At times, I would find her sobbing after failed attempts to perform tasks that able-bodied people complete without thought. To the outside world, she appears utterly helpless.

During her stay in an extended care facility, staff affectionately nicknamed her “Mrs. Smiley” because of the broad grin she wore almost constantly. Her once fiery temper seemed to have dissolved into a quiet gentleness that had never been part of her personality. Fellow patients and caregivers treated her with extraordinary kindness, charmed by this placid façade. Few could imagine that before her stroke, she had been demanding, impatient, and intimidating—a woman whose presence filled a room and whose approval was never easily earned.

For most of my life, I kept my distance from her. We rarely shared heart-to-heart conversations. She disowned me more times than I can count during my teenage years, and I grew up without any reliable sense of a mother’s affection. Each reconciliation came with conditions, expectations, or unspoken debts. I asked God many times why our relationship seemed so permanently broken.

Now, stripped of her authority and independence, she has become meek and vulnerable. And in this reversal, something unexpected has happened to me. I feel a deep sympathy for her and find myself willing to help her without being asked, without needing recognition. Caring for her no longer feels transactional; it feels human.

Only then did I understand Bolívar’s words. It was ignorance—of her inner life, of my own woundedness, of the limits of our understanding—that governed our relationship for so many years. Her stroke did not heal our past, but it dismantled the forces that once defined it. In her silence, I learned compassion. In her weakness, I discovered forgiveness. And in confronting what was lost, I finally found what had long eluded us both.