This was my mother’s favorite line. She used it often, and usually while she was in motion. You might hear it while she sorted socks or flipped pancakes. She’d say it while wiping the counter or packing sandwiches for the next day. The words came out like a rhythm she moved to.

She never used it to complain. It wasn’t a cry for help or an invitation to pity. She said it with a grin. It was the kind of grin that made you wonder if she knew something the rest of us hadn’t figured out.

I didn’t understand that line as a child. I only knew she said it a lot. But now, years later, I can see it more clearly. It was her way of naming the weight she carried without letting it pin her down. She had every reason to feel tired. She had lost her husband too soon. She raised five children. She worked full-time and ran a household that always had a place for someone who needed help.

Even then, she didn’t let fatigue have the final say. That line—“Born tired and never rested”—was her way of laughing at it, or maybe standing on top of it.

I’ve found myself saying it lately. I’ll wake up, look at the list on the fridge, pour coffee into the same kind of mug she used, and there it is. The line just shows up. Not as a complaint, but as something else.

It reminds me I’m part of a story that started long before me. Her voice, somehow, still lifts the weight. Not all of it, but enough to take the next step.