There’s a moment in every child’s life when they stop seeing their mother as a figure draped in permanence — provider, disciplinarian, caregiver, friend, anchor, guide, mentor, perfectionist (I could honestly keep going) — and begin to perceive her as a person, the total of a brilliant life and experience that have led to them and what they share now.
With dreams. With regrets. With incomplete stories. Which we find out as we grow older. To know that once she was just a kid, and now she nurtures them.
With a quiet swell of memories, triumphs, glories and let-downs behind her eyes. That moment arrived for me years ago, and yet it returns often, like a wave.
It returns when she’s in the kitchen and she’s not humming an old Jagjit Singh ghazal, but debating politics with me over chicken biriyani, I realise then she’s taught me to be this outspoken, this bold, this opinionated.
That's the old part of her that lives on in me. Sometimes in the middle of a fight, when I see myself saying something with her tone, in a debate, when I use her proverbs in my rebuttals, I have an epiphany that she taught me that. She’s me. I am her.
They say every child fears becoming their mother.
I’ve started to wonder: do I fear it as her as her son? Or do I already resemble her in ways I’ve just begun to admit? The fact is, in ways, I am so proud of what she has made me into.
This Mother’s Day, I wanted to do something different. Not a tribute, not a gushy, impersonal Q&A that makes both of us uncomfortable.
I wanted to explore us — our relationship, the one that shaped me, and perhaps, reshaped her too. And I wanted to write about her not from the outside in, but from the inside out. To see her as I’ve known her, and as I’ve become her.
She was never the loudest mother at parent-teacher meetings. She was quiet, assessing, and dignified. But her silences were not passive. They were observant, like parentheses around everything I wasn’t yet saying.
She saw me whenever I did badly, never turned a blind eye when I stuttered on stage, and in that glint, I realized that she was always supportive of me. That she saw me for who I was, not who I wanted to be.
So today, 17 years later, I asked her: “What was Nani like? I mean, really like, when no one else was around?”
She smiled without looking at me. “She was fierce, but quiet. Pursuing an M/A in Psychology in the 1960s, no less, whilst being married.” Her tone became nostalgic.
“But tired. Always tired. She was bringing up six children without much help after we lost almost everything in the 1999 Cyclone. I used to think I’d be nothing like her. But… now, sometimes when I raise my voice, or sit too quietly, I hear her in me.”
There was no bitterness. Why would there be? Only recognition. A woman sees herself through a generational mirror, one frame behind.
And I realized, that the Maya Angelou saying, “I come as one, I leave as ten-thousand,” is so true. I see every time I look at my mom, and the countless women before her.
“Do you like the kind of mother you are?” I asked her. It was a cruel question. But it was honest.
“No one likes themselves all the time,” she replied. “But I like the kind of person I’m becoming because I’m your mother.”
Your mother. Not a mother. Yours. And somehow, in that simplistic answer that Indian parents give when they don’t want to be excessively soft, I was reaffirmed forever.
I grew up watching her survive—she became a full-time mom after I was born, (she had a press publication), touring every district in the state, meeting professors and investors, illnesses she didn’t name, and dreams she postponed.
I wonder now what it would’ve been like to see her in that element now. In ways, I feel guilty knowing that she gave all that up so effortlessly without second thought for me.
I found myself introspecting: “Could I ever do the same for my kids?” I still don’t have an answer.
But now, in this strange age of AI babysitters and parenting influencers, I wonder what she makes of motherhood 2.0.
“It’s terrifying,” she said. “You’re raising a child in a world where everyone has a voice, but very few have values. Social media makes you perform motherhood instead of just living it. I learned slowly when I had you. I got a lot of unsolicited advice, but I never took it. But moms these days have millions lecturing them on their journey. I worry about how many filters a child will have to peel away before they get to their truth.”
I nodded. I feel it too—the slow erosion of innocence, the early cynicism creeping into children’s eyes. The way even ten-year-olds now speak in memes and “brain rot”.
“But you turned out fine,” she added, almost teasing. “Despite the phone addiction and the tragic poetry.”
I laughed. “Only because you taught me that not everything needs to be posted to be real.”
That’s her way. She doesn’t moralise. She just lives her truth, and dares you to look away.
I still remember — Grade Six Annual Day, I remember every one of my friends had an iPhone, and me being me at thirteen, said, “I want one.” — All she said was, “Do you need it?” I nodded no. That was when I knew. I’d never need something much more than family. The family she gave me.
There are things we haven’t talked about—her private heartbreaks, her friendships that faded, her ambitions that stayed curled like pressed petals in some forgotten book. But I see the outline of them in her parenting: the things she gives me not because she had them, but because she didn’t.
The freedom to disagree. To fight her ideas.
The space to be soft and furious and complicated all at once.
The patience to try again, even when you’ve failed her. Time and time again.
Sometimes, I think of her not as my mother, but as a girl. A girl who was once a debating Gold Medalist at Vani Vihar. A girl who wanted to leave her small town and become someone nobody forgot. And she did.
And now here I am — on stages, in newspapers, in rooms where she’s never been — but always, somehow, carrying her voice. Always thinking of her. Of us. Of all that we share.
This is the part I didn’t expect.
That I’d grow up not in opposition to her, but in extension of her. I am her, in more ways than I can count. The vocal register, the little squint in our eyes when we smile, and the same anger issues.
This isn’t a hyperbole. It’s a reckoning. A thank-you. A confession.
A mirror held up to the man I’m still becoming — for the woman who, even now, shapes that becoming with every quiet decision, every lesson unspoken, every time she holds me without asking what’s wrong.
Always, “Sambhal lenge,” she says.
And maybe, just maybe, the child is the father of the man.
But the son?
He is the unfinished poem of the mother.
(Tarun Tapan Bhuyan is a student studying in SAI International School. Views expressed are his own.)
