I. The Flinch
A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned that he bumped into someone else’s mother and her boyfriend. I laughed and made jokes about him having a pet dinosaur. Yet, even as the sound left my mouth, something in me tightened. A private flinch.
I surprised myself. Why should this bother me? Why was my first instinct to think, “At her age?”
Later, I realized the discomfort wasn’t about her. It was about me. About what it forced me to imagine: what if it were my mother? Could I bear to see her step out of the role I’ve written for her?
If I’m honest, I don’t think I could.
And that admission shames me. Men of the same age remarry, rebuild, fall in love again, and society applauds. Mothers? We want them still. Predictable. Waiting in the wings, even after the play is over.
The flinch revealed something I hadn’t admitted: I don’t just want my mother’s love. I want her fixed, safe, unchanged. Anything that disturbs that shape feels like a threat.
II. The Scripts We Inherit
Culture rehearses our discomfort long before life tests us.
In Badhai Ho, Neena Gupta’s character becomes pregnant in her fifties. Her children don’t see love, they see shame. Neighbors whisper. The pregnancy becomes a punchline. Only later, awkwardly, does the family remember she is more than “Mom.”
The Western screen isn’t any kinder. Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated is played as quirky comedy. “Cougar” turns longing into caricature. Madonna dates someone younger, and the world laughs.
Meanwhile, men in their sixties start over and no one blinks, instead we nominate them to be President.
Desire in men is coded as strength. Desire in women is coded as desperation.
We absorb these scripts like background noise. Until someone says, “My mother has a boyfriend,” and the static jolts into a flinch in the body.
III. Arundhati Roy’s Mother and Mine
The unease lingered until I came across Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.
Her mother, Mary Roy, was a force. She fought the courts for women’s inheritance rights and won. She built schools. She defied rules. And yet, in her daughter’s telling, she was also volatile, sometimes cruel. She could strand young Arundhati on a roadside. Rage over trivial things. Even order the family dog killed.
Fierce and damaging. Tender and terrifying.
Roy does not smooth these contradictions. She writes her mother jagged, whole.
And then she writes the line that won’t leave me: “One half of me was taking the pain, the other half was taking notes.”
Isn’t that true of all of us? We inherit the gift and the wound. We hold both.
And maybe that’s why we resist seeing mothers as human. Because once they leave the pedestal, we have to face the contradictions. The ways they loved us, and the ways they failed us.
IV. The Feminist Question We Refuse to Ask
This isn’t just private unease. It’s patriarchy.
We are comfortable with women as mothers. We are comfortable with women as martyrs. Hell! we build temples for them and worship them. But we are not comfortable with women as desiring beings, especially after motherhood.
A father who remarries is reclaiming life. A mother who does the same is abandoning her role.
Adrienne Rich wrote that there is a difference between the experience of motherhood and the institution of motherhood. The experience is messy, alive, full of contradictions. The institution freezes women into saints.
Kamla Bhasin, the feminist poet, once said: “Patriarchy doesn’t just control women. It controls our imagination of women.”
That’s what the flinch is. Not instinct. Inheritance.
Which leaves the question we rarely ask: Who benefits when women are denied their humanity?
V. The Hardest Act of Love
I try to imagine my mother at a restaurant, laughing at a joke that isn’t mine. I imagine her hand reaching across a table for someone else’s.
And again, I flinch. It is a very physical reaction.
But when I sit with it, I see the truth: she was someone before me. She will be someone after me. Her life does not need to fold neatly around mine.
We call it love when mothers give themselves away, piece by piece, until nothing is left. But maybe real love is the opposite. Maybe it is letting them keep what is theirs. To want. To choose. To walk away from the roles we’ve assigned and what doesn’t serve.
The hardest act of love, then, is not gratitude or obedience. It is permission not as something we grant, but as something we stop denying.
And maybe the first
act of maturity is learning to live with that truth. To watch, not with judgment, but with awe.
Because in the end, a pedestal is only another kind of prison.
And love that demands stillness is not love at all.