I asked my mother four questions in the kitchen while she was cooking, and the first one was this:
“Mumma, before you were my mumma, aapko kya banna tha?”
She said interior decoration. She had wanted to do interiors.
I am twenty something years old. I have lived in the same house as this woman for most of my life. I did not know that.
The most ordinary kind of not knowing
I want to be careful about how this gets read, because it is easy to turn it into a sad story about distance, and it is not that.
This is not a case of a cold family. We talk constantly. We are in each other’s business at a level most people would find alarming. And still, the information that my mother once wanted to design rooms for a living had simply never come up in two decades of daily conversation.
That is not neglect. That is what happens when a person moves into a role early enough and thoroughly enough that the role becomes the entire surface area of the relationship.
Mothers in Indian households are spoken to almost entirely through function. Khaana ban gaya. Kapde aaye? Tablet li? Papa se baat hui? Every one of those is an act of love. Not one of them has any room in it for an answer about her.
So you can love somebody every day for twenty years and end up with a surprisingly thin file on who they are.
The questions I asked, and what they are doing
Before you were my mumma, what did you want to become?
The word “before” is carrying the whole question. It gives her a window of time in which she was not responsible for anybody, and she is allowed to talk about that person without it sounding like a complaint about the present.
Almost every mother can answer this. Very few have been asked.
If you could go back and change a decision you made for me, what would it be?
This one is riskier and I put it second on purpose, after the warm one.
Notice what it is not asking. It is not asking what she regrets about her life. It is asking about a decision she made for you, which keeps the frame on her judgment rather than on her whole existence, and makes it much easier to answer honestly.
My mother’s answer was that she would have made me learn swimming and skating. Which is to say: she would have given me more things to be good at outside the house.
You have to sit with an answer like that rather than argue with it. The instinct is to immediately say no no, you did everything right, I turned out fine. That is a way of shutting the door politely. She has just handed you a thing she has thought about privately for years. The correct response is to ask one more question about it.
Mumma, when was the last time somebody asked how you were and actually wanted to know?
The “actually wanted to know” is the part that makes this question work. Without it she will say “everybody asks, beta” and move on.
Her answer was essentially that nobody does, and that it is a mother who asks. Not bitterly. As a statement of how the job works.
If you ask this question, be prepared for that answer, and be prepared for it not to come with any accusation attached, which somehow makes it worse.
Mumma, what do you wish I stopped worrying about?
I put this last because it is the only one that gives something back.
Three questions in, she has been the subject for a while, which for most mothers is uncomfortable in a way they will not say. This question hands the relationship back to her in the direction she is used to: her, looking after you, telling you to relax.
It also tends to produce genuinely useful information. Many of us are carrying anxieties on our parents’ behalf that they gave up on years ago and never thought to mention.
On seeing your mother as a person
There is a word for the psychological transition into motherhood: matrescence. It was coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael and has been picked up more recently by researchers who argue that becoming a mother reorganises identity as substantially as adolescence does, and gets a fraction of the attention.
The part that interests me is what happens on the other side of that transition, in the family. The people around her adjust extremely quickly to the new version. Within a year or two, “mother” is simply what she is. The person from before does not get killed off, she just stops being addressed.
And she is still in there. That is the thing. She is fully in there, and she will come out immediately if somebody asks a question shaped for her rather than for the role.
What to expect if you try this
She will deflect the first one. Mine did a version of “arre ab kya matlab hai iska”. Wait. Do not rescue her from the pause. Most of the real answers arrive after a silence you found uncomfortable.
She may get emotional about a question you thought was light, and stay perfectly steady through the one you were nervous about. You will not be able to predict which.
She will probably turn it around and ask you something back. Answer it properly. If this becomes an interview where only she is exposed, it will not happen again.
Do not do it as a project. No announcement, no camera, no “I read something and I want to try an exercise with you”. Ask one question while she is chopping something. The kitchen works for the same reason the car works: her hands are busy and nobody has to hold eye contact.
And do not try to fix the answers. If she says she wanted to do interiors, you do not have to enrol her in a course by Friday. Sometimes the entire value of the answer is that somebody finally heard it.
What I am actually suggesting
Not a heart to heart. Not a reconciliation. Not therapy at the dining table.
One question, asked while something is on the stove, about a woman who existed before you did and still does.
You will get one fact you did not have. That is all this is for. But it is surprising how much a single fact rearranges, and how differently you look at someone once you know what she wanted to be.
The mother questions are on the questions page if you want somewhere to start.
What you have just read is psychoeducation: general information and reflection, written for a lot of people at once. It is not therapy, an assessment, or a diagnosis, and it is not advice about your particular situation. Reading it does not make us a practitioner and a client.
If you are carrying something heavy, please talk to a qualified mental health professional who can actually see you and your circumstances. And if you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please do not start here. In India, Tele-MANAS is free and open 24 hours on 14416, in English and 20 other languages. Anywhere else, findahelpline.com has the number for your country.