The Weight of Inheritance

On mothering, becoming and being

This week, I'm sharing something deeply personal—an essay about the moments that nearly broke me as a mother and how I found my way back to myself.

It's about the inheritance we carry from our mothers, the ways we try to do things differently, and what happens when conscious parenting becomes its own form of self-erasure.

Thank you for holding me gently.

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I emptied the ibuprofen bottle into my mouth. The pills all too many to swallow at once, but I was determined and desperate.

Each one felt like an accusation as it traveled down my esophagus: the friends who couldn’t understand why motherhood consumed me (“Everyone has kids, what makes yours so special?”), my husband’s longing for our old life (“This isn’t us anymore!”), my own relentless drive to be everything my mother wasn’t (“You must heal this inter-generational wound.”).

A single gulp, and these voices would be silenced.

So I did it.

Thirteen years of marriage and a flourishing career all dissolving into motherhood, ending in death.

I was drowning in the role I’d spent my life avoiding. Too present, not present enough. Too attached, not attached enough. Too strong, not strong enough.

Would it be vile? It seemed so easy in the movies. A sweet slumber, an escape from this relentless tug-of-war between who I was and who I’d become.

I waited for the quiet to come. A hush. A slow dimming.

Then what was this? My pulse throbbing against my skin, pounding, screaming. Her avocado-sized hand in mine. The slow rhythm of her breath against my exploding rib cage. Something hot and rising. Panic? Regret? The sudden realization that I didn’t really want to let go?

I placed her gently on the bed and rushed toward the toilet.

The relief I thought I wanted burned its way back up my throat. I watched as it all came undone, my body making a choice my mind couldn’t. Even in this final act, I put her before myself.

The very thing that had brought me to this edge, lulling me back from it.

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My mother bled through her pregnancy for all nine months, waiting for a miscarriage. Quietly hoping for one. Because she had plans, because she had dreams, because she wasn’t ready to be encumbered.

I understood her now in ways I never had before—the terror of losing yourself to motherhood.

But where she had pulled away, I was overwhelmed by closeness.

Where she had hoped for a miracle baby, I had given birth to one.

Where she had seen an offspring as redemption—because what would it mean if she failed at the one thing her body was designed to do?—I saw mine as a choice and a blessing.

She had a master’s degree. Yet even the uneducated servant had three children.

How shameful would it be if she, with all her knowledge, her affluence, her pedigree, could not do what they did so effortlessly?

So much was at stake.

When I finally arrived, she did not see me for three days. She was too weak, too depleted, too bled out.

Now here I was, three and a half decades later, nearly disappearing for the opposite reason—not from keeping my distance, but from losing myself entirely in my daughter’s existence.

Two extremes of the same maternal void.

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Nineteen years ago, I wrote with defiant clarity in my journal:

I am not owned by nor am I a slave to anyone.

I am me. Uniquely me.

A poet, philosopher, cook, writer, traveler, thinker, debater, friend, colleague, lover.

Born an only child to Indian parents in an era when female infanticide was still quietly accepted, I learned early to be a rebel.

I never knew how to cook but devoured books instead, married across continents and castes, claimed my space in a world that preferred women to be submissive.

I knew then what I was fighting against: the simple labels that tried to contain me.

Someone’s daughter.

Someone’s niece.

Someone’s cousin.

Always someone’s. Never my own.

As if belonging to others was the only way to belong at all. Yet here I was, with a body numb from sleepless nights and continuous giving, and a deep-seated resentment at the patriarchy that defines parenthood, for the most part, as a mother’s responsibility.

This is what they do not tell you.

Motherhood consumes you entirely. The way the person you were fades, blurs, then completely disappears.

The way conversations shrink to the minutiae of snacks and carpool schedules.

Your name fades, replaced by a role. Called out a hundred times a day, yet rarely in recognition of you.

I had spent my entire adult life fighting against being someone’s daughter and wife, only to become nothing but someone’s mother.

She hugged me when I left for my first job. I was 20.

It was brief. Her arms rigid at first, then tightening at the last second, as if trying to compensate for lost time.

I stood there, engulfed in an alien warmth I craved but didn’t know how to respond to.

A sixty-second embrace. Was that supposed to erase a lifetime of being told I was not good enough, not worthy enough, not lovable enough?

I remember her being emotionally unavailable, as if she was afraid of being too invested in a relationship she knew would walk out on her.

She never said, “I love you” until I was enroute to Iowa, half a world away.

Maybe she’d been hurt too much? Judged too much, because of the choices she made? An Indian woman in the 1980s not sacrificing her career for her child, breaking glass ceilings when she was expected to be a “good” mother.

Love, in our house, meant being provided for. Marriage was obligation. Family was a social structure to uphold. Lavish birthday parties, Calvin Klein dresses, airplane travel—the illusion of happiness.

I don’t remember my mother’s arms around me as a child. I don’t remember softness.

That void shaped me, carved out a space that would later overflow.

But I remember longing, unspoken and unlearned, for something I didn’t yet have the words to name.

And now, in this body, in this life, I was nothing but touch. A child curled into me, fingers tangled in my hair, arms that never knew rest. My body trying to heal two generations at once.

Maybe that’s why I gave so much in those early years.

Maybe that’s why I let her press into me, let her take and take and take.

Because I wanted her to have what I never had.

Because I didn’t know how to stop. Because I also didn’t want to stop.

Each night, I lie in bed for 45 minutes with my 11-year-old.

Lights off, stroking her hair in long, steady sweeps, as she recounts her day in scattered vignettes:

A sharp word from a friend.

A joke that made her laugh so hard she cried.

A question that made her feel small.

I do the hardest thing a parent can in those moments: hold my tongue. I remind myself she doesn’t need advice or a barrage of questions.

There is no fixing, no filling that space with anything besides love.

Listening to everything she’s left unsaid in those pauses.

We hug.

She sleeps lighter.

I carry what lingers…

The next day, she wears my periwinkle ones

Slides them on without asking,

laces them up like they’ve always been hers.

She’s barely an inch shorter than me.

"I'll give them back by summer," she grins.

"My feet will be bigger than yours."

My jackets fit her too.

Sleeves still a little long, but not for much longer.

Her strides outpace mine,

on paths where I once carried her.

These borrowed things between us

shoes, jackets, time itself

shape-shifting as she grows.

And then there’s the journal.

The one we pass back and forth, tucking it onto pillows or slipping it into nightstand drawers.

For the things too hard to say out loud.

Sometimes she asks about my past. Other times, I write the advice I never got.

The rule is simple: nothing written will be discussed in person.

Just words, exchanged in ink, the way truths sometimes need space to land.

Last night, I opened it to find her question scrawled in the margin:

Did you always want to be a mom?

I held the weight of that page in my hands.

And then I wrote back:

I’m grateful you chose me to be yours.