Dear Maa,
While scrolling through reels one ordinary evening after work, I stumbled upon a female influencer who said something that felt like a quiet revelation. She spoke of how her mother once told her, “I wish I get parents like myself in my next life, so that I can have a life like you. Study like you, earn like you, and travel to wherever I can like you.” And suddenly, something inside me shifted. For years, throughout my teens and most of my early twenties, I had carried a silent anger towards my own mother. I blamed her for every stand she didn’t take for me, for every decision she didn’t make according to my idea of right , for every moment she didn’t understand what my definition of freedom was. But that reel cracked something open. Perhaps my mother gave me her fullest version of freedom, the only one she had ever known. She grew up in a world where girls were given less food so they would grow slower, a world where a woman’s dreams were shortened before they could lengthen. ...
