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.  She gave me everything she could see from her horizon: education, a post-graduate degree, financial independence, the courage to leave home, and travelling.

And when I climbed the pedestal she built for me, I discovered that freedom stretched further than a degree, further than choices of clothing or the permission to study.

It was deeper, wider, more layered.

And I realized that I could explore those layers only because she raised me as per her idea of freedom and independence.

Maybe her mother did the same for her.
And maybe one day, I will do the same for my daughter. Give her my definition of freedom, raise her the way I wanted to be raised, place her on a platform higher than my own, watch her grow into a woman who sees farther than I ever could.

Maybe she too will spend her teenage years being angry with me ,misunderstanding the limits of my vision.
And then, someday when she'll turn twenty-five and find some reel which will make her realize this, and maybe then she'll write a blog on it ? Hehe.

See ya!

Anoushka.