What Suhani wants her mother to know

I have your eyes but not your hurt. I sound like you, without the tinge of loss you have in your throat. Is that the problem, Suhani Khan Acharya asks her mother in this startlingly resonant essay.

Listen to the secrets of the universe as 22-year-old Suhani shares what her mother does not know:

My mother doesn’t know that I…love her; for all that she is, for everything and everybody she has been before. For all the versions of herself that she locks in her wooden cupboard.

They’re not secrets anymore, or maybe they never were. Locking up a frown and putting on a smile hides a transparent disguise of relentless anguish, pain and resentment. Perhaps it’s the female experience, to have multiple versions of yourself, that you wear like a skin suit, every morning a new role, a new person, one you may like or despise.

I read somewhere that mothers and daughters exist as wretched, broken reflections of each other: I am all that you are, and more. Do you resent me for it? Am I better for it or should I have spent more time mourning the loss of you? I have your eyes but not your hurt. I sound like you, without the tinge of loss you have in your throat. Is that the problem? I am too much like you, but more. Is it too much to wake up every morning and look at what could’ve been? Am I too much? Is that why my mother thinks that I don’t love her? When a simple conversation turns into an argument with loud screams and melodramatic tears, she probably thinks this.

She doesn’t know.

This year I was home with my family in Mumbai on my mother’s birthday. The evolution from fifty-five to fifty-six has been remarkable and mind-boggling. The development from January to June has shocked me. My mother doesn’t know that I look at her with love: with special goggles reserved only for her, where I notice everything, the change in tone, a modification in reaction and the pursuit of being better. My mother doesn’t know. Or maybe she doesn’t think.

I would imagine it to be a funny thing, to see a younger you. To witness all the mistakes you made yourself, but this time through an extension of yourself. You can’t tug at the umbilical cord anymore, pulling, “No! Stop it!…You should know better” (I should’ve known better). The egg has grown, far far away from you. How do you stop it from living a life similar to yours? A life you lived once, years ago. Back then you must’ve thought, “my 20’s are the time to find myself, to have all the existential dread, to cry for my child self and embrace adulthood, to not know who I am…I’ll figure it out.”

Did you ever figure it out?

A year ago, I gifted Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to my mother. I had read it and had a moment of reckoning; for all the women in my life. Both my grandmothers, all my aunts and most specifically, my mother. In the book I wrote: “I hope we give you a room of your own”.

Did we?

The four of us moved into a three bedroom apartment with a balcony and a gigantic living room - a refreshing change from our tiny two bedroom where a thousand things (and multiple emotions) were stuffed into trundle beds and glass cupboards. In this new house, there were 3 bedrooms. One bedroom for parents, one bedroom for sister and one bedroom for ? Not for me, no; for my mother; a study.

The study of her dreams with pink walls and a black and white sofa, where she could sit all day, typing away, writing the world’s story. I thought to myself and later to my father, “Where is the space for me? It’s been 20 years of sharing a room, sharing a cupboard, sharing a life. Why can’t I get a room for myself?” My father shrugged. I didn’t ask my mother. I didn’t want to. I lived abroad, I shouldn’t ask for a room for myself. This study was my mother’s favourite room. The AC on 24, sitting on her wooden wicker chair, her legs resting on the stool, she created her nook. So I stayed out of it.

My mother doesn’t know that these are the ways in which I love her.

I was sitting with her the other day. My sister came in, envious, that we got ‘alone time’. I said, “We finally have something…don’t ruin it now.” I’m constantly pulling at strings, tugging and toying, pushing us together, gluing the cracks, making her smile. Mother’s love is a strange thing. You never think you have it but when it begins to appear like a faded message in a foggy car window, it starts to feel all too strange. Is it new? Is it permanent? Is it real? Can I close it in my fist like that ladybug I caught in my hands 11 years ago? Or will I have to let it go and hope that it comes back to me?

For a long time, one that feels like my whole life, I thought, ‘my mother doesn’t like me’. Sure, she might love me, of course she loves me. But does she like me? Just like the scene in Lady Bird, I was also standing in a dressing room, in a Gap dress, my mother picked out for me, staring at myself in the mirror, fifteen pounds heavier than I am now, face caked with horrendous makeup and a receding hairline, I too wondered, does she like me? Why doesn’t she like me? Am I too dumb? Not what she wanted? Am I constantly disappointing her?

Something gnawed at me; the need to be liked by mother, to make her feel some sort of proud, some happiness, to not fall into the same trap. Was she feeling the same way? The curiosity of our lives is stuck in the words we stifle down our throats, gulping it down like a big sip of chilled, bubbly beer, with one or two burps of missed opportunity.

My mother doesn’t know any of this. Bit by bit, she is finding out. I guess that’s what growing older with your parents means. Being honest and truthful. My mother doesn’t know that I love her and perhaps I don’t know that she loves me.

Currently learning how to navigate living in two different countries, 22-year-old Suhani Khan-Acharya is a 22 year old reader, writer and ardent observer (of life and media). With loud opinions and a brain that is constantly on fast forward, Suhani finds peace in writing what she thinks.