Today is Amma’s birthday, and as I sit down to write this, I find myself struggling, as I always do, to put into words something that has never needed words at all. There is a particular kind of love that does not announce itself, that does not perform itself, that simply exists in the way air exists, necessary, invisible, and everywhere.
That is what Amma is to me. People speak of the umbilical cord as something that is cut at birth, a clean and final severance that marks the beginning of a separate life. I have often thought that in my case, someone forgot to do the cutting. Some odd years later, it is still there, this invisible thread between us, carrying not nutrients now but something more essential, courage, conscience, and an unshakeable sense of who I am.
I did not grow up with a mother who told me fairy tales about happily ever after. Amma never sat me down and painted marriage as the destination, the prize at the end of a girl’s life that would make everything else fall into place. She did not speak of princes or rescue. Instead, she spoke of becoming, of building a self so complete, so rooted, that whatever came after, whether marriage or otherwise, would be an addition to a life already whole, never a substitute for one.
So many parents, out of love, out of fear, out of their own unhealed wounds, try to smooth every path before their children walk it.
I did not understand this fully as a child. I thought, perhaps, that she was simply being practical, or even a little unromantic. It is only now, looking back, that I understand she was doing something far more radical. She was refusing to hand me a script written by other people. She was insisting, in her quiet and unspectacular way, that my life belonged to me first. This is, I think, the truest form of feminism I have ever encountered, not in slogans or speeches, though I have come to love and need those too, but in the everyday practice of a woman who raised her daughter to believe that she was a complete person, not a half waiting for another half to make her whole. Amma never used the word feminist with any particular emphasis. She did not need to.
She lived it. She worked when she wanted to work and rested when she wanted to rest, and she never once made me feel that her choices were owed an explanation to anyone, least of all to me. She let me see a woman who held her own opinions, who disagreed with my father openly and without apology, who was tender without being servile, and strong without being hard. I absorbed all of this the way children absorb everything, not through lectures, but through watching, through osmosis, through simply being in the room.
What I am most grateful for, though, is something harder to name, she let me fail. This sounds like a small thing, but I have come to understand it as perhaps the largest gift a parent can give a child, and one of the rarest. So many parents, out of love, out of fear, out of their own unhealed wounds, try to smooth every path before their children walk it. They want to spare them the falls they themselves once took.
Amma did the opposite. She watched me make choices she knew, with the clarity of someone who had lived longer and seen more, would not end well. She let me make them anyway. She did not say ‘I told you so’ when I came back bruised, literally or otherwise. She simply opened her arms, let me cry it out, and then, when I was ready, asked me what I had learned. Not as a lesson, not as a moral lecture, but as a genuine question, as though my mistakes were data, not failures, material I could use to build a more accurate map of my own life.
It is because of this that I have never been afraid to fail. I know how rare that is. So many people I meet are paralyzed by the fear of getting it wrong, because somewhere along the way, someone made them feel that their worth was contingent on getting it right the first time. Amma never did that to me. She made mistakes feel like a normal, even necessary, part of becoming. She trusted me with my own life long before I trusted myself with it, and that trust became the foundation on which I built whatever confidence I now carry.
I think often about the kind of strength it must have taken her to stand back and watch, to bite her tongue when every instinct in her must have screamed to intervene, to protect, to fix. That is not weakness, as it might be misread by people who confuse love with control. That is the deepest form of respect a parent can offer a child, the recognition that I was, even as a girl, even as a young woman, a full person capable of carrying the weight of my own decisions. To say that I cannot imagine my existence without her is, as I said, to put it mildly. It would be more honest to say that I do not know where she ends and I begin.
Not because I have failed to become my own person, she made very sure of the opposite, but because everything I understand about being a person, about being a woman, about being honest and brave and unafraid of an imperfect life, was first shown to me by her, before I had the words to ask for it. So today, on her birthday, I do not think I will manage to say any of this out loud. We are not, either of us, people who say such things easily. I will probably just hold her hand a little longer than usual, make her favorite tea, and let the silence between us carry what it always has, everything. Happy birthday, Amma. The cord was never cut, and I hope it never is.
The writer is a seasoned professional and can be reached at [email protected]