She deserved better than a phone call
my mother and i don't talk the way we used to.
i don't know exactly when it happened. somewhere between me moving to bengaluru, starting a job that ate everything, and life becoming the kind of thing you survive rather than actually live — we went from talking every day to talking on sundays. then every other sunday. then "i'll call you back" that sometimes didn't happen until thursday.
she never complained. that's the thing that gets me. she never once said — you don't call enough. she just picked up every time i did call, like no time had passed, like she'd been waiting right there, which she probably had been.
mother's day is on may 10th this year.
i've been sitting with that date for three weeks now.
last year i sent flowers. they arrived a day late and she sent me a voice note saying they were beautiful and i could hear in her voice that she was being kind about it, the way she's always kind about everything, the way she's been kind my entire life without ever asking for anything back.
i don't want to send flowers again.
i want to send something that stays.
i found this thing — the Meri MAA Personalised Wooden Plank — a wooden wall hanging with Meri MAA in hand-painted folk art letters across the top, and below it a jute string with little coloured pegs holding photographs. actual photographs. ones you choose.
i went through four years of photos on my phone looking for pictures of her where she actually looks like herself. not posed. not at a wedding with a fixed smile. her.
i found three.
one from the last time i was home — she's standing in the kitchen doorway in the morning, not knowing i was watching, holding her chai, looking out at the street. she looks peaceful in a way i don't see enough.
one from a video call that my sister screenshot without telling either of us — my mother mid-laugh, head tilted back, completely unguarded.
one from eid two years ago — all of us at the table, her at the head for once, looking at everyone with that expression she gets when the people she loves are all in the same room.
three photos. three moments of her i'd been carrying on my phone without doing anything with them.
i ordered it the same night.
i think about what she's going to feel when she opens it.
not the polite gratitude of someone receiving flowers that arrived a day late. something else. the specific feeling of being seen by someone who you assumed had gotten too busy to look.
i have gotten too busy to look. i know that. i'm not going to pretend otherwise.
but i looked this time.
her name on a wall in her own home. her face in three photographs chosen by her daughter who lives far away and calls less than she should and loves her more than she probably knows.
may 10th is three weeks away.
if you're reading this and you also have a mother you call less than you should — not because you don't love her but because life got complicated and distance got comfortable and sundays kept becoming every other sunday — this is me telling you:
find something that stays.
not flowers. not a call that ends.
something she wakes up to. something on her wall. something that says i was paying attention even when it didn't look like it.
it's not too late.









