Hearts Still Care

When I think of my mother, I think of a woman who has lived through contradictions — a woman shaped by her own wounds, her own courage, and her own choices. She is not perfect, and neither is our story, but she has been the one constant structure in my life: the person who, in her own distinct way, always had my back.

I came out to her when I was sixteen, sometime around 1992. I still remember the moment clearly — she was cooking, and I had already spent weeks preparing the ground by talking about a boy I had a crush on. When I finally said the words, she didn’t react dramatically. She didn’t lecture me, she didn’t throw a fit, she didn’t even say she “supported” me. She simply carried on, taking it in without protest. In 1992, that silence was its own kind of acceptance. She let me be who I was, without shaming me or pushing me into hiding. That, in itself, was a gift.

Her life was shaped by choices that separated her from her own family. She married my father because he pursued her persistently, and by twenty-two she was a wife and, not long after, a mother. She never fit neatly into the expectations of her Parsi community, and when she married outside it, she was sidelined, pushed out, made the “other”. In that isolation, she learnt to depend on herself. She built a life from scratch, took a 9–5 job in a bank, and became the sole provider for two children. She did this in an environment where her beauty and intelligence didn’t translate into privilege or help. She simply worked because she had to.

My sister and I grew up mostly in the care of my grandmother, my aunts, and my nanny. They were the ones who held me close, and my mother often says they preferred me because they were patriarchal and misogynistic. Over the years, this made her feel pushed aside, as though I had chosen them over her. It’s a complicated emotional knot — her resentment, my affection for them, and the way old family dynamics shaped our closeness. None of it is simple, yet all of it is true.

She has always had strong ideas about right and wrong, shaped partly by being a middle child who felt overlooked, and partly by the life she built out of necessity. She could be strict to the point of being harsh. When I struggled with maths as a child, she would teach me at home after school, and when I couldn’t grasp it, I would get beaten. My first panic attack happened in the fifth standard, holding a maths paper with a score of 12 out of 50, terrified to show her. My aunt had to intervene. After that, I was put into tuitions year after year. Fear became a language between us for a long time.

When she finally left my father and moved into the home she built on her own, she pulled us away from the warmth and affection that my grandmother and aunts had given me. I don’t think she thought through what that would mean for us emotionally — she simply made the move she needed to make.

What followed for me was a childhood that began to cave in from multiple sides. After we shifted, I was being bullied and beaten by my father at home. At the same time, I was being bullied in school — mocked for being effeminate, harassed, and made to feel unsafe. I tried to explain to her that something was happening in school, that I didn’t feel right in that environment, that I dreaded returning there. One morning, walking down the stairs on the way to school, I collapsed. A neighbour found me and carried me home.

When my maternal grandparents arrived, my grandfather dismissed the incident completely and said I was pretending so I wouldn’t have to go to school. My mother didn’t question that opinion. She didn’t ask what was happening to me, didn’t explore the reason behind my dread. She did, eventually, shift me to another school — a convent school closer to what I had known earlier — but the pattern repeated. I was still bullied. I became the fat, effeminate boy who was an easy target. Even my first crush in that school humiliated me at our farewell party.

I had no one to talk to about any of this. Not my sister, not my mother, not my grandmother who was far away, and certainly not my father. My childhood became a long, silent boil — painful, unbroken, and festering. By twelve, I knew I was gay, and I searched desperately for any gay cinema I could find, looking for some sense of reflection. When I came out to my mother, I honestly believed she might ask me to leave. A part of me would have preferred going back to live with my grandmother. So it surprised me when she took it in her stride. She didn’t react with anger or fear. She simply absorbed it. Even today, there are many aspects of being gay that she doesn’t fully understand. She can be quick to judge. But she accepted the truth of who I was, and she allowed me to exist without hate.

When my father and extended family tried to reconcile, they arrived with a VCR because they knew how much I loved films. She still says they used my love for movies to manipulate their way back into our home, and she partly blames me for that reconciliation. It is strange to carry responsibility for something like that as a child, but again, this is part of her way of interpreting the world.

As I grew older, another layer revealed itself — her jealousy. She has carried jealousy from childhood, from watching her parents favour her sister. And at times, that feeling has extended to me. She has told me more than once that I was loved because I was a boy, and she has, in those moments, ignored the fact that I was beaten, bullied, harassed, closeted, and terrified for most of my growing years. She sees my adult world through the lens of straight privilege and often disregards the realities of my sexuality, my heartbreaks, and the impossibility of marrying the man I love in the country we live in. She responds to emotion with action, and believes action alone solves all problems. She does not understand therapy, depression, or psychiatry. She is a grassroots person — she understands what she sees, and she struggles with what she cannot visualise.

What hurts me the most is that she often thinks I don’t understand her, when I believe I understand her better than anyone in the family. Yet she feels antipathy towards me, and the older we grow, the more resentment gathers between us. I have grown cold at times. I have grown short-tempered with her shortcomings. There is a distance growing between us that neither of us seems able to soften.

The rest of that chapter — my father’s violence, his homophobia — is already known. I won’t revisit it here. This is about her.

And the truth is this:

she was a woman who held up a collapsing world on her own shoulders.

She provided. She worked. She survived.

She marched in pride parades with me.

She stood beside me in moments when society could have crushed me.

She may not have always known how to nurture, but she always knew how to protect.

Yet the other truth stands beside it: I wish my childhood had been easier. I wish someone had listened. I wish the bullying, the fear, the harassment, and the loneliness had been recognised early enough to prevent the scars I still carry. I know there are countless people who face far worse, and I’m grateful I wasn’t harmed in those ways — but I refuse to guilt-trip myself out of acknowledging my own pain. I deserved better, and it is fair to say so.

Both my parents could have done more. Both could have understood more. Both could have protected more. The cost of those gaps shows up in the PTSD, the anxiety, and the emotional fractures I navigate even today.

But this, too, is part of the truth:

my mother did the best she could with what she had, with who she was, and with the limits of her own emotional inheritance.

I don’t see her as a saint, and I don’t see her as a villain. And perhaps this is the part that deserves to be said as well:

We are all flawed. Every one of us. My mother did what her conditioning allowed, shaped by the insecurities she carried and the fears she had never been taught to untangle. She parented from instinct, from circumstance, from survival. And in her own way, she provided. She kept my sister and me afloat. She helped shape the people we eventually became. 

But she wasn’t the only influence — my grandmother, my aunts, the women who held me when the world felt unbearable, they shaped me too. They softened the sharp edges. They gave me the warmth she sometimes couldn’t offer. Families are like that — quilted from many hands, stitched by many temperaments.

I often wish the world were a place where people were taught how to be good parents before they brought children into it. But these things aren’t taught, not really. I don’t even know if they can be. Parenting is a strange, uncharted terrain, navigated with whatever maps one inherits, whatever courage one can muster, and whatever love one is able — or unable — to give.

My mother did what she could with the map she had.

And so did I.