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Dhruv Saxena
My mother turned sixty-two last month.
I know this because I called her on her birthday and she told me, in the tone of someone reporting a mildly inconvenient fact, that she was sixty-two now and her knees were reminding her of this regularly.
I said happy birthday. She said thank you. We talked for forty minutes about other things.
And then, about a week later, my sister sent a photo from the birthday lunch. A proper photo, good light, everyone looking at the camera, the kind that gets framed.
I looked at my mother in that photo for a long time.
She looked sixty-two.
I don't mean that cruelly. I mean it factually. She looked like a woman who had been alive for sixty-two years and whose face showed it honestly, the way faces do when they belong to people who have spent six decades in the world. She looked like herself. She looked fine.
She did not look like the version of her I carry in my head.
The version in my head is somewhere in her late forties. Maybe fifty at most. Capable and central and exactly as I've always known her. Capable of everything, in need of nothing, running the household and managing everyone and generally being the fixed point around which everything else orbits.
The woman in the photo was sixty-two.
I sat with that for a while.
I was at home the following weekend, sitting at the kitchen table while my mother made chai and put out Mom's Magic biscuits the way she always does, and I watched her move around the kitchen and I saw, for the first time in a long time, how she actually moved. Slightly more carefully than she used to. A small pause before sitting down that wasn't there before. Her reading glasses on the counter, which she picks up now without thinking about it.
I had not noticed any of this before. I had been looking at her through the lens of the version in my head and missing the actual person in front of me.
The Frozen Image
Everyone has a frozen image of their mother. It forms at some point in childhood or early adolescence and then just stays, remarkably resistant to updating, regardless of how much time passes.
My friend Nikhil's frozen image is his mother at forty-five. He is thirty-four. She is sixty-seven. In his head, she is forty-five. He told me this with the specific discomfort of someone who has only recently noticed it.
He went home last year for a visit and watched her climb the stairs to her flat. She stops on the landing now to catch her breath. She didn't used to do that. He stood at the bottom of the stairs watching her stop on the landing and something shifted in his chest that he wasn't prepared for.
He called me afterwards and said, "she's old, Dhruv. When did that happen?"
I didn't have a good answer. It happens the same way all slow things happen. Gradually, continuously, entirely visibly, and then all at once when you actually look.
The Math We Don't Do
The frozen image persists partly because we don't do the math.
If your mother is sixty-two and you are thirty-one, she was thirty-one when you were born. She was forty when you were nine. She was fifty when you were nineteen. She has been ageing at exactly the same rate as everyone else, which is one year per year, without exception, for her entire life.
This is obvious. It is also, apparently, not something most of us consciously track.
My friend Priya did the math last year and came to me slightly shaken. She said she'd been thinking of her mother as mid-fifties and then actually counted and realised her mother was sixty-four. Sixty-four. Priya said she'd been off by nearly a decade in her mental model. A decade. She'd been underestimating her mother's age by ten years without realising it.
I asked how that was possible.
She said, "I just stopped counting at some point. She was always just Mum."
What the Frozen Image Costs
The frozen image is comfortable. That's why it persists. It lets you maintain the version of the world in which your mother is capable of everything and in need of nothing and will be there, exactly as she is, indefinitely.
But comfort comes at a cost. When you're looking at the forty-five year old version, you miss the sixty-two year old one.
You miss the knee that needs to be mentioned. The stairs that are getting harder. The sleeping pattern that has changed. The things she's managing quietly that she would mention if you asked the right questions, but you're not asking because in your head she's fine, she's always fine, she's forty-five and perfectly capable.
My friend Karan told me about a conversation he'd had with his mother where she'd mentioned, in passing, that she'd been feeling tired lately. He'd said "get some rest" and moved on. A few months later he found out she'd been dealing with something that she'd managed herself, quietly, because nobody had followed up.
He had not followed up because in his head, his mother did not get tired. She had always been the person who managed everything without needing anything. He had not updated the image.
He updated it after that. He asks different questions now.
The Simple Fix
The fix is not complicated. It's just looking.
Not at the version in your head. At the actual person in front of you, or on the phone, or in the photo your sister sends from the birthday lunch.
She is the age she is. Not the age she is in your head. She has a body that is doing what bodies do over time. She has things she's managing and things she needs and a version of life that looks different from the one she had when the frozen image was formed.
Update the image. It's overdue for most of us.
I look at my mother differently now when I go home. I notice more. I ask more. I watch her move around the kitchen with more attention than I used to.
She caught me watching her last visit. She asked what I was doing.
I said, "nothing, just looking."
She said, "you're being strange."
She went back to the chai. I went back to the biscuits. The updated image is less comfortable than the frozen one. It is also considerably more accurate.
And accuracy, when it comes to your mother, matters more than comfort.
