Dhruv Saxena

I remember the exact moment it happened.

I was twenty-six, home for a week, and my mother was trying to figure out whether to go to a specialist or stick with the family doctor she’d been seeing for twenty years. She had her phone in her hand, the doctor's number on the screen, and she turned to me and asked, “What do you think I should do?”

She wasn’t asking in the way she used to ask things when I was a child. Back then, her questions had answers built into them. “Do you think you should be rude to your elders?” wasn't really a question. “Don't you think you should sleep early?” wasn't either.

This was different. She genuinely didn’t know. And she was asking me.

I didn’t really know how to respond. And that’s not because I didn’t have an opinion, but because I wasn’t sure when I had become the person whose opinion she needed.

The switch

It happens to all of us, and it happens quietly. And, to be honest, pretty suddenly too.

One day she’s telling you to eat your vegetables, and a few years later, she’s asking you whether she should sell the flat. You blink, and somehow the whole thing has shifted, and you’re sitting across from the woman who once knew everything, and she’s looking at you like you might have the answer.

The role reversal. That’s what they call this, right? But that phrase makes it sound far cleaner than it actually is. The truth is messier. It’s both of you trying to figure out what this new arrangement means, at the same time, with no instructions.

Think about what she was doing for the first twenty years of your life.

She was the one who decided. What you ate, where you went, what was safe, what wasn’t. She held all the information you didn’t have yet. She’d already made the mistakes you were about to make, so she tried to steer you away from them. Her authority came from experience.

And then, slowly, the information started shifting.

You went to college, learned things she hadn’t. You moved to a city she didn’t know as well as you. You started using technology she couldn’t quite keep up with. You built expertise in things she had no frame of reference for.

And suddenly, for certain questions, you were the one further along.

The first time

The first time she asked for your advice about her health, what did you feel?

If you're honest, it was probably a strange mix of things. Some part of you must have felt useful, important, and even trusted with something serious. Another part felt a quiet panic.

It’s because her asking about her health meant acknowledging that her health was something to be discussed. That things could go wrong. That she was, in fact, not invincible.

For most of our childhood, our mothers feel like the most permanent things in our lives. The idea that she has a body that can fail, that she needs someone to help her navigate it. And that someone could be you… is a difficult space to navigate.

It’s not just a question about a doctor. It’s the first real glimpse of what's coming, eventually, for all of us.

The toughest questions

There's a particular kind of advice she might ask for that hits hardest.

I mean, when she asks you about something emotional. About a conflict with a relative. Or whether she made the right decision when you were young. Or when she expresses her own regrets.

That’s when you realise she always had an inner life you weren't privy to.

She was never just your mother. She was a person with doubts and second-guesses and things she wished she’d done differently. And now she’s letting you see some of that. Not because she’s fallen apart, but because you're finally old enough to hold it with her.

Can I be honest? It felt very weird the first time my mother shared something emotional with me. Weird because I wasn’t used to being her friend. When did the dynamics change? What made her start trusting me? When was the switch?

I really wanted to listen to her, and respond lovingly. But my body wasn’t to it. I had been accustomed with taking instructions from her. And over time I noticed I wasn’t the only one who had reacted weirdly to my mother’s first-ever emotional expression.

Getting used to it

Here's what I've noticed talking to people about this.

Most of us get the practical advice-giving right. We research, we compare, we find the best option. We are efficient and helpful and proud of ourselves for handling it.

What we get wrong is the emotional part around it.

We get impatient when she asks the same question three times. We get frustrated when she doesn’t follow our advice after asking for it. We treat her uncertainty like a problem to be solved rather than a feeling to be sat with.

We forget that she spent twenty years sitting with our uncertainty. Our fears about exams, our heartbreaks, our big decisions. She didn’t always have answers. She was just there, patient, until we found our own way through.

Maybe that’s what she needs from us now. Just someone steady, next to her, while she finds her way through.

I believe the role reversal isn’t a single moment. It’s a long, ongoing negotiation.

Some days she’s still the authority. She still knows things about your family, your history, your own patterns that you haven’t figured out yet. She still catches things in you that you can’t see in yourself.

Other days she needs you in ways she never needed anyone before. And that requires a kind of patience and gentleness that we’re not always used to.

But you got to remember something.

Treat it like a privilege

She asked for your advice. She trusted you with her uncertainty. She let you into a part of herself that she kept private for years.

That’s cannot be a burden, right? That’s her telling you that you’ve become someone she can rely on.

When was the last time you actually stopped and recognised what that means?

She raised you to be this person. The one she could turn to. And now you’re here, and she’s asking, and the most important thing isn’t even the advice you give.

It’s that you don't make her feel stupid for asking. And…I get it. It’s not a switch, and it won’t be immediate. But put in the effort. It’s about the most beautiful woman in the world, after all :)

By the way, I told my mother to see the specialist. She did. It turned out to be nothing serious, which is the best possible ending.

But I think about that moment a lot. The way she turned to me with her phone in her hand. The way she trusted me to know.

I wasn’t ready for it then. I’m still not sure I’m ready for what comes next.

But I’m paying attention now, in a way I wasn’t before. You must too, buddy.