I cried so much on Mother’s Day 2025, when I ubered flowers and chocolate to my mother in New Jersey because I could not be there myself. She was ecstatic–nearly over the moon–for two Ferrero Rocher’s and a bouquet that should have been bigger. I cried so much when she thanked me over the phone because she shouldn’t have. She should have been disappointed at my lack of effort. She should have asked me why the flowers weren’t grander and why the chocolates weren’t gourmet and why I wasn’t there hand delivering them when I only lived two hours away in Harlem. She should have been used to the effort. What I had done for her should have been subpar. I cried because we had never done much for her on Mother’s Day because we were children and because my father never set the example that we should have. I cried because I know my mother cried years ago when she saw other families going above and beyond for the celebration. I cried for all the birthdays and Mothers’ Days that my mother cooked and cleaned for us. 

My mother is twice the woman and twice the man I am. I realize this now in my kitchen cooking pasta alone. As I add the spinach in I wonder how my mother did it all when I was young. How did she learn how to make pasta for the first time? Where did she get the recipe? A food she had never eaten and never liked despite our family only ever going out to dinner at Olive Garden. I used to think my father just strangely loved Olive Garden for some reason. Now I know that my parents only took us there because they knew it was the only food I would not complain about. I would take two bites and decide I was full, but I would not complain. 

One time when I was 11 I told my mother I just didn’t like roti anymore. Roti–perhaps one of the most convenient and culturally significant grains–I had decided to replace with pasta. That was why I started cooking very young. I could no longer stand my mother’s cooking. My mother had learned to make so many random American meals from God knows which cook books and Youtube videos that I sometimes enjoyed more than the recipes coiled in our DNA. She was both relieved that she did not have to go through the battle of finding something I would ingest everyday and saddened by the fact that I was bit by bit abandoning them. 

I will admit that it is strange how so many of my taste buds were colonized in America, to the extent of me enjoying canned beans on toast, while my brother’s remained cemented in our mother’s hands. It is ironic because I always held it over him that I was born on Punjabi soil while he was born in America. And yet my brother is closer than ever to the flavors I am now beginning to melt back into my meals. 

I have no idea what exactly pulled me away from myself so strongly and very unlike myself, I have no interest in figuring it out. I only regret not eating from her hands more often and that regret has replaced whatever desire I might have had for “figuring myself out”. I let the time I had to eat from her hands slip through mine, but I am grateful to know that at least I have entered into the phase of my life in which I can feed her. Much like our meals at Olive Garden she may not love them beyond the convenience of someone else cooking for her, but I can’t complain.