“Ijaa, I am 51 years old… 51! Don’t worry about me.”

But she still does.

She still asks where I’m going, with whom, and when I’ll be back. When I tease her, she sulks. “I’m not worried… just asking. Do I not have that much right?” And then, just as quickly, “Okay, won’t ask… you’re a big girl now.”

“Not big, Ijaa… almost old.” I laugh, but she is hurt.

Yet, in the very next moment, she holds out a plate—fresh Gujhiya, made without sugar just for me, and gulab jamuns with just a little sweetness. “Ijaa, I won’t die of hunger there;”I joke. But she insists, so I eat both, nearly collapsing from a sugar overload.

That’s Ijaa. That’s my Maa … my mumma ..

She was my first home, the first heartbeat I was closest to . They say the umbilical cord is cut at birth, but the invisible one? It never is. It lingers in her worried questions, in the emergency medicine kit she still prepares for me, in the crumpled money notes she slips into my hand. It is in the pickles she makes for her grandchildren, in the warmth of her scolding, in the quiet way she ensures I’m okay—even when I insist I don’t need her to.

And now, I find myself doing the same.

“Did you eat? Take your medicines. Don’t stay out too late. I’m not worried, just asking…” My daughter sighs, rolls her eyes, half exasperated, half amused—just as I once did. She doesn’t understand yet, just as I didn’t then. But one day, she will.

I used to believe independence meant outgrowing my mother’s care. That adulthood was about standing on my own, making my own way. But now I see the truth—you don’t grow out of a mother’s love. You grow into it.

One day, my daughter will find herself uttering the same words, with the same mixture of love, worry, and quiet devotion. And when she does, she will know—just as I do now—that the cord was never cut.

From Ijaa to me, from me to her.

Because a mother’s love is not something we leave behind. It is something we carry forward, from one heartbeat to the next.

Suvi’s Scribbles