This Is What It Looks Like to Be the First Woman in Your Line to Heal

Today, I made my mother cry.
Not from pain.
Not from disappointment.
But from something gentler. From something I had written for her.

A letter. A reckoning. A love note. A surrender.

It’s strange—how when you begin the hard, ugly, necessary work of healing yourself, you start to see your parents not just as the people who raised you, but as the people they were before that. The people they were never allowed to be.

Her tears weren’t loud. They didn’t need to be.
They said: You see me.
They said: You value me.
They said: I didn’t even know I was waiting for this kind of permission.

I’ve spent years undoing the damage of silence.
Of pleasing.
Of shrinking.
Of surviving.

But her tears reminded me: this work doesn’t end with me. It echoes backward, too.

Because when I started healing myself, I began to see our generational wounds not as inheritances, but as invitations.
To look closer.
To forgive deeper.
To choose differently.

This is what healing can look like.
A letter.
A tear.
A mother finally exhaling.

माँ, अब तुम्हारी बारी है