Gen Z Speaks: A letter from me, aged 25, to my mum when she was 25

Dear Ma,
In the year 1998, Bill Clinton is impeached, George Clooney charms his way through the hit show ER and into your affections, and you become a mother.
The year I am born, you are 25 — the age I am now. You are comfortably married, with a stable job to boot. 
But while you’ve been trying for a baby for five years now, 25 years into the future, I will succumb to the very modern notion of “finding myself”. 
Exploration and reinvention will be the norm for most young adults, even if one is a woman with a “ticking biological clock” — a phrase that is no doubt only mildly less offensive to you now than it will be to me a couple of decades later. 
My grandmother, your mother-in-law, often said that women leave their best years behind much earlier than men, but you will never let me believe that. I cannot help but wonder if anyone has ever told you not to believe it either; if you knew, at age 25, that you had other options.
It’s a thought I can’t bring myself to express to you out loud. After all, I exist because you wanted me. The trappings of motherhood must appeal to you in a way it hasn’t quite yet appealed to me — certainly not “trappings”, in your view, but a gift. 
Here in 2024, the idea of being wholly responsible for someone other than myself makes me almost sick with panic. 
But I’m young and it’s fine that I feel this way. Normal, even. You seem to think I’ll change my mind in due time, seeing as you have names picked out for your hypothetical grandchildren.
Still, my decision to enter into parenthood rests in my hands, a privilege many women before me have not known. 
I’m not against a hypothetical version of me becoming a mother — a put-together, responsible, perfect, future version of me. But that person doesn’t exist yet. 
Did you have the luxury of waiting for that version of yourself?
Maybe that’s an unfair question. 
You were born in India, one of four children. As the eldest daughter, you were perpetually taking care of something or someone. 
With your parents working around the clock, you had to grow up just a bit faster to fill in the empty spaces.
At the age of nine, you learnt to cook warm sambhar, rice flecked with cumin, flat, round chappatis, and much more. You knew how to slice onions so they were perfect and thin, even through the tears they brought to your eyes. You have cut many a chicken’s throat, emptied its guts and plucked its feathers without flinching, the way your uncle taught you. 
Your siblings look to you for full bellies, steady reassurance, and gentle discipline. 
Maybe that’s what it is: You had motherhood thrust upon you so early, and my birth will merely be a natural extension of the shape your life has already taken, a trajectory that’s been decades in motion. 
Perhaps you wanted what you already knew. 
The year is 1998 — but five years ago, the man who is now your husband took one look at you and decided he was never again going to leave your side. 
Your father adores him, which helps because you adore your father. (Years from now, you will constantly tell me I’m just like him: Tall, well-spoken, frustratingly unshakeable. It will become one of my favourite ways you tell me you love me.)
The man who would become my father did leave you one last time — to get his affairs in order here in Singapore before he could officially marry you.
You exchanged letters with him during this separation, letters in which he endeared himself to you so irrevocably that you were willing to leave an entire life behind and make a new one with him in a new country. 
The whole thing is undeniably sweet and makes me irrationally embarrassed of my generation’s obsession with dating apps. (It’s a long story, but mobile phones will one day be able to find you love. Or at least a temporary substitute for it.) 
Fortunately, three decades into your marriage, you and my father will remain cloyingly, undeniably sweet — much to your children’s chagrin.
Perhaps I am simply the result of your love and the life you wanted with him.
In 1998, leaving one’s family and one’s home for a new one is a daughter’s lot in life. 
Even so, the concept is not something I can comprehend. I can’t imagine being thousands of miles from you for more than a few months, let alone in perpetuity. 
You will make a wonderful life for yourself here in Singapore, filled with love and respect. You will have a new family to contend with and care for. 
You will become indispensable to those you work with; competent, personable, a leader in your own right. You’ll make friends wherever you go and charm all of mine too. 
Even so, the idea that you might feel the same strain of separation from your own mother sends a bolt of guilt through me. 
Perhaps that’s irrational (and slightly narcissistic) of me, though. You are, and will always be, incredibly self-possessed. Nothing happens to you that you have not already planned for.  
If anything, you would’ve preferred I arrived sooner. “So stubborn,” you will complain on multiple occasions, equal parts exasperated and fond, “you only do what you want.” 
Well, I am my mother’s daughter. 
Your long-awaited child will arrive in a matter of months. She will seem like a miracle to you, and you will treat her like one. 
I will resent this sometimes, especially as a teenager. I will feel suffocated by you, embarrassed by your relentless, never-ending ardour. 
Here in 2024, I think of it with a dizzying sense of relief. Everyone my age is trying new things and finding out who we are — the prospect of getting it wrong doesn’t scare me because I know that every version of me will be loved. How many people can say that?
A year later, you’ll give birth again. Your husband will flee the room near tears because he cannot bear your pain. 
But you will bear it all, the way you’ve always done.
I may never fully understand the person you are now and the decisions you made — but I know the person you will become. 
I know the nightly rituals that ease your busy mind: Throughout my childhood, you will touch the crucifix hanging on our closed apartment door, then come to both my sister and I as we’re on the edge of slumber, pressing cool fingers against our foreheads in benediction. On nights rest eludes you, you will make the trip twice more. You will only be able to rest when we do – and vice versa.
I know your anxieties, your surprising sense of humour, your competitive spirit, your perfectionism, and your imperfections. 
I know no one has ever been more uniquely qualified to be my mother. 
How can I ever condescend to you? How can I question your intentions, your past and your choices — or lack thereof — when they have brought us all together and in such joy? 
We are both 25 years old. 
You are vitally maternal; I get nervous around pregnant women. You’re friendly where I’m withdrawn and taciturn, overly thoughtful where I’m careless. 
Still, we are two sides of the same coin. 
I want to ask you questions and listen to your answers without judgment. 
I want to know if you would like me if you didn’t have to; I want every version of you to be best friends with every version of me. 
I want to tell you that your love for me will become a foundational fact of my being; the immutable truth I will spend the next 25 years building my life around. I wonder if you know that most people go their entire lives without being as important to anyone as you are to me.
Maybe in 1998, you’re laying your careworn palm on your stomach right now, and feeling the first flutterings of my existence. 
Here in 2024, I lay my head in your lap at the end of difficult days and drift off to sleep while your fingers card through my hair. I am safe and warm.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Angelitha Jayaraj, 25, is a content writer. She believes in the transformative powers of long walks, good books, and listening to Africa by Toto until you pass out.