I don’t think we notice the people who hold us up until something gently forces us to look.
There is a moment from yesterday that has stayed with me. Nothing dramatic. Just a long day in the garden, soil under our nails, the quiet satisfaction of preparing for something that will only reveal itself months from now. I was putting the tools away when I heard a small sound behind me. I turned, and there she was. My mother. A glass of water in her hand. A soft smile. A look that said she had already seen what I had not yet registered in myself.
I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t even thought of it. She simply noticed.
I think about this ability of hers often. Not just as an act of care, but as a way of being. The ability to read a moment without making a statement out of it. To respond without needing recognition. To show up in ways that feel almost invisible in real time, but stay with you long after.
Later that evening, as I sat down to eat my dinner, I was scrolling through Netflix and came across Nonnas. I was looking for something light. What I found instead was something that asked a little more of me.
The film circles around a loss many of us spend our lives quietly avoiding in our thinking. The loss of a mother. There is a line that lands with a kind of finality that is hard to argue with. You cannot say goodbye to someone after sixty years. It is not possible. Another truth follows close behind. It does not matter how old you are. There is nothing harder than losing your mom.
I paused. Not because the idea was new, but because of how directly it was presented.
What stayed with me was not only the grief, but the recognition that sits underneath it. The realization that the most important people in our lives rarely announce their importance. They do not arrive with titles or declarations. They are simply present. Consistent. Steady. And we move through that presence as if it is permanent.
Until we are asked to imagine a world where it is not.
My mother’s life has not been defined by ease. She grew up as the only daughter among five brothers in a deeply loving family, but in a time that did not always extend the same fairness or opportunity to women as it did to others. Financial hardship added its own particular weight. To say life asked a great deal of her early on would be to state it quietly. What she faced would have defined many people, and not generously. Across her life, there were moments that could have shaped her in very different ways. What she did was something more deliberate than surviving it.
What stands out to me is not what she faced, but how she chose to respond to it.
She chose, again and again, to meet life on her own terms, with a kind of dignity that does not arrive from comfort but is forged slowly through everything that is not comfortable. She moved through difficult circumstances with a grace that never performed itself, a confidence that never needed an audience, a patience that I think most people spend their entire lives trying to acquire. Again and again, she met life with a quiet resolve. Not the kind that seeks attention, but the kind that builds over time. A steady dignity. A patience that does not rush to prove itself. A confidence that does not depend on anyone else’s acknowledgement.
I have said this in many settings, and I believe it more with each passing year. My mother is my favourite leader and my most important teacher. Not as a gesture, but as a conclusion I have arrived at through observation. When I think about what leadership actually requires, clarity, care, consistency, the ability to hold steady when things are uncertain, I realize that I learned most of it long before I had the language to describe it.
She did not teach through instruction. She taught through presence. Through stories shared at the right moment. Through choices made quietly but consistently. The lessons were not delivered. They were lived. And over time, they settled in.
I sometimes think we underestimate that kind of influence because it does not present itself in obvious ways. It does not demand attention. But in my experience, it is the most enduring form of leadership there is.
There is also something deeper here that I have come to appreciate more with time. In Hindu thought, the forces we revere most are often expressed in feminine form. The earth is not just land beneath our feet. She is Mother Earth. Knowledge is embodied as Saraswati. Wealth as Lakshmi. Strength and protection as Durga.
I have always found that meaningful. Not as symbolism alone, but as an understanding of what sustains us. That what nurtures, what enables growth, what holds things together without asking for recognition, is worthy of the highest regard. That care is not separate from strength. It is a form of it.
When I think about my mother in that context, it feels less like metaphor and more like precision.
In Nonnas, the son struggles to open a letter his mother left behind. He is not ready for her final words. There is something honest in that hesitation. It speaks to the depth of the relationship. Even when everything is prepared, even when nothing is left unsaid on paper, the moment itself can feel too heavy to carry.
He turns instead to what he can hold. Food. Recipes. The small rituals that keep her presence close. The film suggests, quietly, that as long as he has her food, he has her.
I understand that instinct. Memory does not live only in words. It lives in habits, in gestures, in the way someone shows up in your life so consistently that you begin to carry it forward without realizing.
But what the film also left me with was a more immediate question. Not about how we cope with loss, but about how we live before it arrives. Whether we are present enough now that when that day eventually comes, it does not carry the added weight of things left unsaid, moments left unattended.
I am not prepared for that day. I don’t think anyone is. But I do think we have more agency than we sometimes acknowledge in how we use the time before it.
Last night, after a full day beside her, after that small moment at the garage door, while eating an awesome meal prepared by her with love, I felt a kind of clarity settle in. Not dramatic. Just steady. A recognition that the most important parts of our lives are often built quietly, through repetition, through care that does not call attention to itself.
My mother has been a constant in that way. A source of grounding when things felt uncertain. A reference point for what matters when decisions were not simple. She has never made a show of it, but you always knew where you stood with her. You always knew what was right.
I believe that much of what I have been able to do in my life rests on a foundation she helped build long before I understood its value.
This Mother’s Day, I am not writing out of obligation. I am writing because it feels necessary to say these things while there is still time to say them. Because the people who shape us most deeply are often the ones we acknowledge the least in public.
If traditions have taught us anything, it is that the most powerful forces are not always the most visible ones. Sometimes they are the ones that sustain everything quietly, without asking for anything in return.
Thank you, Mom. For another glass of water. For the stories. For the way you have lived your life. For being my favourite and most powerful leader.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Happy Mother’s Day to every mother who has ever been someone’s lighthouse.
