Fiction has traditionally fit mothers into two very different costumes: the saint and the monster. The saint is the maa of Indian cinema, waiting at the door with an aarti plate, eating last, forgiving everyone and everything. The monster is the cruel matriarch we love to hate. Both costumes are lies of convenience.
Real mothers, the ones who raised us and the ones we became, live in the enormous space between the two, a space no one talks or writes about.
My novel Cobra Orchard has three mothers in it, and I held them to one rule: no saints, no monsters. Each one of them loves her child. Each one of them leaves a wound. Damaged mothers live in that middle space, and so do most real mothers.
None of them are villains. All of them leave a wound.
Fear, Guilt and Grief
One mother in the book is driven by fear. She loves her daughter so aggressively that the love turns into terror, and the terror turns into treatment. Remedies, prayers, a new worry every season. She spends years trying to fix a child who was never broken, and never once notices that this fixing is what breaks the girl.
Another is driven by guilt. She knows a truth and she can’t bring herself to say it, so she protects, manages and loves in utter silence, and calls the whole arrangement devotion. Her child gets the hot meals and the clean clothes, but never the truth. The damage grows in the gap between the care and the truth.
The third is driven by grief. Decades ago, she made a choice in a world that offered her nothing better, and she’s been quietly paying for that choice ever since. Her love is not ideal and it arrives late, bent out of shape by everything it had to pass through on the way.
What These Mothers Taught Me
I began writing these women as a novelist and finished as someone resembling a witness. The first lesson was that intention and impact rarely align. Not one of these mothers intends to harm her child. The harm happens anyway, because love doesn’t scrub fear, guilt or grief out of a person on its way through.
Whatever a mother carries, her love is carried in the same arms.
The second lesson was harder. Every mother was a daughter first. Each of these women was shaped in someone else’s kitchen, by someone else’s fear, long before her own children arrived to inherit it. Follow a mother’s damage back far enough and you find a girl in another house, dealing with her own insecurities, being the daughter she thinks others expect her to be, learning what love is supposed to feel like from adults doing their own imperfect best.
Knowing where a wound comes from doesn’t heal it. It only tells you how old the wound is.
Every mother was a daughter first. The wound is older than she is.
Why Fiction Needs Damaged Mothers
The saint and the monster aren’t just boring. They inflict harm. The saintly mother sets a standard no living woman meets, yet real mothers are measured against her anyway. At every family function, by every relative with an opinion. The monster does the opposite damage. She lets readers file their own complicated mothers under evil and close the drawer.
Watch the family WhatsApp group on Mother’s Day. The photographs go up, the word sacrifice appears in every second message, and the child who is still hurt about something from twenty years ago sends a heart and says nothing. Neither costume allows the sentence most adult children actually need to say: my mother loved me, and my mother hurt me, and both are true.
Honest, damaged mothers in fiction exist to support this sentence. When readers meet a mother on the page who loves and wounds in the same chapter, something unlocks in their own brains. They get permission to see their own mothers, and sometimes, uncomfortably, to see themselves. Many of these readers are parents now, standing in their own kitchens with their own inheritance, hoping they’ll do better.
Sometimes love is real and still not enough.
That’s what writing damaged mothers taught me about love. Love is almost never absent. It’s almost never enough on its own. And the most painful thing about the mothers in my book isn’t what they do to their children. It’s that they do it while loving them, in the only ways they have come to know.
If your mother loved you and hurt you too, explore Cobra Orchard and meet mothers who do both in the same breath.
Before they were mothers, many of these women were girls in villages that left them no other choice. Indian villages of the 1970s shows the world they had to survive.
My mother loved me, and my mother hurt me. Can both be true in your family? Please tell me in the comments.
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime Paperback.
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Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
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