Dhruv Pathak
By Dhruv Pathak
Who would we be without the women who see us more clearly than we see ourselves?
I call my mom Maaji. I call my wife Baby. And both — separated by generation, by the decades between mother and wife — see the same thing when they look at me. Not the person I show the world. Not the personality hire who talks a good game in interviews. They see potential I have spent my entire life running from.
Maaji raised three children. My brother, my sister, and I. She’ll tell you I caught on fastest — not because I earned the best grades or followed the straightest path, but because I grasped ideas quickly. I had patience. My teachers saw it too. I cared about understanding more than outcomes. People more than profit. In another mother’s eyes, these would have been flaws to correct. In hers, they were something else entirely.
She saw someone who could do remarkable things, if only he believed in himself.
I didn’t.
The day I dropped out of university, I didn’t call her. I couldn’t. Instead, I avoided her calls for weeks, posting on Facebook as if nothing had changed. When we finally did speak, she didn’t cry on the phone with me. Maaji isn’t the type. But my brother told me later what my silence had cost her, that each missed call had landed like a small betrayal. That my disappearance hurt worse than any failure ever could.
While some mothers, faced with a son who drops out, avoids calls, and wastes his potential, would have given up. Or gotten angry. Or demanded he become someone else, more practical, more focused, more like everyone else.
Maaji did none of those things.
She waited. She believed. And when I finally came back, ashamed and certain I had burned every bridge, she simply said, “Welcome home. Are you ready now?”
I didn’t understand then that her belief wasn’t conditional on my success. It wasn’t something I had to earn through achievement or prove through external markers. She saw who I was underneath the anxiety, the procrastination, the self-sabotage. And she refused to look away.
But that belief came at a cost to her.
Not sleepless nights. Maaji can fall asleep anywhere, anytime, a superpower I’ve never inherited. But she absorbed the cultural pressure from family and community: What is your son doing? Why isn’t he settled? When will he be serious? She carried the weight of watching your child struggle, knowing that the only thing stopping him was himself.
She carried all of that. And she never once made me feel like I owed her a house or a car.
What she wanted was simpler and infinitely harder: for me to believe in myself the way she believed in me.
For years, I thought staying away when I struggled protected her. I was wrong. The protection she needed wasn’t from my failures; it was from my silence. From my refusal to let her love me when I felt unlovable.
For years, I thought the problem was discipline. Focus. The ability to follow through. But the real problem wasn’t effort. It was a belief.
Men turn our mothers’ belief into a transaction — their faith in our success. We think we repay them through material achievement: the degree, the job, the house, the Instagram post on Mother’s Day saying I did this for you, Ma. When we fail, we assume we’ve broken the contract. So we hide.
Our mothers don’t love the version of us that succeeds. They love the version that’s still learning to try. By avoiding them when we struggle, we deny them the only thing they actually want: to know us, to carry our weight, to believe in us when we can’t believe in ourselves.
Women seem to instinctively know something men rarely appreciate, that belief precedes achievement, not the other way around.
You don’t wait for someone to become worthy before you love them. You love them first, and that love becomes the ground they learn to stand on.
Maaji knew this. She’d always known it.
I just wasn’t ready to receive it yet.
Then I met my wife.
She saw what Maaji did, plus something else: the pain I’d carried for years. The weight of being the son of someone who never learned to set boundaries with family. The anxiety that came from always caring too much, people pleasing, disappearing into my own head.
Caity is the best version of everything my mom taught me to value from a very young age. Someone who uses her intellect not for status, but to help as many people as possible. Someone who sees potential as responsibility, not performance.
But where Maaji’s love was patient and waiting, Caity’s is active and insistent. She encourages me, no, pushes me to do things that make me more uncomfortable than I ever realized I needed to be.
She teaches me more than I could ever repay her for. And that’s exactly why I do everything I can for her.
I’m not religious. I don’t believe in fate or divine intervention. But there’s something almost spiritual in the way these two women found me, or perhaps, refused to let me stay lost. Maaji and Caity share the same characteristics, the same unwavering belief, the same refusal to let me hide. They are separated by generation and circumstance, yet somehow enmeshed in their vision of who I could be.
Without them, my belief fades. And when I stop believing in myself, I stop becoming anything at all.
With them, I have something rarer: a mirror I can’t look away from. Two women who see the same person across time and context. And who refuse to stop believing until I finally start to see it too.
Maaji taught me what unconditional love looks like. For Caity, I’m learning to believe I deserve it.
I promise to stop hiding when I struggle. When anxiety tells me to disappear, to avoid the calls, to pretend everything is fine, I’ll stay. I’ll let you carry the weight with me instead of protecting you from my unworthiness.
I promise to allow you to push me into discomfort, understanding that my self-reflection is not stagnation but preparation. The person you trust isn’t merely a concept, he’s simply scared.
I promise to stop treating your love like something I need to earn. Maaji spent decades waiting for me to understand this. You shouldn’t have to wait that long.
I promise that when I doubt myself — and I will doubt myself — I’ll act as if your vision is true. Not perfectly. Not without failure. But consistently. The true way to honor the women who believe in us is to show up every day as someone worthy of that belief.
I used to think honoring my mother meant buying her a house one day. Now I understand it means becoming the man she always knew I was.
And proving to my wife that her belief wasn’t misplaced.
Men offer encouragement, which is often loud, performative, conditional on results. We post on Mother’s Day. We dedicate our wins. We promise to make them proud someday.
The women in my life offer something rarer: quiet confidence that can never be disavowed. They don’t cheer for the version of me that succeeds. They believe in the version that’s still learning to try.
This Women’s History Month, I’m not celebrating what I’ve done for them. I’m honoring what they’ve done for me. They held up a mirror until I finally started to look.
To my mom: Thank you for waiting.
For my wife: I’m ready now.
Dhruv Pathak is a salesman and aspiring writer based in St. Louis, MO originally from Charlotte, NC. He writes to better understand people and contribute to our shared humanity. Contact: pathak.d@icloud.com.
