It's problematic to believe that a woman's inherent job is to provide care. It is this false notion about gender roles that makes women overlook codependency.

By living life mostly on her terms, my mother taught me to do the same. I inherited her intensity, her self assurance, stubbornness and assertion, and I learnt later that she was insanely proud of me.

We often see motherhood as a switch that changes women. But it is a developmental passage called Matrescence that is far more complex.

We decided to launch “Dadiamma”, my mother’s brand of homemade, preservative-free jams and jellies made from jaggery. As I write this piece, my children and their grandmother are busy putting stickers on the jam bottles.

As relationships become distant it is convenient to keep them so. Gradually you stop sharing small details which sound unimportant, and not worth sharing on the late night phone call after all work is done.