A Maternal Nudge: When the story is not the storm but the stillness

 IT WAS A MONDAY made of mild light and muted motivation. The dal was warm, the sabzi simple, the rotis puffed with patient perfection.

Across the table sat my mother—81, upright and unsentimental, going strong in spirit and spine. She has outlived eras, endured losses, edited my excesses. She is my first audience and fiercest auditor. She keeps me honest. She keeps me hungry. She keeps me from drowning in the syrup of self-pity or the swamp of melancholy.

“Mom,” I said, pushing food more than eating it, “What should I write about today? I’m not getting it. I’m not getting it.”

She tore her roti, dipped it, tasted it. Then she said, steady as scripture, “Write about that. Write about not getting it.”

There it was. The assignment disguised as absence.

We dramatise writer’s block as if it were a barricade—brick, brutal, unbudging. We imagine a wall where there is, in truth, only weather. Some days the sky inside you is cloudless and carefree. Some days it is congested with competing currents. Monday was monsoon in the mind. Too many topics tap-danced at the temple. Too many metaphors elbowed each other in the hallway. None would sit still long enough to be chosen.

But my mother mistrusts melodrama. She survived the Partition’s pain, fragile finances, a son’s flamboyant detours. “Nothing is as dramatic as you make it,” she says, with a smile half mercy, half mischief. To her, the missing mojo was not a crisis. It was a clue.

Write the wobble. Write the waiting. Write the weariness. So here I am, confessing the confusion.

The truth is, I don’t lack language. I lack landing. I know what I want to circle; I simply cannot find where to descend. The idea hovers like a hesitant helicopter— visible, vibrating, unwilling to touch ground. Hovering is harder than hunger. Hunger is honest. Hovering is hazy.

At lunch, my mother watched me unravel. “You think too much about the reader,” she said. “First write for yourself. Then we’ll see.”

We’ll see. The most maternal of mantras.

Perhaps writer’s block is not blockage but bruised ego. We want the column to be cinematic, seismic, shareable. We want applause before articulation. And when the words arrive without fireworks, we dismiss them as dull.

But writing, like cooking, is not always spectacle. Some days it is sustenance. Some days it is khichdi, not caviar. Comfort over cleverness. Clarity over choreography.

My mother has never chased shine. She seeks sense. When I veer towards vanity, she anchors me with arithmetic: “Does it say something true?” That is her only rubric. Does it say something true?

Here is a truth: the block is a barometer. It tells you you care. If the column were casual, the sentences would spill like loose sugar. But when you wish to write something worthy, you hesitate before you harm it with haste. The soil stiffens before it softens. The seed resists before it roots.

Another truth: beginning is bravery. Not brilliance—bravery. The courage to commit a clumsy first sentence. Momentum builds breath by breath, not bang by bang.

My mother finished her meal and folded her napkin with finality. “You’ll write,” she said, not as prediction but as promise.

And I did. Not because the muse descended in silk and song, but because an 81-year-old woman across the table refused to indulge my theatrics. She reminded me that not getting it is part of getting it. That doubt is not deficiency. That Monday mood is not mortal.

So if you, too, are sitting before a screen, stalled and self-suspicious, consider this your maternal nudge. Write the wobble. Write the weather. Write the waiting.

Sometimes the story is not the storm. It is the stillness before it. And sometimes, the column you were meant to craft is born not from mojo—but from mother.