Calling all moms

The day after Mother’s Day I was driving my kids to school, and my daughter said she wanted to talk to Ammamma on the phone. Ammamma is what she calls my mom. In Tamil, Amma is “mom,” and so Ammamma is Amma’s amma. I was driving, so without thinking, I said, “Hey Siri, Call Ammamma.” There was a time when dictation software was not sophisticated enough to process this request; I remember as a child my dad being an excited early adopter of Dragon dictation only to have it fumble profoundly when faced with the transcription of his name, “Ramaswamy.” Now, however, Siri promptly opened my phone contacts and started calling the contact saved as Ammamma, which is in fact, not my mom, but my own grandma. My own Ammamma.

My own Ammamma used to leave me voicemails, and when she died in January 2020, I saved all of the ones on my phone in a sort of digital remembrance ritual. As my husband and I drove from Philadelphia to New York, I played each one aloud and emailed it to myself with a short description. The voicemails I had from her in my phone were left in 2014 and 2015. After that, her ability to speak deteriorated, and when confronted with the phone, she began to nod along and say one word phrases rather than her usual style of rapid fire interrogation. And then, eventually, even the nods would stop.

But still, Siri was trying to reach Ammamma. Too scared of by being confronted by someone picking up on the other end, perhaps a new owner of the phone number, I hung up.

Moms are quintessentially supposed to be accessible, supposed to act as an appendage for your ability to function, a combination of RAM and hard drive all in one. They’re supposed to remember what day is crazy sock day at school but also when you need your next medication picked up and also are you meeting your developmental milestones and also what’s the Joules/kg to shock someone out of vfib in a code? (That one’s for the doctor moms.) I remember as a child in the ‘90s calling my mom’s office phone, asking in my most serious precocious voice, “May I please speak with Dr. Vis?” “It’s Vidya, her daughter,” I would say, and I would be connected through to ask an urgent question such as, “where is that one notebook, I need it?” My mom would have to pause her work as a pediatric hematologist/oncologist to say, “I think it’s in that cabinet?”

“But I looked in that cabinet already…oh actually I found it!”

The mental whiplash my mom must have gotten! As a mother now, I have realized that the working memory involved in being a mom who is “on top of it” is exhausting.

At the end of season 2 of the Marvel show Loki, which positions the character Loki fighting against the destruction of various timelines of the universe, Loki determines that the only way to preserve the multiple timelines is to sit on a throne in the center and hang on to them with all his might, keeping them alive and organized with his magic. He sits there, stoic, with great strength holding onto the heavy loom of all the timelines in the universe, so they can sprout branches and prosper and not get tangled up or destroyed. So that the fate of everyone rests on him. Loki, I thought, has achieved the essence of motherhood. Horns, a cape, mastering time, feeling the pressure of everyone’s fate on one person. What can’t mom do! Even sitting down can’t be relaxing, because she’s literally holding everything together.

Hyperbole, perhaps, but also, I have started to notice the systemic ways society enacts this expectation that mothers be accessible, even when there are two equally involved parents. In our medical record system, we list parent/guardian phone numbers in the chart for each patient. More often than not, we call a mom first. I have caught myself doing this as a physician even if it was a dad who brought the child in for the appointment. I have started to be more thoughtful about who I call, thinking, who was the one who messaged or called in? Who did I last see with the patient in the office? On the receiving end, I receive calls first for medical issues for my kids, or for the many therapies my autistic son receives. I am grateful for this, as I am also a physician, and the questions I ask are sometimes unique to my own background and not always reproducible by my husband. But when I cannot respond—often if I am in clinic seeing patients—sometimes they call my husband next. But sometimes they don’t. They just leave a voicemail, and move on. Then I’m stuck with a missed call and voicemail after work, and I can’t reach the caller because it’s already the end of the day. Or there will be a group text with a time-sensitive question, but it won’t include my husband, and I don’t see it immediately. It’s frustrating for my husband, too, who wants to be involved but is sometimes accidentally cut out of conversations.

There is a reason moms find it so hard to take a true vacation, because it’s not necessarily that hard to plop yourself in another location, if you have the financial means to do so. It’s because if you have a role that feels irreplaceable—if you’re holding the whole loom together—then leaving, letting go, for even a day, feels hard.

Now that I am a mom, and a physician myself, I am more appreciative that my mom was always so accessible despite her busy job. In fact, even now, she calls me almost every day, and she picks up the phone whether during a busy work meeting or her morning tennis, whenever I need her. And I’m glad that I have my Ammamma’s voicemails to remember her by, though sad that I was inaccessible enough that she had to leave the voicemails, meaning I missed her call each of those times. I’m appreciative that my husband is just as accessible to our kids as I am, even in a world where mom is often considered the default parent. I think my kids see both of us as equally accessible—perhaps him even more so, since he mainly works remotely. I want to be accessible and do the best I can for my kids, but I have realized that part of that means being kinder to myself when I slip up. And part of that means realizing, for all moms, that maybe the best support is systemically treating more of parenting as a joint effort, and not just defaulting to mom as the fixer, the caped martyr sitting, jaw clenched, in the center.