Mother's Day 2019: Mere Paas Maa Hai… and other celluloid tales about motherhood

India has shed a thousand tears over this film, but it took the phenomenal acting talent of Joan Crawford to bring out a very special image of Mommie Dearest. The iconic image of her standing on top of the stairs with a baby in her hand is so different from the ‘No wire hangers!’ scene…

You are allowed to scoff and say Bollywood has also had its share of Lalita Pawar dropping the baby in Sujata in alarm, but that was because she was an aunt, steeped into religion and casteism. Lalita Pawar also played the loving mother substitute as Mrs D’Sa to Raj Kapoor in Anari. Although a fierce mother-in-law has been a trope for years in Indian cinema — and I say Indian because mothers in law have been reviled in cinema (even literature) across all languages, it would be years before manipulative mothers would become a norm on Indian television. Cinematic nasty mothers in law are just a husband’s mother who doesn’t want to share the son’s love with a younger woman. But what happens when Ed Harris brings home Julia Roberts? Can a Stepmom ever win when Susan Sarandon is the perfect mother?

Speaking of perfect mothers, cinema has also laughed at imperfect sons. Albert Finney plays a grown-up, a troubled middle-aged son who comes back home to his mother, played by Debbie Reynolds in a fun movie simply titled Mother. Meryl Streep too has played a famous actress daughter who is forced to move back in with her mother in Postcards From the Edge and Shirley MacLaine makes for an awesome mother who offers advice every woman should take:

But what if overachieving mothers find themselves literally in the bodies of their daughters? Freaky Friday is still a good fun film to watch on the telly whenever it plays.

If a cookie could change your fortune, the things you’d ask! Jamie Lee Curtis finds herself in her teenager’s body and begins to understand how her daughter really feels. Speaking of fortune cookies, the Chinese film The Joy Luck Club was a better book than the movie, but Oliver Stone makes that difficult. The story of four mothers and their quest to give their daughters a better life is heartbreakingly beautiful:

Mothers have been known to fight for her kids from Mildred Pierce (1945) to Serial Mom (1994), but who’d have thunk they would fight evil too? Babadook gave us the creeps as recently as 2014, but it was about a single mom who wanted to save her kid. Mother, as played by Jennifer Lawrence, created as much hate as it did love, but it is a movie you cannot really ignore:

No matter what your relationship with your mother is, one thing is for sure, mothers have to learn to let go of their sons and daughters, someday. Be kind to your mother, because her struggle is real. It is not easy to let go of someone you brought into the world. Birds seem to push baby birds out of the nest easily, but then we don’t live in that world of learn to fly or you might die. We do have forty-year-old men who think their mothers are everything, and daughters who come running back to their mothers when they break a nail, but do mothers really know they’re the villains in their kids lives because they cannot let go?

It is heartbreaking to see old mums waiting for that one call from their sons and daughters who live thousands of miles away (and sometimes in the same city). It hurts to watch mothers fade away in the hope that their kids will give back in kind what youth they spent on their sons and daughters. But there’s always movies that make you smile when mothers manipulate their sons into The Guilt Trip