A Mother’s Fierce, Extravagant Love (Encore)

Summary

Modern Love Podcast Episode Summary: "A Mother’s Fierce, Extravagant Love (Encore)"

Release Date: May 7, 2025

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Introduction and Personal Reflections

The episode opens with host Anna Martin engaging in a heartfelt conversation with her mother. This personal exchange sets the tone for the episode, emphasizing the deep emotional connections that define maternal relationships.

Notable Quote:

• Anna Martin (02:11): "I talk to my mom a lot. She's the person I call when I'm facing a big decision or when a guy I'm seeing makes me feel bad... I feel like I need to hear her voice."

This interaction not only showcases Anna's close bond with her mother but also prepares listeners for the episode's central theme—celebrating and understanding the multifaceted nature of maternal love.

Revisiting a Powerful Essay: "She Put Her Unspent Love in a Cardboard Box"

Anna transitions into the main segment by introducing an encore episode from the Modern Love archives, perfectly timed for Mother's Day. This essay by Genevieve Kingston, read by Julia Whelan, serves as the focal point of the episode.

Summary of the Essay: Genevieve Kingston narrates the profound love her mother exhibited by preparing a cardboard box filled with letters and gifts for her children's future milestones. Diagnosed with advanced breast cancer at the age of three, her mother undertook the meticulous task of creating these time capsules to ensure her presence and guidance would remain with her children even after her passing.

The essay intricately details the mother's routines—balancing her business, family responsibilities, and relentless preparation for her children's lives without her. Kingston poignantly describes opening these boxes at significant moments, such as birthdays and graduations, feeling her mother's love and wisdom bridging the gap created by her absence.

Key Insights:

• Legacy of Love: The mother's efforts symbolize a legacy that transcends physical presence, offering emotional support and guidance through carefully crafted messages and gifts.
• Emotional Resilience: Kingston explores themes of grief, memory, and the enduring impact of parental love, highlighting how these prepared tokens provide comfort during difficult times.
• Intergenerational Bond: The essay underscores the continuity of love and values passed down from mother to child, shaping the latter's approach to life and relationships.

Notable Quotes:

• Genevieve Kingston (Narration) (03:42): "Her words, written to bridge the gap between us, cut through space and time."
• Genevieve Kingston (Narration) (16:13): "...I have been fiercely, extravagantly, wildly loved."

These quotes encapsulate the essence of the mother's unwavering love and the profound emotional connection that persists despite her physical absence.

Tiny Love Story: A Mother-Son Connection Through Cooking

Following the essay, the episode features a "Tiny Love Story" submitted by Yogita Singh, a listener who shares her experience connecting with her teenage son, Vedant, through cooking during the pandemic.

Story Highlights: Yogita recounts how the COVID-19 pandemic strained her relationship with Vedant, who became more withdrawn, often retreating to his "dungeon under the bedroom." To rebuild their bond, she involved him in cooking, turning meal preparation into an opportunity for communication and emotional connection.

Notable Quote:

• Yogita Singh (17:40): "Food and excuse. We talk about feelings again."

This succinct narrative illustrates how shared activities can rekindle communication and strengthen familial ties, even in challenging circumstances.

Interview Segment: Anna engages in a thoughtful dialogue with Vedant and Yogita, delving deeper into their cooking traditions and the significance of these shared moments. Vedant reflects on the joy of creating something tangible with his mother, while Yogita emphasizes the cultural importance of cooking as an expression of love and legacy.

Conversations Include:

• Vedant (19:07): "It feels like a great opportunity for us to make some good food and I guess just talk to each other."
• Yogita Singh (21:35): "Cooking is a very integral part of just the Indian culture. And a lot of the way that you manifest your love for your children is through cooking."

These exchanges highlight the role of cultural practices in fostering emotional bonds and the intergenerational transmission of love and traditions.

Conclusion

Anna wraps up the episode by acknowledging the producers and contributors, reinforcing the collaborative effort behind the poignant stories shared. The episode serves as a tribute to maternal love in its various forms—those who are present and those whose love endures beyond their time.

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Final Thoughts: This episode of Modern Love masterfully intertwines personal anecdotes with universally relatable themes of love, loss, and connection. Through Genevieve Kingston's heartfelt essay and Yogita Singh's intimate Tiny Love Story, listeners are invited to reflect on the profound ways mothers influence and sustain their children's lives, both in presence and in memory.

Transcript

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[Anna Martin]

Hey, everyone, it's Anna. Before we start, the Modern Love team wants to hear from you for our Father's Day episode. We're looking for stories about a moment your dad opened up to you emotionally. Where were you? What did he say, and how did you react? And if you're a dad, we're curious how you're trying to show emotion and vulnerability to your kids. What do you do? Does it feel easy, hard? And how did your dad shape your approach to being a father? Record your stories as a voice memo and email them to modernlovepodcastytimes.com and we may use them on the show. Check out our show notes for tips on how to submit. Once again, we're looking for stories about a moment your dad opened up to you, or if you're a father, how you're trying to show emotion and vulnerability to your kids. Send us a Voice memo to modernlovepodcastytimes.com we can't wait to hear from you. All right, let's start the show.

[Anna's Mom]

Hey, Anna.

[Anna]

Hi, Mom. What are you up to right now?

[Anna's Mom]

Well, I'm sitting actually in your bedroom.

[Anna]

In my bedroom?

[Anna's Mom]

Bedrooms. I'm looking at your little. Your little. Your porcelain pig collection, your. Your marble toad collection, your little glass fish collection, and for some reason, you know how many years later they're still sitting here.

[Yogita Singh]

But it's sweet.

[Anna's Mom]

I'm sitting here working, and it's just nice to sit in here and remember you as a little person.

[Anna]

I didn't know that you worked in there.

[Anna's Mom]

Yeah, no, I'm floating around now. I'm a floater.

[Anna Martin]

I talk to my mom a lot. She's the person I call when I'm facing a big decision or when a guy I'm seeing makes me feel bad or when I just need someone to tell me I don't have food poisoning, even though I did just eat some sushi I left down on the counter. I guess I don't have to call her for any of these things. It's more that I just really want to talk to her. I feel like I need to hear her voice.

[Anna]

Okay, bye, Mom. I love you.

[Anna's Mom]

Bye, Anna. I love you too.

[Anna Martin]

From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love, and this Sunday is Mother's Day. So we went back into our archives for inspiration, and we found an episode from a few years back that we really think is worth revisiting. It's about the miraculous lengths one mother went to to make sure her children would feel her love even after she was gone. It's an essay that feels like a love letter from daughter to mother and from mother to daughter. And it makes me think about calling my own mom, how just by picking up for whatever it is, big or small, she's showing me how much she loves me. It also reminds me how lucky I am that she's there to answer. Coming up in just a moment, Genevieve Kingston's essay she Put Her Unspent Love in a Cardboard Box, read by Julia Whelan. Stay with us.

[Advertiser]

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[Narrator]

In the back of my closet is a small cardboard chest with brass handles and latches. It has followed me to every new address. An old sticker on the bottom says it was purchased at Ross for $26.99. Now there are only three things in the bottom three wrapped presents marked in my mother's tidy cursive, engagement, wedding and first baby. My mother was always prepared. She ran a small nutritional beverage company with my father in Santa Rosa, California. While raising my older brother and me by day, she made marketing slogans, distribution strategies, five year plans by night, bubble baths, pillow forts, bedtime stories. She and I had the same February birthday each year. My parents arranged elaborate parties. She once spent a week making a school of origami fish to swim through tissue paper, seaweed across the ceiling of our dining room. And then, when I was three, she learned she had advanced breast cancer. She immediately began to prepare by researching every available treatment, conventional alternative, Hail Mary. She flooded her body with chemotherapy and carrot juice. She would sit for hours at our long oval dining table, her straight dark hair tied back, surrounded by piles of paper, studying dense technical paragraphs. Medical research, my father said as he shepherded me from the room. She was always looking for a way to survive. When I was seven, the materials on the dining table began to change. Wrapping paper and ribbons took the place of her highlighted pages as she worked busily under the dark fuzz of her shorn head. Scissors swished through gift wrap. Paper creased under her fingers. Ribbon cut to length with one snip. Knots came together with a tiny creak, Swish, crease, snip, creak. She was assembling two gift boxes, one for my brother and one for me. There was a rhythm in the room. She bent closer and closer to write the labels as her vision began to fail, a result of the cancer having spread to her brain. She packed presents and letters for the milestones of our lives. She knew she would miss driver's license, graduation, and every birthday until the age of 30. When the boxes were full, my father carried them up to our rooms. She died 10 days before our shared birthday. That morning, when I turned 12 and she would have turned 49, I woke up early. The box sat three steps from the foot of my bed, just as my mother had shown me. I lifted the latches and opened it. Neat rows of brightly wrapped presents glowed like the spring tulips that were just coming up in the front yard. I opened the package marked 12th birthday and found a little ring with an amethyst at its center. A white card curling around the present read, I always wanted a birthstone ring when I was a little girl. Your granny finally bought me one and I loved it more than I can say. I hope you like it too. Happy birthday, darling girl. Love your mommy. I slid the ring on and traced her writing with my fingertip. Her words, written to bridge the gap between us, cut through space and time. When I got my first period and couldn't bring myself to talk to my father about it, a four page letter from my mother marked first period laid out practical advice. Take time to make friends with yourself. Take time to learn what interests you, what your opinions and feelings are. Find your own sense of the world and which values you hold most dear. As I read, I wanted to fall through the white, lightly textured page and into her arms. Year after year, my mother traveled forward in time to meet me in a little package with a pink ribbon and a little white note card. Happy 15th. Happy 16th. Congratulations on your driver's license. You're a college girl. Happy 21st. Happy birthday, darling girl. Love your mommy. Each time I opened the box, I could for the briefest moment, inhabit a shared reality, something she imagined for us many years ago. It was like a half remembered scent, the first notes of a familiar song, each time a tiny glimpse of her. When I was a child, opening the next package felt like a treasure hunt. As I grew older, it began to feel like something far more fundamental, like air or community, something like prayer. Her messages met me like guideposts in a dark forest. If her words couldn't point the way, at least they offered the comfort of knowing someone had been there before. A decade after I lost my mother, my father followed suddenly. She had spent years preparing her exit. But with him. I blinked and he was gone. The morning of his memorial, the box stared back at me with nothing to say. There was no letter for this. My father left no clues or letters. The only parenting I would have from 22 on was in the box. When I hit 30, the nearly empty box sat in my Brooklyn apartment, clashing with the furniture. Only three packages remained. Engagement, wedding, first baby. The problem was I didn't know if any of those things would happen. I didn't know if I would choose them. I didn't know if I ever wanted to get married. But I had been living with someone for three years, and whatever advice my mother had about committed, loving relationships, I wanted it. Now I felt 12 again and rebellious as I pulled out the thick envelope marked Engagement. My fingertips felt cold as I opened read. My dearest little girl, of course you aren't so little anymore as you read this, but you are little. As I write, you are only seven, and I am facing the terrible sadness that you will be growing up without me. With the smooth pages crinkled in my grip, I found her hopes for what my marriage might look like. She wrote, a true marriage is a marriage of what is most sacred in both of you. One must have an ease about both giving and receiving, a capacity for forgiveness for oneself as well as for the other. A personal sense of balance that is not dependent on the balance of the other. A kind of loving detachment. I didn't know if I was capable of loving detachment. There was no detachment in the love that made the box and no detachment in the love that opened it. She wrote, I'm so sorry to be leaving you. Please forgive me. I know a box of letters and tokens can't begin to take my place, but I wanted so badly to do something to ease your way through the future. Love, your mommy. For 20 years, I have pulled mothering from the box, but I don't know if the next 20 will include the milestones she planned for me. I often wish I could lift the latches, jump inside, and ask her which path I should walk and how I will reconnect, recognize it. I want to ask if the life I'm carving for myself looks anything like she would have hoped. But I know this time travel only works one way. After I read the engagement letter, I put it back with its unopened present and closed the box. Those three final secrets will remain secrets for now. Maybe I'll open them tomorrow. Or in 10 years. Or 20. There's comfort in knowing there's a little left in the box. My mother's gifts. Her letters are a constant reminder that I have already been given what every child, what every human needs. I have been fiercely, extravagantly, wildly loved.

[Anna Martin]

After the break, a Tiny Love story. These are mini modern love essays, a hundred words or less, and this one's by a mother trying to connect with her teenage son. Plus, we get to hear his surprisingly thoughtful reaction. Stay with us.

[Advertiser]

Support for this podcast comes from Estee Lauder. They really duped Beauty Sleep Estee Lauder's Advanced Night Repair Serum helps your skin look like it got eight hours of beauty sleep. Even if you didn't in just one sleep. See immediate radiance and a reduction in fine lines. It really is beauty sleep in a bottle. Get ready to glow with Advanced Night Repair serum@estee Lauder.com friends. Don't let friends miss a good beauty sleep dupe. This podcast is supported by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Cathy Jones, Schwab's chief fixed income strategist, along with their guests, analyze economic developments and bring context to conversations around stocks, fixed income, the economy, and more. Download the latest episode and [e-mail] oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Anna]

All right, whenever you're ready.

[Yogita Singh]

Okay. Hi, this is Yogita Singh. Dave and this is my Tiny Love Story. I wrote this In December 2020, nine months into the pandemic, my 14 year old Vedant dwells in a dungeon under my bedroom. Through the muffled cadence of his voice, I deduce if he's in virtual school or playing an online game. Thrice a day he comes up for air asking what's there to eat? We used to talk a lot on our car rides about life and feelings. Now we have nowhere to go for the holidays. I make him my sous chef, slicing a butternut squash. My knife slips. He takes my bleeding finger in his hand and blows a kiss. Food and excuse. We talk about feelings again.

[Vedant]

Hey.

[Anna]

Hey, Vedant. What's up?

[Vedant]

Nothing much.

[Anna]

So your mom wrote this story when you were 14, but it's been two years now. So are you 16?

[Vedant]

Yeah, I am.

[Anna]

Do you have any early memories of cooking with your mom when you were younger?

[Vedant]

Yeah, actually I do remember we would make rotis. Sometimes these are like bread bowls, things like that. And I definitely remember sometimes in the kitchen I would help, like make them in balls and flatten them with a rolling pin.

[Anna]

So fun.

[Vedant]

But I also remember that I was very particular. Like, I didn't want to get any of the dough, like, stuck to my hands. And getting the dough stuck to my hands was just the most annoying feeling. And I remember I would like immediately rush to the sink and try and wash the dough off my fingers.

[Anna]

Why did you want to be cooking with your mom? What was fun about it?

[Vedant]

I don't know. Just the whole feeling of finishing something from start to finish and what looks like nothing at first. You cook it together, you put oil, you know, you might put it on the pan and all of a sudden it turns from just like random ingredients to like a really tasty dish. So I feel like it's just a great opportunity for us to make some good food and I guess just talk to each other, you know, vent out our feelings and have a good conversation.

[Anna]

Do you think you'll ever become a better cook than her?

[Vedant]

No, I don't think so. She set the standard far too high.

[Anna]

Vanat, could we actually talk to your mom for a minute?

[Vedant]

Yeah, sure. I can get her really quick.

[Anna]

Cool, thanks. Hey, Yogata, how are you?

[Yogita Singh]

Hi, Anna. I'm good. How are you?

[Anna]

I'm great. I just had a lovely chat with Vedant.

[Yogita Singh]

Oh, that's awesome.

[Anna]

So, Yogata, your story is about your relationship with your son Vedant and how cooking has strengthened it. When you were a kid, did you cook with your parents?

[Yogita Singh]

I didn't. I didn't cook at all because I grew up in India and we have house out there to help Cook and clean and do a lot of the household chores. So I would say I grew up pretty spoiled in that manner. But cooking is a very integral part of just the Indian culture. And a lot of the way that you manifest your love for your children is through cooking. I've seen my mom do it for me, but I wasn't really required to be a part of the process. She's done it for me, and I feel I'm just passing on what I learned from her to my kids, my way of passing on my love.

[Anna]

So if you weren't as involved in the kitchen when you were growing up, how did you learn how to cook?

[Yogita Singh]

Because I knew that coming to America, I would have to find my independence. So first I started with Indian cooking because I could always call my mom and ask her, hey, how do you make this? And a lot of times her answers would be, oh, I just eyeball this and eyeball that. I'm like, it's not going to work. You have to tell me teaspoon how.

[Anna]

Much is calm intuition.

[Yogita Singh]

Exactly right. And I'm like, no, that's not how I'm going to learn. So. So I kind of found out the secret ingredients that she would use, but then I would go to a recipe book and kind of find out the proportions of it all.

[Anna]

It sounds kind of daunting, though. I mean, speaking for myself, my mom is Chinese. She's an incredible cook. So is my grandma. And I haven't quite hit the point where I've really delved in to making these dishes because it feels really intimidating. And I'm just curious, was it important to you to cook with Vedant from a young age?

[Yogita Singh]

I think as he started getting older, I realized that one day he's going to fly away. He's going to be going to college. And when he looks back at the days that he spent at home, what are some memories that I can give him?

[Anna]

It's almost dinner time right now, actually, it's like close to 6pm when we're talking. What are you making tonight?

[Yogita Singh]

Tonight, my mom is here from India, so she's the one cooking for us. She is making matar paneer for us. It's an Indian dish with cheese and peas. So this just goes in circles, right?

[Anna Martin]

Wow.

[Anna]

I really wish I could come over for dinner right now. I'm getting so hungry.

[Yogita Singh]

Come on over.

[Anna]

Thank you so much for talking to me today, Yogita.

[Yogita Singh]

Thank you so much.

[Anna Martin]

This episode of Modern Love was produced by Julio Botero and Hans Buteau. It was edited by Sarah Saracen and mixed by Elisheba Itup. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell, original music in this episode by Marian Lozano, digital production by Mahima Jablani and a special thanks to Ryan Wagner. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you want to submit an essay or a tiny love story to the New York Times, we have the instructions in our show Notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.