She Made Me This Way
I cremated my mom yesterday.
My mom was my hero.
She was smart, beautiful, funny, graceful, and courageous — a woman of deep resilience and quiet resolve. She graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee with a Civil Engineering degree, then earned her Master’s at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She met my father at Roorkee, married him, and took a job in the same field. But that’s where their similarities ended. My father, despite his education, was a man steeped in patriarchy. He believed all domestic work was the woman’s job, and never once helped at home or with the children.
For my entire childhood, I watched my mother do the work of two people. She woke at 5am to do household chores, prepare lunch boxes, get the children off to school. Then she got herself ready and went to work. She came home at lunch to feed us, went back, and returned in the evening to set us free to play outside. She never complained. She just did what needed to be done.
I chose Civil Engineering at IIT Delhi to follow in her footsteps even though my JEE rank allowed far higher-prestige choices. But my greatest achievement at IIT wasn’t academic. It was convincing the student assigned my mother’s old dorm room to swap with me. I begged her. She agreed. I spent my years at IIT living in the exact room where my mother had lived 26 years before. I felt her there.
After engineering, I took a job with Schlumberger as a field engineer on offshore oil rigs.
I was stationed in Japan, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, working rigs in the South China Sea. It was physically demanding. Rigging up sensors, handling heavy equipment, traveling on tug boats through rough seas for days at a time. And then there was the mental weight of being the only woman among a hundred men, for weeks at a time, with no way to reach family.
Asking for help was impossible — men read it as romantic invitation. Pushing back too hard was impossible — men would close ranks. You learned to carry yourself with precision, neither too soft nor too hard. You learned to do the work without the safety net everyone else took for granted.
I learned there that I was capable of far more than I had imagined.
In part, I survived that job because I had grown up watching my mom get in a jeep every morning to travel to remote construction sites, climb overhead tanks and work in a male-dominated environment, navigating her way through it a generation before I did.
In early 2024, my mother was diagnosed with aggressive oral cancer.
What followed was two years of surgeries, radiation, and immunotherapy — each one offering hope, each one eventually failing. Throughout this, I supported my mom with hours of care every day. In January 2026, we learned the cancer had returned and spread extensively. In February, I moved her in with me and rearranged my home to care for her properly, 24x7.
For the next ten weeks, I slept three to four hours a night. I was running what amounted to an emergency room inside my house — managing wound care, suctioning, medications, lymphedema drainage, and the endless invisible decisions that come with caring for someone whose body is failing. I hired help, but her needs were too complex, too medical, too moment-to-moment to fully hand off.
During this same period, I was building SmartVerify, my startup developing next-generation data security for the agentic AI era. My husband looked at me one evening and asked: “How are you even alive?” But I knew I was going to be alive.
Because I had seen this before. I had watched my mother wake at 5am for decades, carrying two full lives at once without putting either one down. I wasn’t doing something extraordinary. I was doing what she had taught me. I was simply her daughter.
She made me this way.
I want to say something about what caregiving does to a woman’s career, and what it doesn’t.
I couldn’t share what I was going through with potential investors, customers, or professional contacts. The professional world penalizes women for caring. People see it as distraction, risk, divided attention.
But the truth is the opposite. Caring for my mother gave me clarity and resolve I hadn’t had before. The trivial fell away. What mattered became obvious. I became more focused, more efficient, more direct. There was some slowdown, yes — but no material difference to the direction or success of my company.
What looked from the outside like a liability was, from the inside, the source of everything.
Women in the workplace are like icebergs.
You are seeing perhaps one tenth of what they are carrying. Right now, women in your life — your colleagues, your employees, your peers — are showing up, performing, delivering, while quietly managing things that would flatten most people.
My mother did this her entire life. I did it for ten weeks caring for her. And I will do it again, because this is what the women before me taught me: that you don’t put things down just because they’re heavy.
Men have no reason to change. Women have to push the world to become a better place for us all. And we do that best when we lift each other.
Her legacy lives in me. I am her mirror.
My greatest career accomplishments are real. But this is my greatest achievement: to have done the sacred work of loving my mother to her end. To have held her hand at her last breath.
To have been worthy of the woman she was.
-Kajal D.
Kajal is a former product and engineering leader from Microsoft (SQL Server, Windows, Azure) and AWS, where she served as General Manager of AWS Audit Manager. In 2025, she launched SmartVerify (www.smartverify.ai) to build next-generation data security for the agentic AI era.
