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A few days ago, I stumbled upon a headline on the BBC: 'Nadal - the son every mum would love to have'. I knew who Nadal was, but as someone who’s not much of a tennis fan, the title didn’t exactly excite me. I was simply curious to see what good deeds had earned him such praise, so I clicked half-heartedly only to find myself wading through a hagiographic account of his career—his enduring friendship with Federer, the sheer grind of his athleticism, and, yes, his success in balancing it all. And that was it—no mention of anything else to justify the title, aside from the fact that someone had arbitrarily decided it. The article casually dropped the claim at the end without any explanation. 

It turned out the title was just another piece of clickbait, as many are these days, and without further ado, I moved on with my day. Or I thought I did because, in the end, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Those words got me thinking: who would be the son every mum would love to have? Would it really be Nadal? And what, exactly, makes a man that? Is it, as the BBC seemed to suggest, the kind of gruelling, hyper-disciplined life required of a top-tier athlete? A life lived under the spotlight, with the immense pressure of global expectations, the constant threat, or better yet, the constant certainty of injury? Could it possibly be Nadal—or anyone like him, for that matter? Or perhaps it’s someone else entirely. A son who’s content to live a quieter life, maybe in a quaint little town with a modest teaching gig, stopping by his mother’s for tea on Sundays. A man not chasing glory, but stability, grounded in the comforting routines of an everyday existence. The kind of son who is present.

I got back to the article and read it again. Of course, it was a man who said that, speaking for all mothers out there.  It was a man, as so many before him, telling women what their happiness, their sense of fulfilment as mothers should look like. And it looks like the BBC had no problem with it because, as it happens, the author of the article was also male. In fact, he put it right in the title, exposing this aberration to millions of readers and perpetuating a false ideal for mothers everywhere. And isn’t that telling? It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this strange phenomenon, where male writers assume a maternal voice to project their ideals of manhood. Literature and history are full of examples. A mother’s fervent wish for her son to die heroically in battle—how often that sentiment has been trotted out, only for it to later emerge that those words were placed in her mouth by a male poet or writer, whom we are taught to revere in school. It’s a convenient tool, turning a woman’s love into a vehicle for male ambition, for narratives of bravery or martyrdom. What a tidy trick, to wrap up an idea in the package of motherly love, giving it a kind of unquestionable authority.

And this, of course, raised in me another question. When will we finally start to ask actual mothers what they want? When will men stop defining women’s hopes and dreams on their behalf? Because mothers have been speaking up about what they need for a long time now: affordable childcare, support in their careers, recognition for the unpaid work that sustains families and communities alike. Yet these voices are rarely amplified, often drowned out by the very men who claim to know their hearts so well.

Imagine, instead, if we lived in a world where we actually listened to those mothers. What if, instead of idolising some far-off ideal, we focused on real issues, one son at a time? That, to me, would be an article worth reading—a story about a man who, instead of performing greatness on a world stage, simply turned his attention to the problems that so many women, so many mothers actually care about. Now that, I think, would be the kind of son any mum would love to have.