Every year, on the second Sunday of May, we celebrate mothers. We thank them for their sacrifices, patience and love. 

But there is a particular kind of mother we rarely stop to honour — the one who looked at the life she was handed, the wounds she was raised with, and made a radical decision: “my children will not carry this.”

She decides that her children will not inherit poverty, silence, or the belief that a woman's worth is decided by the family she serves or the suffering she endures.

This Mother's Day, we look at five women across India who did exactly that — each in a different place, each carrying a different kind of inherited weight, and each finding her own way to courageously put it down and leave it behind.

She stopped at Class 5. Her daughters won't

Nijara Devi was married at fifteen or sixteen, and her own schooling stopped at Class 5 because the next school was too far. She has six children, and two of her daughters are currently in Classes 9 and 12.

For the last seven months, she has been coming every day to a training centre in Chundi village in Rajasthan's Jaisalmer district, run by an initiative called Thar Ki Udaan. 

She fits it in after the household work is done, and she stitches dresses, earning Rs 250 per piece, up from Rs 200 when she first began.

"I use it for my children's copies, pens and household items," she says.

The sentence is quiet, but what it contains is not. A woman who stopped studying in primary school is spending her own earnings — money she made with her own hands — to keep her daughters in secondary school. 

In the Thar, where women's lives have for centuries been shaped by purdah and early marriage and the particular invisibility of being a woman in a desert where the nearest school is often farther than a girl is permitted to walk, this is not a small act. 

She did not have the education she is now making sure her daughters........

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