The Men Who Explain My Mother to Me

There are few things more maddeningly consistent in life than the way older men explain things to you that you already know. Or worse — things you’ve lived. As a woman, this is standard terrain. As a woman in a family full of uncles and aging wanna-be patriarchs with a flair for unsolicited wisdom? It’s practically a Greek chorus.

The most recent example was almost poetic in its absurdity.

My uncle — let’s call him The Interrupter General — asked me for an update on my mother's health. She’d recently suffered a stroke and was knee-deep in physical and language therapy. I was the one visiting at the clinic, talking to her doctors, coaxing words back into her daily vocabulary, the one watching her rebuild herself syllable by syllable.

While chopping vegetables I began explaining how she was doing. Not in vague terms, either — in specific, lived-in detail, personal observations. I described her progress with verbs. I told him how the right word for “safetypin ” kept slipping away, how she was frustrated but fighting. 

Mid-sentence — and I mean mid— he chimed in.

“Well, that’s totally normal,” he said, with the confidence of a man who had once sprained his ankle and clearly believed that made him a neurologist. “You know, when I was going through physical therapy for my shoulder, I had the same kind of emotional fatigue. It’s all connected to the body’s resistance to vulnerability.”

Was it poetic? Almost. Was it helpful? Not remotely.

What it was — was mansplaining, the insidious habit of men (usually older, sometimes smug, always confident) explaining things to women that the women already know, have already said, or, in this case, are actively experiencing in real time.

The Mansplaining Family Man™

This isn't about one well-meaning uncle. This is about a generational affliction — men in families who feel ordained to act as human TED Talks, even when you didn’t ask for a presentation. Especially then.

You grow up with these voices — fathers, uncles, sometimes brothers — who somehow have a working theory on everything from international politics to your menstrual cramps. You could be bleeding on the carpet and one of them would start in with, “You know, back in my day, women handled this differently…”

They don’t say it with malice. That’s part of the problem. It’s delivered with the warm, slightly condescending tone of someone handing you a flashlight when you’re standing in broad daylight.

There’s a performance of knowledge, but more than that, there’s a quiet entitlement to the floor — a belief that what they say matters more than what you live.

Where It Comes From — And Why It Lingers

To be fair, this isn’t all their fault. They were forged in a cultural kiln of male authority. These are men who came of age when the loudest voice in the room got the final word — and the woman in the corner got to take notes.

Sociolinguists like Deborah Tannen have written entire books on how boys are rewarded for talking over each other, while girls are taught to listen, empathize, and not make too much noise. That’s not social behavior — that’s conditioning.

And let’s not forget Rebecca Solnit, who helped usher the term “mansplaining” into the cultural bloodstream with her now-iconic essay Men Explain Things to Me. She wrote about a man at a party explaining her own book — to her. I raise you one: try having your mother explained to you while she's upstairs relearning how to speak.

It’s more than annoying. It’s epistemic injustice — a fancy academic term for what happens when your knowledge is systematically dismissed because of who you are. And in families, where love and duty are laced with hierarchy and ego, it hits differently. It’s not just a guy on Twitter correcting your grammar. It’s your uncle telling you how your own mother feels — as if she hadn’t told you herself.

Why It Matters

Here’s the thing: when men dominate conversations, it’s not just about airtime. It’s about authority. Every interruption, every unsolicited explanation, reinforces the idea that women are here to receive knowledge, not hold it.

Research backs this up. A Stanford-Columbia study found that women’s confidence plummets after being given unsolicited “advice” by men — even when they were already correct. In family systems, where women often carry the emotional labor and the logistics (who do you think gets Mom to therapy?), this kind of erasure isn’t just irritating. It’s corrosive.

Women start to talk less. Or qualify more. Or disengage altogether.

And the men? They keep talking.

The Comeback

So what do we do? Humor helps. A well-timed, “Thanks, Professor” can work wonders. So does radical boundary-setting: “Actually, I’m not looking for advice. I’m sharing.”

But mostly, we start by naming it. Because once you name it, you can stop internalizing it. It’s not your job to absorb other people’s need to be right. Especially when you are the one showing up, day after day, to do the hard, real work of care.

So the next time a man starts explaining your own story to you — your job, your expertise, your mother — you can look him dead in the eye and say:

“I’ve got this. I’m the primary source.”