MIGHT GUY CENTRAL

to me, gai's mother was a very talented shinobi. not that skill is genetic, but i DO like to believe dai's inability to use ninjutsu is genetic, and so gai gets his ability from his mother. she was the one getting in fights to defend dai in their academy days when he couldn't protect himself lol. she was also the one making the most money for them to support themselves! she must have been supportive of dai, but someone has to put food on the table and he was not the most secure in that regard. she probably didn't love the idea of the gates or dai hurting himself either (who would?) but she understood him

dai comes off as very laid back in terms of how people view him, and i think anyone who cared about him would be the total opposite, just like gai. it would be hard to stand the entire village looking down on someone you love, and so i imagine she was a much angrier person than dai; again, just as gai was.

i also hold the headcanon that all of team gai (and so gai's parents by extension) are chinese, with gai's parents having immigrated as children. like kushina, both of them would have been looked down on by konoha citizens, which made them both targets of bullying, but also encouraged them to seek companionship in each other (although i'm fond of the idea gai's mother didn't even like dai at first, she just didn't like seeing him get beat up)

this i'm not really certain on, but i think it's possible she and dai were never married. they were longtime partners and lived together and everything, but something hurts me about the idea of dai being hesitant to let his love marry into a clan with no prospects and no money, just his scorned last name. maybe they planned it someday, and that day just never came.

i think she was mentally ill. dai, as much as he definitely has some issues, was pretty stable all things considered, and gai is... not, even from a very young age before anything truly terrible had happened (see linked posts for more on that!). she probably suffered from ptsd like most shinobi, but i think she also struggled with depression and possibly ocd/anxiety. dai recognizes similar symptoms in gai, but has a hard time effectively handling them as he's never experienced them himself. he wasn't prepared to raise a child alone :')

like he got his mind from her, i think gai looks a lot like his mother too. he gets his dark shiny hair from dai, but beyond that he has a lot of his mother's features. he'd probably look like dai if he grew a mustache though. he's transgender (canon & real) so he looked more like her when he was younger, but there's definitely still a strong resemblance between them. i think it's cute when boys look like their moms ok

also, the ONLY TIME gai EVER mentions his mother (afaik, please prove me wrong if there's something else) is in one of the ninja storm games, during the madara fight. he says this:

which, while obviously just being a reference to being Alive because of her, i like to take as him getting his physical prowess and looks from her. let's be buff with mama

and finally... unfortunately we can assume gai's mom is dead, because she's not present (and all women not shown in naruto are dead bc they don't have lives outside of the people around him ig). i know people have talked/written about her just being a deadbeat but i'm sure you can see that doesn't fit my personal take on her. so as much as i'd prefer she wasn't fridged at all, i think she died in childbirth. i believe dai raised gai completely alone, so she was out of the picture from the beginning. just a grieving husband and a little newborn baby alone in the dead of winter :')