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I am married for 20 years into a family which is completely the opposite of mine. Here customs have much more importance than relationships and human beings.
Born in 70s and growing up with my sister and loving parents never made me think that life would become a burden to me anytime in future.
I grew up in a pretty liberal family where our relationships were more important rather than customs and traditions. It’s not that we didn’t follow customs, but there wasn’t any pressure to follow them. My grandparents were pretty ahead of their times. They never forced any of their wishes on any of their daughters in law, and in the 60s & 70s encouraged their kids to be independent and have their own home and way of life.
For the initial years I thought it were only my in laws who insisted on these, as I thought my husband was pretty liberal in his thinking. Above all we had a love marriage. But as we spent more time with each other as a married couple, it turned out his only religion is his parents. He just follows what he was being told without giving a thought to it.
This ended up creating a lot of trust issues, losing respect for and love for each other, ugly fights, and bitter memories.
At a point we moved abroad and that made us distant from his parents’ daily influence, but distant from my parents too. My parents were never treated equally as his parents or never treated as human beings too. He wasn’t even allowed to visit my parents, and he never went against it.
Now his parents are there with us, and are trying to change the life we created for ourselves. All these years when we were far from them gave me impression that my husband is better when he isn’t around them, but now we are back to where we started.
I don’t have any help, but have people with a sense of entitlement around me, where nobody acknowledges all that I do for them and for the entire household. Asking for any small help turns into a big nightmare that makes me curse myself – why did I asked for help no matter how tired or sick I was feeling?
Giving up or walking out don’t look like solutions to me, and at the same time I am tired of fighting for things which are logical enough for everyone else but not them.
It make me wonder – where did I go wrong that every day looks like a burden to me?
Image source: a still from Kya Kool Hain Hum 3
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
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Being a writer, Nivedita Louis recognises the struggles of a first-time woman writer and helps many articulate their voice with development, content edits as a publisher.
“I usually write during night”, says author Nivedita Louis during our conversation. Chuckling she continues,” It’s easier then to focus solely on writing. Nivedita Louis is a writer, with varied interests and one of the founders of Her Stories, a feminist publishing house, based in Chennai.
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