Dear Mother

by Gauri Trivedi

[box]Vīram | A daughter writes to her mother on a very important decision that she has taken in her life. In a story structured in the form of a letter, Gauri Trivedi celebrates the rasa, Vīram (Courage) – the bold decision of a woman.[/box]

Dear Mother….

I am sure by the time you open this letter and recognise the familiar curves of the pen on paper, you already suspect something is amiss because we spoke last evening, just as we do every Friday and yet I mentioned nothing out of the ordinary.  And by now you will have already fast forwarded through the lines to find their actual purpose with a frantic heartbeat because you know we always resort to writing when it gets too difficult to ‘tell’.

It has been a family tradition initiated by grandpa when he wrote to his own father living under the same roof, informing about a job opportunity out of town. His daughter, and my aunt, had no other choice but to leave a note when she eloped to marry the neighbour’s son next door. Dad would probably have managed to break the ritual had it not been for you – his wife-to-be who wrote to him a day after their engagement and asked that he convince his folks to hold off the wedding for two more years so that she could finish her graduation first.  The ‘letter’ has always brought with it a dreaded announcement or a noteworthy change in our lives. This one comes with some news too; good or bad, depends on how you look at it.

Remember how, when I was growing up, I had questions about the occasional arguments you and Daddy had? Didi and I were never supposed to know about them and most of the times we didn’t; but at times, the loud voices transported from behind the closed doors and into our ears. It troubled me that you always seemed so composed immediately afterwards and when I probed too much, you would smile and say “a marriage runs on compromise, the husband and wife may argue but they must always concur.”

In the past few months, concurrence has taken a whole new meaning in maintaining what used to be my marital bliss. Faced with a nagging fear of losing my voice along with the whole of my being in this institution, I have tried again and again to seek solace and inspiration from the only marriage I have witnessed up and close – my parents’. But as I look back over the years and try to match your actions with your words, a whole new picture emerges in front of me. I think what you actually meant to convey was that marriage runs on compromise, where one person always gives in while the other prevails.

You somehow convinced Dad and successfully completed graduation before getting married but turned down the job offer of a school teacher soon after. You cooked our meals and yet never had any favourites or dislikes when it came to food. You always had an opinion but never had your way. Daddy’s parents stayed with us for 18 years before peacefully passing away in succession. I saw you care for them with patience and affection as their health continued to fail. Last year when your own mother was bedridden for several months, all you could muster up was a week at her bedside before her death.

Now what has your marriage got to do with mine? Yours survived the imbalance, mine didn’t.

While we talked about everything under the sun, you maintained you were more a mother and less of a friend. And for the same reason, you accepted that our ‘generation gap’ was real and not just an imaginary line drawn between individuals from different decades. One particular thing we used to squabble about was your strong feeling about intolerance being the root cause of increasing number of divorces in the current generation.

As I stand on the brink of being one more addition to that tainted list, I can give some recommendations first hand.

A lot is written about how our family system is breaking up because of the unhealthy influences on our society. People talk about how we are aping the west and asking for divorces under minor grounds such as “incompatibility”.

Yes, the family system is changing, marriages are crumbling and relationships are falling apart. And is it because of that one person who used to give in, compromise, put everybody else in the house before her and is now refusing to do so? Maybe. But don’t you think our whole system itself is flawed when it puts the onus of holding the marriage and the family together on the woman, the wife or the mother by expecting her to make the necessary sacrifices and then putting the blame on her for destroying something that was primarily based on repressing her individuality?  It is all good as long as she doesn’t raise her voice or express her desire to not be controlled. It is so very convenient for everybody in the family to have their egos pampered and their needs taken care of by putting the woman on a pedestal created out of convenience.

Well, I refuse to be that woman on the altar.

Once, the word spreads around, everybody will have questions for me, you will have them too though you will be the last one to ask them. But I believe I am not answerable to anybody other than you. You, who will face the heat of disapproval and shadows of doubt on the upbringing of her child. The mother, whose values will be questioned, and who will be made to feel responsible for the daughter’s (mis)deeds.

And so this letter is kind of an advance notice to you; to adequately prepare you for the havoc the news of my divorce will create in our family. It is my unapologetic account of what I refuse to suffer anymore.

I don’t think I have the right words to articulate the unbearable suffocation experienced all along in my marriage of a year and a half. I can make adjustments, tolerate some good-intentioned dominance and even twist and turn my personality a bit to create a harmonious living with the person I love. What I find impossible to do is give up my ambitions completely as if I wasn’t supposed to have them in the first place. Believe me Mom, it isn’t the person, it is the attitude I find hard to live with. Trust me when I say this; if I had the slightest hope of saving this marriage I would have fought for it but from where I stand, all I see is a clash of core ideas, increasing and intensifying day after day.

I would rather free myself from a bond which feels like a chain at the cost of being labelled as “too independent” than spend the rest of my life playing second fiddle to a spouse who will never consider me his equal. I would say I am not giving up on my marriage; just pulling out of it before more damage is done.

The issues that you faced in your marriage, I never expected to face them in mine, after all I was the ‘next’ generation and should have learnt a lesson to two from my predecessors. So in a way, it was ironical to come face to face with those very things that I used to find repressive (the MCP attitude) and an ‘older generation’ characteristic. I guess it will take more than a couple of decades of age brackets before we can get rid of certain traits in the society.

For now, I am in no mood to change the whole universe, only my small little world.

Love

Swati

p.s. I may need to camp in my old room for a while till the paperwork is all finalised.

Gauri Trivedi is a former business law professional who makes the law at home these days. A Mom to two lovely daughters, her days are filled with constant learning and non- stop fun. All of her “mommy time” goes into writing and finds itself on her blog pages http://messyhomelovelykids.blogspot.com/ and  http://pastaandparatha.blogspot.com/ and if she is not writing she is definitely reading something!

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