Some two decades later, I got married and saw that my mother-in-law suffered a similar fate. Her opinions and desires came secondary to her husbands’ whose words governed the household. Nothing was done without his permission and against his wishes. All was well if he had his way but if my mother-in-law wanted something different and dared to challenge him, a discussion would ensue and that would eventually lead to a fight, one that would end with my mother in-law giving in.
Looking at my parents, I often wondered why my mother wouldn’t stick to her guns and not cave in. I wondered why my mother-in-law, vicious in her ways with me, would say absolutely nothing even when her husband behaved unreasonably. It wasn’t long before I found myself in a situation similar to my parents and in-laws and started behaving like the women in question (my mother and mother in-law) when I realized that us, women, have been conditioned to compromise from so early on that we don’t know how not to do it.
Ours was a marriage arranged by the parents, and while my husband and I got along just fine, there were things that created a rift between us because we were two different people – almost polar opposites – struggling to understand each other. My husband, who had grown up seeing his father basically dictate his mother’s life and how things at home should be done while not lifting a finger himself, had fixed notions about his and my role in the household. Once, very early on in our marriage, he got so offended when I asked him to help me do the dishes that he didn’t speak to me for two days.
When I finally confronted him on this matter, he simply said, “I have never washed the dishes.” I had never cooked, I had never woken up earlier than everybody in the house and made tea, I had never done laundry, but I was expected to after I got married because I was a woman. My list of ‘I have never’ was equally as long as my husband’s but while I was expected to do everything I had never done, he could just continue giving that excuse because, after all, he was a man.
This was reinforced by my mother-in-law who would sometimes see her son helping me around the house (in matters as simple as folding the laundry or making the bed) and tell him to let it be. “Timi na gara. She will do it,” she would often say. Once I came home a bit late from work and she said I should consider telling my supervisor that I was a married woman with responsibilities and thus needed to be home by a fixed time. My father-in-law was quick to comment that eight wasn’t that late and people with jobs can’t be rigid about timings, but she wasn’t listening.
As I was leaving for work the next day, she asked me to be home on time and added, for the zillionth time, that married women shouldn’t be out so late. All the eye rolling and ‘keep quiets’ from my father-in-law did not have any effect on her. When I told my mother about this incident, she said that my mother-in-law was right and reprimanded me instead. While this didn’t come as a shock, it was little disheartening to see that my mother too had set different standards for sons and daughters.
The thing is we live in a male dominated society whose law enforcers, at least in the urban setting, are almost always the female members. My mother, and my mother-in-law are the people who tell me to behave a certain way because I’m a ‘woman’, while my father and father-in-law have always told me to do as I wish. Even my husband hardly imposes any restrictions on me.
Female relatives, on both my families’ side, are always quick to comment on my demeanor and state how things should be. An elderly relative begins and ends her sentences with ‘timi chori hau tesaile’, an aunt’s favorite line is ‘chori manche le teso garnu hunna’, yet another female relative always exclaims ‘keti manche le ta…’ – there’s no end to this list of how women force other women to think, act, and be a certain way. But not all blame lies squarely on the older generation’s shoulders. It’s the women, like you and me, who follow these rules, albeit complaining, that are to be blamed for the regressive ways of our society.
It might be a little too late for me to rebel but I hope my kids will be the harbingers of change because I will teach my son that it’s not alright to behave anyway he wants to because he’s a boy and I won’t teach my daughter to compromise because she’s a girl. I want to tell them and teach them that your gender doesn’t define who you are, and what you can do, and if someone tells you that it does, you should probably keep a distance from that person.
I will teach my five year old son to be respectful towards women, to treat his two year old sister as an equal, to not think things are a given because he’s a son, and to one day be the ideal partner to a lovely wife. When they grow up and start venturing out on their own, I will tell both my son and daughter to come home by a certain hour because it’s unsafe in the dark. Both will have the same deadline imposed on them and my son will not get an hour extra because he is a man.
The household chores in my house will be divided equally between my two kids and my daughter will not have to learn things she’s not interested in because she is a girl who will one day be a daughter-in-law. I will not groom my kids to become what they are not. I will, however, teach them both to compromise because what’s life without a little compromise. But I will teach them to compromise only when they want to, not because they have to.
ip_bista@hotmail.com
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