Skip to main content

Unbalanced Union

Continuing to read about the impact of absent father on daughters. I am not sure this is the exclusive realm of daughter and if the father has to be physically absent. From what I have observed this one applies to children whose mother's who are partnered in paper but really don't have someone who fulfills their needs and wants. 

The absence of father means there is no balance or union, no modelling of coming together and then separating, enacting the process of development. When the father is not there to unite with the mother and the sense of their pairing is absent, a daughter experiences separation, empty spaces, anger and unmet desires. She might comprehend the father in his absence through the eyes of mother as an incompetent figure who is disappointing and subsequently denigrated

In Indian society when I grew up finding the mother incompetent and disappointing was common enough. Children learned to ignore her on serious matters because her voice or opinion did not matter anyway. Denigration was not as common as feeling sorry for the hapless woman. Grown-up kids could get impatient with their mothers and demand that she grow a spine, fend for herself and so on - mainly so they could get on with their lives instead of being concerned about her well-being all times. 

More often than not, the pep-talk to revolt was useless. The union had been unbalanced for life and the woman had adapted to it at a great cost to her physical and mental well-being. She did not have the resources left to instigate change. It is true that children of such marriages have nothing to model from and flounder in their own marriages. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...