A daughter-in-law; someone who is brought into the house with festivities and celebrations. Someone who is asked to leave behind her home, her possessions and even her name. Someone who is told explicitly that this house is her new house and she’s to be provided for only by the members of this house. Someone who’s told not to ask for money from her parents, even when her in-laws’ think her expenses are extremely frivolous!
She enters the house, hoping to make it her home. She accepts the relations as her very own. His parents as hers, his brothers as hers, his grandparents as hers. Within a few years of her marriage she realises that this house is just that; a house. She lives in a no-man’s-land, with nothing to claim as her’s.
Her parental house seems to lose its sense of belongingness the day she gets married. She feels like a stranger in the house she grew up in. She’s no longer acquainted to the things stacked in the house. Her cupboard may still have her clothes but it feels out of place. Her parents’ room seems foreign to her and she tries to force herself to feel a connection, but cannot.
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| Pic Courtesy: Huffington Post |
In her marital home, she just goes through the motions of living. Everyone treating her like an outsider. It doesn’t matter if she fights with the world for her in-laws. It doesn’t matter if she keeps bickering with her in-laws like she would with her parents, because after all they are her in-laws and she needs to put up a mask and act like “nicey nice”, sushil, sabhya bahu. She won’t be part of financial discussions in house. In fact if she chances upon the discussion, the entire room will go quiet and the mother-in-law will change the topic of discussion. The husband wouldn’t even realise that this has happened and wouldn’t even believe for one bit that the wife is not being treated as part of the family. It will all seem normal to him. She will still need to keep her needs secondary because she will always be compared to his mother and it’s a fact, no one can ever match up to a mother! She will be expected to understand why the house functions in this way and why people in the house react this way but she is not expected to react at all! She is expected to accept this and move on with her life, making everyone else believe that this is her family.
It doesn't matter if you do not live with your in-laws. The occasions that you do meet them and spend time with them is spent reinstating the fact that you are an outsider and will always remain living in a no-mans-land.
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