Time and again...

I met my man who was a boy 16 years ago. We have been together since 12 years. Both of us fought over many things and moved on as either wisdom donned or we hit upon the solution. Now I see many young couples around me who are going through the teething years of getting together as partners. Though my journey seemed very unique because we are very different people and our situations and contexts were differnt blah blah it is interesting to see a pattern.

I know these are all bits and pieces of power struggle and so many other things like one needs to accept the other, is there love and respect, are people flexible enough, issues of gender sensitivity and patriarchy and so on. It is still interesting to see..

Scenario 1: Who likes to do what?

He told me that he is comfortable washing dirty dishes, clothes and anything under the sun, but he can not sweep the house because he does not like it. I said I dont mind doing anything as I know how to do them there is no particular task that I like for the sake of it, but I love cooking as it is very therepeutic. So what happened next? Though I wanted him to do the work of washing clothes, dishes and so on.. I started noticing that he does not do it so well and wastes lot of water. I felt the need to correct him and show him how it is done properly!! patriarchy seeped in to the extent where I felt the need to be the expert. It is not like he was trying to discover a new element and I am his guide, he would have figured out eventually the methods which are comfortable and so on as he is also above average intelligent guy. I set myself up to wash clothes, sweep the house and cook!! One fine day I realised that I am doing more or less everything and flew off the handle the moment he uttered 'can I help you?'... I ranted about how it is not helping me, it is what is needed for maintaining the household, I am not responsible alone, this wont do and what do you mean help me? Why cant this be shared equally and so on. Things became better after I ranted and we discusssed. So we started making weekend home maintenance task list. This list consisted of two columns tasks in one and who will do it in the other. So as soon as it was made (by me), he would take it first because I asked him to pick tasks first, he invariably ticked majority of them and in the evening we used to check and see that I ended up doing the majority!! Either it indicates that I am a control freak or as women we are conditioned to look at chores in a different way. So if I am cooking lunch, cleaning up the kitchen counters, dusting the shelves and dusting the elctronic items in the kitchen go hand in hand. While he would go and clean the commode though the task consists of scrubbing the bathroom floor, washing down the door, defogging the mirror and so on. That is how he understood it. Initially I got innocent compliments from him that while I clean the bathroom, some how it looks more cleaner and better!! The list and sharing of what is implicit in an explicit manner helped. Now we are equal partners wrt household needs. I see this fight happening in different degrees and different contexts around me.

Scenario 2: My friends, your friends and our friends:

I did not like many of his friends and he did not like many of mine. I felt his friends were stuck in boyhood and are deeply patriarchal, he thought my friends were pseudo intellectuals and pompous. So I went to his friends gatherings' with my nose up and he came to mine with his forehead knotted. We no longer have those deeply patriarchal or pompous ones in our lives. But this did cause some heartache in the first Act of our marriage. Now our friends are the ones who are great with both of us and we have our own individual circle of friends who are accepted lovingly by the other.

Scenario 3: If we love each other so much, how can we fight? How dare you not fight back? Am I investing more here than you? Why do you shut me off? Why do you yell at me?

Figuring out the fighting style that suits us so that things move forward and get closure than towards festering is an art which has to be learnt by each couple. There are no shortcuts to this process. We are active aggressor + passive aggressor combination on many days, it changes to one weepy hormonal entity + one bewildered soul on some days and one subtle manipulator + one subtle resistor or on some days and so on. All these styles keep on happening. Some styles have been retired by us over the years as they were mushrooming the issue at hand into something else. The first time my active aggressor yelled at him, he stood up, looked at me with deeply hurt expression and marched out of the house. He came back after an hour of walking and by then my anger had turned into panic. As soon as he came home, I hugged him and said sorry and he hugged back and said sorry. He whispered in my ears 'please dont yell at me' and that is the last time I yelled at him. When we feel like my aggressor supreme and his great resistor are getting ready to march in, we have taken a step back and have taken notebooks and writing to communicate what we are feeling. That has worked, along with many other things which we have found to be useful. We have also understood that it is better to share 'what I feel' than to say 'what you did'. I see couples struggling to understand their fighting and I witness the frustration and sadness when repetitively unyielding styles are used. Since there is no short cut here, it has to go on to give way to new harmony. I am also not saying that we no longer fight and have attained sainthood but we definitely know the difference between the issue and the person and how to go about it (majority of the times ahem). 

I am not an expert in relationships and I will not advise what one needs to do in theirs. All the relationship needs is love and trust in the process.

Of rains, scorpions and love

She was thinking of cooking lunch in some time. There was no hurry since they had a good and late breakfast after which he had watched some T.V and slept. Easy, lazy Saturday for both. All of a sudden the sky was overcast, dark clouds gathered very quickly and it started raining heavily just like a PMSing herself would cry over a song or his inconsideration or over missing her people - big, heavy rain drops.

She always found herself excited when it rained and there were many reasons for that. Rains in her life time of 30 something years happened with animation. 

What was her first vague memory of heavy rain? Her family was in a transit home before moving into a proper one which would be made ready for them in some months. This was an asbestos sheeted living space which leaked every where when it rained, she remembered sleeping on the cot with her siblings while her parents sat with two big umbrellas to cover them. In retrospect, she felt sorry for her parents but for her the memory was of excitement of huddling together, giggling with her siblings and being up beyond her bed time. 

 

During later rains as she grew older the first thing her mother shouted when it started raining was 'hey it is raining, quick go get the clothes drying on the clotheline, quick close  the door, quick quick', this was accompanied by her and her siblings running in a mad dash to get dry, semi dry clothes from the line, becoming a bit wet, bumping into each other, tugging some clothes in impatience and tearing some one's precious garment and so on. Always what followed after the rain gave an implicit permission to throw the regular routine in the wind. Demands for pakodas or chilli bajjis were put forth and later when she was an young adult her brothers spoke of having some alcohol in the night to celebrate the rain. They all did too, she blossoming  into an efficient bar tender with a clever hand which tipped less to the tipsy and more to people who kept an eye on the pouring including herself.

There were scary memories of rain too. During her regular summer vacations in her grandparent's home with a mud terrace, she and her cousins were always woken up in the dead of the night from deep slumber to chaos of different relatives shouting different commands to different people, 'fold the bed sheet', 'do not run down the stairs', 'leave that pillow here', 'where is the lantern', 'children go with your grandpa he will take you down' and so on. The summer shower also brought scorpions out of their holes, she sat with her cousins bright eyed seeing scorpions every where in the shadows, snakes under the bed and too hyper to fall asleep forever. Nobody forced anybody to sleep, every body used to be wide awake and used to start talking and laughing again. This lulled her to sleep and not care for scorpions of  the  world. 

In one such Monsoon, her brothers met with an accident because it was rainy season. Those rains which started as an adventure while they were trekking the western ghats turned horrific as a train came un announced. Though they were lucky not to lose their lives the rain that night was the noisiest for her.

She remembered her first kiss. It happened when he was a new acquintance and there was electrifying chemistry between them. One fine night, they stood in the backyard of her friend's room, it started raining, there was no light, they were rooted in their spots not making a move towards going back in or going towards a shelter from rain. To this day both of them do not know what happened next, who approached whom, but they found themselves kissing. That rain was like a flower shower and intoxicating than any spirit she had ever tasted including Absinthe.

After that they made many trips to the pub regularly soaking wet and delirious in love. It was heady to drink chilled beer sitting in wet clothes engulfed by warm thoughts. They came to know that they will be together for ever during those nights and went there for every anniversary, birthday and family event.

Today the excitement of the rain made her bring the clothes from the clothes line, plan for making pakodas, call her mother, sister, brothers and sister in law and to kiss him awake.

Happy Birth day my dearest – 17/12/2009 A missus writing mush – Beware!

I was wondering about what gift I should get for a man who has been with me since I hit my twenties!!!! He has seen me through my wild days of tonsuring my head, glugging rum like water, smoking just to scare the aunties in the hotel and slapping eve teasers left right and center. He has seen me as a man who sees his woman and made me feel like THE most special person on this earth. He has seen me with compassion when I struggled with my demons choking him with my stress. He has seen me as a terrorized child when I shivered during my nightmares. He has seen me with amusement, as my bed side books grew in to mounds and never laughed when the book I was reading often fell on my face when I dozed off. Though he slept earlier than me in the night he held me tight just in case I feel lonely when he is asleep.

What gift can I give this man who is enriching my life every day?

I thought I will tell him about the things I appreciate, acknowledge and love about him as a starter. Me who demands articulation from him about all his emotions all the time, have never told many things to him myself. This is a glimpse of what I forgot to tell him,


• On the day we got married, I was going through a mixed bag of feelings, joy at one level and at the other level sort of facing the finality of the situation so a bit flabbergasted, we no longer had the control over our day, people were propelling us in the agreed scheme of events. Venky held my hand in the hotel we went along with the family for dinner and whispered “it is ok, we are same, we love each other right?” He was right of course
• I do not know about his idea about honeymoon but he came with me as soon as the wedding was over to my grandparent’s place and to all my uncles’ places, every town above 40 degrees of temperature in the peak of summer. I have never told him that I loved his gesture. I especially loved his involvement in handpicking the alcohol bottles we chose for each of our uncles. I can never forget Venky sitting in the toilet fanning himself 
• I really do not want to go chronologically month by month, year by year so heave a breath of sigh.
• I am an informally certified hypochondriac, recently after reading about mental illnesses; I asked him, ‘venky, do you think I have psychosis? What if I do?’ he says, ‘then I will ask the doctor how to maintain this Psychosis because I love it!’ He is all the medicine I need.
• We were in the courting period. I loved drama and passion. I thought he was this passive guy who would never express himself overtly. With a high dose of Jane Austen in my blood I sighed wistfully thinking real life is so boring compared with fiction. One evening, he pulls me out of the side wing, makes me stand so that the light falls on my face, and he asks me to look in to his eyes and tell him that ‘I mean what I say’. I told him that I did and he sighed a big sigh held me tightly and looked piercingly in to my eyes and left. I never told him that, that moment was breath taking. He was more intense and passionate than any of the scripted heroes.
• I was in my first job and he had taken a break from his mainstream job to figure out what he wanted to do. Though I was well paid for starters, I never managed my money properly and he gave me money to go back to Bangalore, he gave money to tide me through this or that. Amounting almost to 20 thousand rupees over a period of time. We were not married then. He never asked that money back, though I kept saying that I will return it, I never got around to doing it. He has never ever mentioned that ever.
• He laughs at all my jokes and looks at me like I am this precious box of wonders all the time. His constant encouragement ringing in my ears, I am a woman I want to be and I am a woman who loves a man and I am woman who can do anything.
HAPPY BIRTH DAY DARLING HUSBAND/PARTNER AND FRIEND 

Romance means what?

The other day I was tempted to take a "Is your marriage as honest as you think" quiz from a women's mag (I wonder why women's mags have these quizzes and mens mags have the toys that boys need to have to get noticed or how big is your bicep or what women think of their body odour ...)

Ok coming back to the quiz, the drift of the questions was,
1. Do you steal from your husbands purse?
2. Do you watch porn when he is not around?
3. Do you think he logs into your e mail account to spy on you?

and it gets better, for all these psychotic questions if your answer is a NO WAY, then the analysis is, " My dear, you are way too honest and candid in this relationship, you need not share so much with him try to loosen up!!!"

I was thinking about what is trust and honesty and what is 'way tooo honest'...

As a young wife 8 years ago, I remember the way romance was between me and the hub dub,
we were thrilled to share the same cupboard and felt happy looking at our clothes together (graon .. I know) and when I fell sick for the first time, my novice husband made maggie noodles because he thought I would like it. I liked it but he made it adding veggies for the next meal thinking I would really like it (Ya I know, but the thought is what counts right?) May be, that was our first fight!

I was away for a week because I was sick (went to mom - Lalitha's warm folds and heaps of freshly made good food). When I came back, the person who took ages to write a sentence, had written two poems and best still he read them out in the night under the moonlight!

Has romance faded over the years? this might be one of the question some body might ask right?...

for my last birthday I was wooed with music, DVDs in the car seat, under the pillow, inside my bag and what not.

He wakes up early invariably every day to make us tea (never expecting that I should do it once in a week at least)

He knows when to order pizza - on those overworked tiring nights

He watches all my girly flicks and never comments on them (some he really liked too!)

He loves my family, he respects people who are important to me and he connects with all spheres of my life.

The man who never cried in any circumstance, wept when my father passed away


His hugs are tight and his eyes are kind.... this is more than enough romance I need

Gender sensitivity and Bhuvi

Bhuvi is my 6 year old niece. She introduced a new game of 'make believe grinding'. We were sitting on the bed and we dutifully did the motion of grinding for a while (traditional Indian way where the right hand makes a big circle on the ground and with left hand grains are put into the small slot). I tried to talk to her and this conversation followed.

Me: Bhuviamma what are you grinding?
(I was playing my childhood game of 'acting like adults')

Bhuvi: What are YOU grinding?

(obviously she had not played this game before)

Me: I am grinding for Idli
(After I said this, I became aware of the gendered conversation I was building where women were sitting and doing all the work etc. etc. and I asked her kicking myself inwardly)

Me: What are you grinding?

Bhuvi: She took a pause and I thought 'oh no she is going to say Dosa now'.
After the pause, she said ....

'I am grinding WORMS'

Whew the damage was not done :-)