Mom didn’t get married until she was 26 years old. That was considered really old for an Indian girl, but she didn’t really want to get married. She was happy with her life, and her parents weren’t inclined to push her.
However, her parents started to get pressured by Indian society. it was a father’s duty to make sure his daughter was married. He ignored them for a while, but then they hit him below the belt.
“Who will take care of your daughter after you are gone?” they asked him.
So he asked my mother if she could get married. But he also tried to give her a choice.
This was back in the 1960s, and Indian marriages at that time were arranged by the parents. Often the kids might not meet each other until the engagement ceremony. But my grandfather was different.
“I’ll pick a dozen or so boys,” he told her. “All of them from good families, with good reputation. And you can meet each one and choose the one you want.”
He was pretty confident any man would want his beautiful daughter because he never considered the possibility that one of the men would reject her.
She only met one man, however. After she met my father, she decided she wanted him.
About a year after my parents got married, I was born. And my mother was really happy because she loved me and loved having a baby. But she didn’t want any more. She was really happy with me and she wanted to focus on me and not have any more children.
She told me this candidly after I became an adult. She was very careful not to tell my brother, however. And she made it clear to me that she loved him very much. But she confided in me after I got married myself.
“Your father would have had a dozen children if I’d let him,” she said. “He loved kids. But… after you were born, I was so happy with you, I didn’t want another child.”
Yet her in-laws started to pressure her.
“Shefali needs a brother or sister to play with,” the told her. Never mind that I had plenty of friends I could play with.
What was not said explicitly but was understood — they wanted a grandson. This was India, after all, in the late 1960s. It was a patriarchal society, all the statues of goddesses notwithstanding. While my grandparents loved me, they wanted a grandson.
I was lucky that my mother’s parents didn’t have that prejudice, and actually, neither did my father. But he also wasn’t as supportive of her as he might have been because he did want more children.
So my mother had my brother, 5 years after I was born.
Well, that didn’t turn out as well as it might have for either my mother or myself, as I talk about here:
My mother explained to me that this was why she herself never pressured me to get married, or to have children. She was the rare Indian mother of her generation that never nagged her daughter about these things. I had other relatives from my father’s side of the family who would make comments about when was I planning to marry? But Mom never did, and Dad backed her up.
So I grew up surprisingly free for someone from that culture. And I am really grateful to my parents for that.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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