Home. What do you ponder when you think of home? Do you consider it as a place of comfort? Of safety? Do you connect it with a person? Someone who made you feel safe, loved, and comforted? Someone who made you feel like you belonged? At least, that\u2019s what home generally means to a person. Sadly, It\u2019s a bit different for Naina, a person on my WhatsApp group. Before writing this blog, I put a broadcast message on a couple of my WhatsApp groups, asking women in my contacts to share their experiences about the violence they\u2019ve witnessed or gone through. Naina, reached out to me to tell her story. After a bit of reassurance, she also permitted me to share it here, so long as her name is changed and she remains anonymous. I can understand her apprehension. I acknowledge her fears, it is not easy to come forward and share what you\u2019ve gone through, especially when there\u2019s the threat of being dismissed at every turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She started, \u201cHome was never a place of comfort and safety for me. I don\u2019t think I can even call it home; it was a prison. It was hell. My father was a violent man, I\u2019ve learned most men are. He would often have these unpredictable bouts of anger; I don\u2019t really know how else to describe them. My mother, as you might have guessed, was not quite a parent but more of a maid in the house. I know it\u2019s a horrible thing to say about your own mother, but that\u2019s the truth. She\u2019d fed us, clothed us and accompanied us to social gatherings; but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever had a conversation with her; not a meaningful one anyways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My life at home was quite typical, we weren\u2019t exceedingly rich, nor did we ever have to worry about the annual school fees or how we\u2019d finance our daily lives. My father worked in the family business and my mother was a housewife. The violence at home was no different from what was happening in my neighborhood homes. In our cultural context, a father represented a person who was nothing more than a person who paid for your life but held control and had a say in everything you did, someone to fear and obey without asking a question. My mother was typical in many ways, she clothed us, fand ed us but most of all, she told us to be quiet in the presence of our father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of my biggest feelings of betrayal comes from my mother. I cannot forgive her for instilling this overwhelming sense of fear of our father in me and my siblings. I know it is unfair, but I hate her for being at our side and reaching out for our defense, standing up for her children, and preventing the trauma he put us through. Why did she never try to take us out of that house? Would life on our own be worse than the hell we were in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What most people don\u2019t seem to understand is that physical violence against women doesn\u2019t just happen out of the blue. Ever since you\u2019re a child you\u2019re told that a woman is inherently bad and sexual. I remember my mother\u2019s disgusted face when I wore a dress to go out for a movie with my cousins. I will never forget the way she looked at me with such hateful eyes and said \u201cstop dressing like the whore you are trying to attract your male cousins (Bhaiyas)\u201d. It is so hurtful when your parents blame you for the unwelcoming gazes that some of your uncles show you once you have grown up and arrived. My parents opined that I was distracting them. I had the unfortunate experience of the very same uncles groping or touching me and here I was scanning myself and examining every word, every gesture I made trying to figure out what is it in me that was wrong and made them do this you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Oxford dictionary simply defines home as a place where one lives. For Naina, the concept of home was much more and it brought forth a series of questions in her mind. Isn\u2019t it so much more than that? Isn\u2019t home much more than a house? Isn\u2019t it much more than a place where you live? Isn\u2019t it a place where you make your life and happiness; where you spend some of your best and worst moments; where you experience love, sorrow, happiness, and everything that comes in between? It doesn\u2019t have to be a place, home can be a person, your person, the one who is there by your side when you most need them knows your good, bad, and the ugly, and has loved you regardless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Naina\u2019s story may be an echo for many reading this blog. I write these few lines to validate and emphasize that violence is real. I may not have started as something physical but can be mental and wear us down. Many times, it is difficult to recognize it; we are often clueless about how close it is in our personal spaces, not to undermine how pervasive it is in our societies. Let\u2019s take one of the most common examples that every girl witnesses with the school uniform mandate. We are shamed if the skirt is \u2018too short\u2019 meaning to say, we are dressing as provocative. We are told not to let our hair loose, use nail polish, kajal or lip balm, and so on as it may take the focus away from education. Yet the same time, we are expected to be feminine and adorn with clothes and cosmetics that complement and fit the space of societal picturization of women. This, however, cannot be too much as to entice men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I once read a quote that said \u201cpretty is not the tax you pay to exist in this world\u201d. This resonates with me at a deeper level. I agree that being presentable for certain settings and gatherings is of great importance, however, am I not obliged to always look \u2018pretty\u2019? Waxing\/shaving, pouching my eyes brows, taking time to do my makeup, all of these things should be my choice, not a social mandate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason that I thought this story was so important to pen down and share with others is that it made me see how most women go through this kind of emotional suppression, shaming, and abuse in one form or the other. It\u2019s important that we understand that we are not alone in our experiences and that we can help each other find our support systems, fight societal expectations and push us into submission. Before anything else, we need to break free of these subtle, subliminal messages that first shame us for our inherent femininity but at the same go, punish us if we try to deviate from the standard of what a woman \u201cshould be\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Noya<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Home. What do you ponder when you think of home? Do you consider it as a place of comfort? Of safety? Do you connect it with a person? Someone who …<\/p>\n
Being or becoming; thy expectations drown me in abysses<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_urls":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":""},"post_excerpt_stackable":" Home. What do you ponder when you think of home? Do you consider it as a place of comfort? Of safety? Do you connect it with a person? Someone who made you feel safe, loved, and comforted? Someone who made you feel like you belonged? At least, that\u2019s what home generally means to a person. Sadly, It\u2019s a bit different for Naina, a person on my WhatsApp group. Before writing this blog, I put a broadcast message on a couple of my WhatsApp groups, asking women in my contacts to share their experiences about the violence they\u2019ve witnessed or gone…<\/p>\n","category_list":"Uncategorized<\/a>","author_info":{"name":"admin","url":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/author\/admin\/"},"comments_num":"0 comments","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4267"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4273,"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267\/revisions\/4273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amitacare.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}