The Housewife Mindset — A doomed legacy prevailing one generation after another.
Women learn the secrets of marriage, yet keep it from the young ones!
Oh the audacity of the women folks to teach young girls only about the house and the kitchen. In many cultures around the world, young ladies are prepared to marry the house rather than a man till this day. Sadly a house which never becomes her house, not even in reference.
I come from a similar culture where a woman marries a household full of people. She is prepared religiously from a young age to win over a man or his family with the food she makes or the house she keeps. Her identity becomes an object that needs to be in pristine condition in order to define her ranking of womanhood.
I heard at lengths from older women declaring other women as “Na khaza” in pashto, referring to her as “not woman” if she wasn’t robust in certain house chores. It could be preparing the meals on time, clearing the wrinkles in the bedsheets at odd hours in the day, to just matching the curtains to the color of her bedsheets.
Some even move as closer to her judging for the physical condition of her man, and by physical condition I mean his clothes and not what you were thinking. Shiny shoes and a crisp collar are symbols of a successful woman, otherwise she has failed miserably. Even if he is dressed up to impress other ladies on the road, the signs of which are often overlooked as much by bystanders as the household full of people.
Is that what a woman resorts to if she chooses to stay at home for her husband, and the family they will create together? Where does the man stand in this relationship between the woman and (not her) house? No wonder the relationship becomes as fragile as an eggshell, yet perfect, well, like an eggshell; presumably with no creases whatsoever.
My grandmother was a housewife, my mother was a housewife, and I ultimately became one despite the higher education I received from my country and abroad. It all came down to living with the guilt of my mother-in-law taking care of my son; an overpriced nanny, or a job which would use me as an option if the opportunity presented itself. It did however present itself, and our project was closed during Covid-19. Eventually despite my efforts to land a few freelancing and remote gigs, I ended up being a housewife.
As a child, I remember my grandmother waking up in the early dark hours of the day and make breakfast for her husband. The two of them quietly enjoyed it in the small kitchen beside her room. The only time they probably spent together. The rest of their days were claimed by children, family and tireless house chores. She was a quite and diligent woman and even as a child I knew, she was only admired for those qualities and her cooking, of course. Nobody knew what colors she liked, what she wanted to be outside of those walls, or how much she loved her husband. She could only openly express her love for her children, and repulse her husband as a sign of virtue in society.
Woman and men were frowned upon to show any signs of love or affection as it was synonymous with vulnerability. I remember her standing by the threshold of the same room the day my grandfather passed away. Solemnly she cried in hushed moans; not to transcend the boundaries of her sanctity, in the threshold she had crossed a countless times everyday to make breakfast for him. My mother then had the same characteristics; shy, quiet with a bit of feminine prejudice. However she had a rebellious distaste for the family politics and interference, at least in her middle age.
In South Asian families, married men live with their parents and single or other married siblings. It is a chaotic environment with family politics exceeding love or bondage. Families retain the autonomy and decisive power in most affairs of life. However, the main reason behind it is usually the financial division among siblings to share and contribute to their parents and unsettled siblings.
It is a controlling tactic of pooling finances from the earning members, usually men, for funding family expenses by the parents. As men live in the family house until financially stable and even after that, this cycle is prolonged for as long as possible to keep things afloat. Women seldom work, and as they get older use emotional leverage to retain power in the household.
They manage the petty affairs and leave out the financial decisions to the men who are usually kept ignorant of the underlying politics. However, as a popular tactic, men deliberately withdraw for their own mental peace only to intervene in affairs when it threatens their masculine decisive power, and well ego.
Younger brides are the prime sacrifial lambs in this system, they have to endure the expectations of the entire family as soon as entering it even at the cost of her husband’s attention. The men are trained to set the expectations upon the onset of a relationship and keep the woman under control. Some might say men are as much impacted by the situation as women which is in fact true and painful.
Imagine being in a situation when reacting to injustice means compromising your masculine status. The family questions the masculinity of a man who is then labeled as “Zan Mureed”, “ a woman pleaser”. It is a tie between social acceptance and a healthy marriage, unfortunately often times men choose the former.
Men do not resort to passive aggressiveness like women, or well up emotions within themselves. This can also be translated to the higher mortality rate in men in the region and heart problems. Mostly in the beginning of a relationship, they find certain coping mechanisms to these situations unable to find solutions to the problems or choose between the spouse and the parents/siblings.
Men alienate in families, they simply disappear from their lives and build their lives outside the house. Friends become their family, especially friends who aren’t remotely related to the family. Extra-marital affairs become common, or they simply avoid the house and do whatever it is that men do outside the house.
Women are expected to endure this because this behavior is recurrent and normal among men. Some families expect the wife to fix such behaviors, and if incapable, which she is; because just look at the odds against her, she is shamed for being insufficient for her man. His alienation is justified shamelessly in her incapacity; sexually and behaviorly, to entertain and attract her man and tame him into the bounds of marital bliss.
If men could be tamed, then why weren’t they already by the family they had lived their entire lives with? Who do they owe all their loyalties to? The hypocrisy is unmatched and the audacity of people especially older women is beyond comprehension.
How does one generation’s trauma become another generation’s therapy? They revel in the failures of the younger women and glorify their own as if in some way sufferings could be rated on a scale of 1–10.
A generation later I see my mother waking up the same way for my father. The breakfast is the prime part of her daily routine. My father never skips it and religiously eats before 8 o’clock every day. She inherited the quiet nature and the agreeableness of my grandmother. She talked to herself in the kitchen while doing the dishes.
Oh the notorious of all chores! the damned dishes and while cooking; ravishing in her presence, and enjoying her little accomplishments in the house. By early noon, she makes the house presentable, if somebody were to come any moment and rate her womanhood on a scale.
She often stressed that people go back to their homes and gossip about people’s tea sets, table sheets, and pans; rusty old pans. So she rubbed them with a mixture of sand, soap, and mud sometimes from the garden. A woman is also known for the beauty of her pans, the more you can see yourself in it, the better.
Being younger, her monologues would be rhythmic conversations; probably between herself and her arch nemesis, her mother-in-law, sometimes slipping into melodious songs. The latter, however, as far as I convinced myself as a hopeless romantic was for my father. Those were the days I remember her being happy or subtle. Later, the monologues changed from conversations to arguments and then fights. Sometimes fights that were never ours, she re-enacted the scenes where she was feeble and defenseless. She reenacted the arguments she never won.
In housewife fables, my mother was taught to be a perfect woman. To brush her hair first thing in the morning so people don’t have a memory of her flyaway bed hair. To clean her room before people woke up, removing the slightest of creases in the sheets.
Her laziness must also not show in the disoriented furniture from the night before added to compensate the children in the room. The extra pillows must be hid away and the blankets piled in the corner neatly one above the other. Neither should the dough she kneads stick to the bowl. Her sleek fingers should wipe the edges if a spectator were to watch her in the act. Needless to say, it was the grit for the Olympics of the housekeeping without the applause.
People, people, and people!
I imagined doing all that and having an unfulfilled relationship with a husband who might have moved on from the previous generation’s culinary expectations. His wife being a pretentious darling trained in anything but bedroom manners. He enters his wedding night chamber late in the night with the house brimming with guests unwilling to leave for another week. His energies which have been brimming from a decade since puberty sees an immobile object unable to use fingers for anything but creasing the kneaded dough. The “object” shivers at the thought of doing something wrong, she remembers being told something by a distant aunt to be submissive and oblige, even plead to be left alone if it comes to it. The ultimate death of an advise ever to be given to a woman to disappoint a spouse on day 1 of marriage.
The night then turns into a one man show, keeping it a sacred act between two strangers who would otherwise wait for children to be born to call on each other as their parents. A vacuum is created between the wife and her man which then stays for life. In some strange cases, again upon the ill advise of some remote aunt, the wife spills the beans on the next day about “the act”, and it becomes a vice for the husband for the rest of his life. One could only imagine how they face each other, or not, in the bed afterward.
“We weren’t allowed to even sit together and have a meal during early days of our marriage. You have an unmarried brother and sister in the house” my mother-in-law would say “Imagine the effect this kind of romance can have on them” — an account of a late boomer on her marriage.
Each generation fails to prepare another for fulfillment in marriage or simply denies it. This can be attributed to the novice that is passed down in generations. Also, it is worthy of mention that when certain information becomes accessible and acceptable, then the men simply move on to higher or more expectations. They either get higher degrees from universities, move abroad, or become pseudo-cultural diaspora. Their expectations from women of their generation become tenfold. Like the Millennials who require a skillset from kneading dough and flatbreads to having a snatched waistline and a generous posterior in order for a woman to qualify for a potential spouse. To add to this, their families prefer and appreciate naïveté in the bride to ensure sufficient distance between the spouses.
“There is a reason parents are against love marriages, because a man when in love doesn’t listen to reason or anyone else for that matter. He is fully controlled by his wife” — An account of an anonymous Man.
Hence the urge to recruit feeble members of society into this role that would fulfill certain set rules and not to tread into realms of their own self fulfillment and self respect.
A time comes however, when women realise the politics of the family stakeholders in her relationship with her husband and by then wakes up to her husband’s debaucheries. Sadly it leads to passive aggressiveness and she usually lets it out on the powerless people within her hold, her children. The cycle hence continues passing the sad and quiet into another generation.
The role of a housewife was invented to objectify a woman within the confines of a house, which when she eventually gets she personifies. Her husband by the time becomes an outsider, a man who comes to eat and sleep and leave when he pleases to go wherever he pleases without question. The house when she eventually gets becomes a sanctuary where she feels protected and is unwilling to let go.
Too physically weak to hang the picture she hid in the back of her cupboard for all the years, and too stiff to exercise in the backyard beneath the mango tree she planted years ago. Too religious to watch the tv shows she wanted to watch in the early mornings when her husband left for work.
In old age, all she remembers again despite the obliviousness is to pray diligently as told by her mother. To cover her hair after having done the pilgrimage and sustain her sanctity until her demise. To count repentance on the rosary beads she brought along from the Holy city, and puff on her children while they sleep.
And to cry for the future of her daughter; another housewife for another house.
