 We are constantly bombarded with posts, memes, articles, videos, podcasts on one very important topic, namely, “Self-Love”. How vital self-love is for our well-being, for our mental health and our love-life. How it is the instant fix for our pandemic malaise.
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 You’ll often read about women in their late 40s/early 50s, leaving their corporate jobs and starting new ventures, mostly in very different spheres than their previous fields of work. The HR manager of an MNC starting her own café, the corporate lawyer starting a jewellery business, the software engineer opening a bookshop and art gallery, the bank officer setting up her own plant nursery……the list is quite vast. Then we also have stories of full-time moms venturing into fashion designing or opening a day care center etc.
 After reading a blog written by a single woman in her early 30s, about her love for space, my mind started ticking. More so coz she compared the right to have space to the institution of marriage.
Do married women (and men) have no right to space? Is the institution of marriage like a prison where a basic right called freedom is so utterly denied? Since I have lived in both in Europe and in India as a very observant adult, I have been observing keenly some behavioral patterns and norms laid out by society about this institution we call marriage.  When I go through the messages on WhatsApp chat groups comprising of 50+ women, I must say, they make me pause and think. About sexuality and the older woman. In fact, there are many thoughts that crowd my head...would our mothers also have had such conversations?
 It was sometime in April that I decided that I want to go on hiatus.....a two-way one. Take a break from social media and go to the mountains for two weeks to plunge into a totally different lifestyle. I had a fixed aim in my mind......to redefine my physical and mental fitness. I knew I wouldn’t find the former tough considering what a disciplined person I am. I knew I’d have huge difficulties with the latter coz of my eternal restlessness of the mind which struggles with quite a few mental issues.
 Mother’s Day could be the most celebrated day after Valentine’s Day.
According to Wikipedia, it is a celebration honoring the mother of the family, as well as motherhood, maternal bonds and the influence of mothers in society. What we celebrate here in India is the American version started at the initiative of Ann Reeves Jarvis in the US in the early 20th century.  After spending a considerable amount of years on social media, I came to realize that the need for sisterhood grows when we are past a certain age. I cannot pinpoint the age, but it’s a gradual process that sets in as we grow older - our kids get busy with their lives, a certain restlessness creeps up owing to various factors, and we begin seeking to connect with our inner selves.
But what exactly is sisterhood?  A while ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop and inadvertently, a conversation between a group of middle-aged women fell into my ears. The words “shaadi” and “settle down” were being used a lot and I got the feeling that somehow life revolved around just these two things. Needless to say, they were discussing the future of their grown up kids.
Somehow, my fertile brain started spinning as I had a grown-up daughter at home too and I had never ever spent a minute thinking about her settling down or her marriage.  “Apna haath jagannath” - a phrase I first heard when I was in the 11th grade. The naive fool that I was, it took me quite some time to figure it out. I had been a “weaving fantasies in my head” sort from a very early age, even before I hit my teens.
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November 2021
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