Today’s date is quite interesting 21-02, 2012 but that’s merely a derailing off topic.

My parents have been separated, then divorced for two years now. And although I did not have to go through my own stages of grief to deal with it (mostly because there was no grief; I felt like it was long overdue and the day that my dad had moved out I thought was a bright beginning towards family happiness), I am still trying to get my mom to see it the same way that I do.

I keep trying to excavate the core issue here so I could “learn from the mistakes of others” but too many things emerge out of the water for me to say that he was impossible to deal with but she could’ve used her woman’s power to change things around. But the question is: should she have?

My mother was always a very grounded and practical person. My dad liked to take calculated risks, albeit maybe not as calculated as my mom would have liked them to be. She chose to accept that everybody lived average family lives and that forever and ever happiness only existed in story books. She was great at handling the worst when she knew that it was the only way out. Even when she was worried, she had a look of determination on her face. That’s why I can’t figure out why she doesn’t see this as just another challenge on her path she needs to get through. Maybe this was how she was before because other people, her family, depended on her keeping her cool and now it’s only her for whom this challenge really matters. And she’s crumbling.

There is a huge list of reasons why I never got along with my dad. Maybe we are too alike to keep seeing our own minuses mirrored at us in each other. But regardless, his actions following through the divorce were not honourable and so, unfortunately I got a little biased along the way.

The thing that my dad had never realized is that in a relationship of a woman and a man, moreover – a marriage, the woman manifests. She creates forms, “castles in the air”, that the man then substantiates using his God given physical power. If she is convinced that his goals do not meet the best interest of the entire family, she will paint a different picture, which will bystep his original plans. He could huff and puff but they will both be at a standstill because the man is not putting in the effort into this newly created picture and the woman refuses to manifest the man’s picture because she doesn’t have faith in it. A woman’s faith is like steam powering a train. You could try pushing a train on your own but it will be the steam giving it full force of speed. And without a train, a steam is just useless vapor. And unfortunately my dad never seemed to realize that. He definitely knew that her lack of faith in his investment plans was the stopper too difficult for him to remove and for that, he got angry at her.

So in his mind – she wasn’t fulfilling one of her wifely duties: supporting the husband. But he also never realized that one of his husband duties was performed substandard: the duty to protect. It is a husband’s job to make his wife feel that she is fully protected from everything, safe in his little bubble. She has to feel safe from any possible outside threats (not just bullies on the street, although that’s part of the list too) including financial ones. How is she supposed to feel safe if her entire marriage she only heard, “We are on a budget” “We can’t afford that” or “We have other priorities”? I remember the days when my dad would bring home some expensive piece of technology, like the blu-ray player right when they first came out or a new laptop or else, and my mom would just be stupified in shock. He wanted to spoil himself once in a while but how is she to feel if not only was she not consulted on the purchase but every other 364 days of the year, she gets told that there’s a budget to abide to? She couldn’t even accept gifts because she felt that the money that was spent on her could have been spent somewhat more usefully to buy something for her children; she was that selfless and still is. But why? Because for 25 years the fear-based belief had rooted itself deep into her subconscious that money is tight and we need to survive. Same as it is the husband’s job to be the primary breadwinner according to the Vedas, same it is to provide comforts to his family, especially the woman who birthed two of his children and left entirely everything to move to a country she didn’t want to go to.

If he had known those two factors, maybe she would feel safer about him taking the risks that he did. Maybe he would have gotten the support he wanted because she would believe in him more…