Difficulty for a Desi Wife

Once you start a task, never ever expect it to get easier.  It took my stubborn self a very long time to admit that.  As time passes by it becomes even more challenging as a woman to handle everything around me.  Many Bengali women (as well as other nationalities) go through this stage of adjusting with their husband's family.  With comparison to many other circumstances, I am a lucky girl to be welcomed so easily into an open-minded family.  That is however not always the case for everyone. 

Desi in-laws assume that the wife of the house knows it all.  What I mean to say is, they are expected to know all the domestic work and have this ability to read people's mind, cook the right way, clean the right way, know a great deal about their mother country, culture, and so on.  That's why many parents prefer a girl form Bangladesh for their son instead of Western countries, because they assume all desi western girls are lacking many obvious things..that they're just bad girls.  Anyways, let's save that topic for another time.  The worst part of all is even if the girl knows a great deal about most things, they are still underestimated.  Why? 

Usually a girl around her early to mid 20s gets married and is brought to the man's house.  From this time on she will be closely observed by her in-laws on a 24-hour basis. 

Let's say this woman knows how to cook, because she would occasionally cook back home when there was nobody around to cook in the house or just to help her mother around.  Now she starts cooking for her in-laws and ofcourse she will not be alone.  After all, it is her fírst time cooking in her husband's house, and even though she is pretty much an expert with giving the right spices at the right time she will be strongly criticized over how wrong her quantities are, how she cuts her onions, or how her style of cooking is not the right way.  So from then on, she changes her way (indirectly, her mother's way) of cooking that she has grown up eating and learns the NEW STYLE whether she likes it or not.  Then she has to get used to the meal timings.  She would have dinner at 7 in the evening at her house, but now, her new dinner time is 11 at night, something she really needs to get used to.  She get's the "Are you crazy" and "you don't know anything" looks when she tells her new family that she thought dinner was at 7, which was why she started setting the table so early.

This whole adjusting thing goes for not only cooking but everything else.  Every little thing from waking up in the morning to going to bed.  

There is this really bad habit that many desi parents have.  I respect all responsible parents for their hardwork to raise their children and get them settled, but it is very nerve-wracking for a person to hear "What did your parents teach you?"  So you screw up on something, instead of the blame going to you it goes straight to your parents.  Which might lead to why desi parents always try to force a certain mentality into their kids just so "people won't talk".  People talk either way, that's something they still haven't grasped.  I've heard and seen many situations where a bride goes to her in-laws and after a few days of working the inlaws would give the classic line, "How can you not know how to do this? Did your parents not teach you before?  It was their duty to teach you!"  For once they do not put themselves in the same position and think about how clueless they were 30 or 20 years ago?  Then i see a new wife going back to visit her parents and so the parents say, "What did your in-laws teach you?" However nowadays a girl's parents hardly ask that..but it still goes on in many parts of Bangladesh. One of the biggest insults one can give would involve the blaming of one's parents.

Some in-laws don't give any importance on the wife's education.  So they don't allow her to go out in the real world and let her study and become successful  because they have this paranoia of her realizing one day how limited her choices are which might lead her to run away from her married life. 

Then they nag and nag about small things around the house and soon they start rotting the wife's ears about grandchildren.  I turns out that they end up controlling her entire life, and so one day, when this wife becomes a mother and then a mother-in-law herself, one of the 2 things will happen to her.  1, by the time she is a mother-in-law, she will be completely brain-washed by her in-laws and have the same beliefs and values as them, leading to her trying to teach the same exact doublestandards to her children or 2, she will have this negative effect towards desi tradition and inform her children about only the negative biased things about our culture.  Both results are bad.

There is no point picking on the wife.  Especially in this generation where in most cases the girl is well-educated which means she has knowledge of not just our culture but other cultures around the world as well, broadening the horizen. 

Dropping the weight of the world on the woman's back is not the fair way to go.  It's hard for a woman to survive in such a mixed society where there exists both extremists and libertarians. 

The worse part is the desi husbands find it a bit difficult to understand sometimes...that it takes time for a woman to get comfortable with a different lifestyle.  The wife never has intentions of hating the in-laws at first.

Much appreciation is needed for all the women who are married into a desi family.  Desi family is filled with a crap load of drama that a woman has no choice but to put up with. 

Nowadays, in-laws outside of Bangladesh are pretty easy-going.  They actually want their sons to move out and be independent to support the wife.  There are still some really traditional people in Bangladesh where they think it is mandatory for the girl to live with the entire family for life.  Why is it mandatory? The people that think it is obligatory can't even come up with a logical reason.