The Stay-at-home Wives/Moms

One of the biggest problems women have to face after marriage is the common complaints of being lazy and not getting a job to provide family support.  This is for the women who actually WORK hard at home and keep the family together.  I actually see several expat-women facing this situation in Sweden, especially since it's hard to even get a job not knowing how to speak Swedish fluently. 

There are many households where the husband's work is the only source of income for the family and unfortunately in many cases, the wife gets misunderstood as a gold-digger.  Of course there are gold-diggers and lazy wives out there who simply use their husband's hard work’s income to get their own pleasure, sometimes even cheat, but come on, let's stop with the generalizations.  There is good and evil MIXED all over this world and the worst thing one can do is categorize an innocent person into the wrong group.

This gets worse when a couple has kids.  Here’s a scenario.  Even if the family is financially stable, there will be times when the husband will completely lose it one day after coming home from a long day's work and let off that nasty temper concerning how he terribly hates how his wife sits at home never doing anything productive.  Truth is, that the wife spends the entire day taking care of the house, running errands, doing laundry and grocery, cooking and cleaning, upbringing their kids, helping her in-laws, and not saving a single minute just for herself.  Not even in the weekends.  Being both a good wife and a mother is a fulltime job for her which always happens to be overlooked.  She appreciates the financial support her husband gives to the family, but she needs to be appreciated too…instead of getting all the blames.

Bottom line is, things need to be mutual in a marriage and when I say mutual it does not necessarily mean having equal income.  It is much, much more than that.

We all know how great the economy is (sarcasm).  So I am sure a great percentage of stay-at-home moms/wives are undergoing this problem.  It’s so unfortunate to see how many marriages are failing for this reason. 

This one’s for all the faithful wives out there!

Some new Swedish words - Home improvement

So over the past few weeks we have been working on giving our old house a little facelift.  Our walls are being painted and new flooring is on the way. 

All I wonder about is whoever the hell lived in this place before my husband's family moved here, because they had really weird taste.  The former owners of the house did some weird things, like putting on 3 completely different brown and white colored wallpapers on the same room with very bad finishing.  I was never a big fan of wallpapers.  Especially the densly printed ones with flowers and leaves.  It makes a house look like a freaking jungle.  On top of that, the kitchen and diningroom floor was just something else. 

Soon there will be no more scary wallpapers and ugly floor.  

Here are a few useful words ive learned  during the process..

grundfärg/primarfärg - paint primer
laminatgolv - laminated flooring
tapet - wallpaper
kakel - tiles
kristallkrona - chandelier

These words might be quite useful in the future when I decide on redesigning my own house some day.

Who's the FOB now?

When i was younger, I used to make fun of fobs, because my friends did it, and i thought it was cool so i turned out worse than them.  Now i think about it.  I made fun of people that were referred to as "fobs" because at the time, those kids stood out as typical desis who were only trying to adjust to their new surroundings.  People would laugh at fobs because they would have a strong accent when they talked english, and dress differently, think differently, not get jokes or the like.

Hmm, I live in Sweden now.  A place where desis seldom mention the word FOB.  When i speak this country's native language i can only imagine how big of an idiot i sound like.  When i dress like an awfully ordinary girl while the rest look their best I wonder if i stand out as an "immigrant".   When swedish conversations go on I have so much to say but don't have that many ways to express it with the limited boring words i know.  So now I'm the quiet girl once again...little ms. quiet munni all over again.  Wonderful.

Us desis, especially in the states, make fun of other desis' broken english.  Try coming here, and try speaking your broken swedish.  You will wonder why you ever laughed about so called "FOBS" that are probably or will probably be better off than any of us in the long-run. 

I first heard the word FOB when i was around 11.  I lived in Norcross, GA then.  All the white people started to move away up north and a lot of the latinos, blacks and desis started swirming in around that time.  Every other indian, bengali, or pakistani in my school was called a FOB.  Unless they were completely brainwashed and americanized, they would be picked on. 

I got older and it started getting worse.  I heard the term ABCD (American born confused desi).  Unlike some people, I was definitely not proud to be called one.  I wasn't confused! Deep inside i really hated the whole division within desis based on whether they were citizens or immigrants.  I would think, my parents were once immigrants.  Even after several years of living in America there are times when they still feel like 2nd class citizens.  Would they be FOBs?  What about now, with me?  Living in a place I am not so familiar with makes me a FOB?

It was stupid of me to even think that way before.  And it's sad how many southasians, mostly in the US, have this mentality.  I come to Sweden and meet tons of immigrants from places all over the world.  They all have different english accents but accent at this point doesn't really matter to us because we are only trying to communicate, be it in english or swedish.  So why is it such a big deal in the US?  Why would you generalize a certain group of people without knowing the half of it?   It just shows ignorance. 

So now I'm the girl with the funny accent, and boring clothes, aggressive driving, having those blond moments while everyone around me laughs and socialize in swedish.  The "typical desi housewife" which is every girl's nightmare.  I'm the outcast.  The immigrant.  I'm fresh off the boat.   

Art of the Day : Priceless Moment

That moment when time stops, and it seems as though only the two of you exist in this world.

So here is the story behind the drawing.  I had this scene in my mind of a very busy manhattan-like city at night which i tried to portray on the picture, however, the couple on the right popped out during the process of sketching.  This was overall, a very unpredictable art experience.  Somehow love interrupted this city scene, or maybe i should reword it and say that it completed the scene. 

Ever since i was a kid, I've always thought drawing people (and still think so) was and is the hardest thing to draw!  Yet i somehow manage to stick in some kind of human figure in all of my drawings.  It actually adds emotion and makes it more interesting for me.  Afterall, i am a girl with extremely little patience.

My goal for my next piece of art:

Something i wanted to do with this drawing actually, was to show you the different stages from beginning to the end.  It's funny how you can never ever tell what a person is drawing by the look of the first rough sketch.

From now on, ill show you the entire process of drawing a picture.  You can get some sort of idea about how my mind really works while im drawing.  Hopefully you won't think I'm too weird!