Family as a support group

Once the children were small there were many occassions when we would all be together and take out group photos. Now increasingly with two , Bittu and Tarun leaving home for studies and jobs it has become difficult to get every one together. marriages in the family are the only occassions when we can all be together. Earlier we had a family tradition on which Somu would insist that all of us take photos of the family on our wedding anniversary day ie. on 28th February. We did this for a long time and hence we can see each year as we grow old and the children grow up. Yesterday I read about the Empty nest syndrom when children leave the house and how many women fall into depression.It stated that this had more impact on women than men. There were a large number of interviews of mother s as to how they were coping with life once their children left.

Betty Friedan in, The Feminine Mystique refers to The Problem that Has No Name. She writes, The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question--"Is this all?"
For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights--the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children. Many women feel empty somehow . . . incomplete, or feel as if they don't exist. She interviews a number of women and talks about the voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home." I feel this is a must read for any one interested in looking at life and trying to understand it.

I also feel that soon the house will be empty if Chottu also decides to go out to study or work. As of now he is not sure and keeps telling a different thing every day as to what he wants to do after his engineering.