At this time on a Amavasiya day, I am thinking about my deceased mother-in-law who passed away exactly a year before our marriage. Having experienced much pain and loss, I expected our marriage would bring a change and the much needed moral support to our isolated family. As the eldest daughter-in-law, I thought it was my responsibility to keep the family intact by looking after a bereaved father-in-law who was broken and had been recovering from a heart attack.
I was innocent without any thoughts that would disturb the family life. I did my best to keep the family at peace. The only thought in my mind was taking care of children who lost their mother. My mother lost her mother when she was a toddler and so I thought it was my sole duty to keep everyone happy and comfortable with my sincere duties to the family.
Now I am forced to think what bad karma left me in this family to face selfish siblings and a prodigal husband who never thought about my comfort level and wanted me to be there as a cook, servant maid and a caregiver of the family. I was stuck being with all times cooking, cleaning and washing utensils. I used to fill an entire tank by lifting water from the well manually. No one helped me and no one was there to think about my comfort level.
I was just thinking what I would have done to my mother-in-law in our early births if one happened to be there. Was I paying back my bad karma by going through all these intensive sufferings that affect my inner peace at heart and encourage suicidal thoughts to get away from this world? No one shared with me important incidents that happened before her death. Even my husband never spoke to me openly about his siblings at any cost. I was left in a void without any knowledge about their family and the issues they were facing after my sister-in-law’s marriage. The younger sister-in-law was a pain in the ass who was always jealous about me and wanted to create trouble always. She always provoked my younger brother-in-law who was merely ten years old at that time and made him sneer at me making faces and passing comments.
I was least bothered about everything that happened around me that tested my patience and tolerance. I turned deaf to every scorn and sneer aimed at me. Though a post-graduate at that time and had been working as a teacher before marriage, still now I could not understand what made me behave so dumb even without reacting to anything that happened around me.