Writing from the Kitchen Sink

Women, in general, get to face a lot of flak. If she is a homemaker, the work she does all day gets unnoticed. The food gets cooked by itself, the shoes you left lying on the floor return to their allotted place on their own. Surely, the clothes are getting cleaned and ironed and put back in your cupboard on their own! If the woman has a job, that is surely for pleasure, for selfish reasons. Of course, it is not a career! If she is a Stay-At-Home Mother and self-employed, then her ‘life is a vacation’ because she gets to spend all day at home, playing and gurgling with her child. She most definitely has all the time in the world. Women are not stressed. That’s a man’s prerogative. So, what is she doing for the family or her home?

The truth is, she doesn’t have a home to call her own. Her space is not her space. When she leaves her parental home, the room where she had grown up in gets converted to the ‘spare room’. This is not the same kind of ‘spare room’ that Anne Shirley romanticises about. It is not ‘spare’ because it is an extra and a luxury. It is ‘spare’ because there is no longer any use for it. Like the room, the woman is also discarded. She becomes a permanent ‘guest’ in her parental home. At her in-laws, she cannot decorate her space and make it her own. She is not the ‘woman of the house’ there, her mother-in-law is. So, if women are privileged enough to live away from the in-laws, because Indian families still have parents living with the sons, then there is no room that is her own. There is the bedroom that she shares with her husband. She might be lucky to find a corner where she can put her feet up but an entire room to herself and nobody else?

So what is ‘home’ for the woman? Home is a place where she toils day in and day out. Home is a place where others can return to at the end of the day to let their hair down. Where does she go to unwind? Does she have a room of her own to relax when everyone has been fed and made happy?

It is a deep-seated human need to ‘belong’. A woman’s home is where she can completely be herself. So if she has some semblance of ‘space’ in her own house, then she can call it home. Why is the onus on the woman to make a house a home? Home for whom? Home-making is a personal choice and more often than not, it has to do with the freedom to ‘make’ it home.

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