Too many people on the same boat. Time some one called it out.

It started with googling instances of emotional abuse and legality of forced marriages in India:

1.) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/31/letter-to-mother-forced-me-into-arranged-marriage
2.) Madh Mama's blog:
    a.) I am also in the exact same situation. To make it worse, my parents are looking into arranged marriages already! Today I was called a back stabber, untrustworthy, disappointment and an excuse for a daughter. I am completely drained. I have been fighting with my parents and trying to make them see for half a year now and I have very little energy left.
tambrahm girl's life!

    b.) AnonymousNovember 11, 2015 at 7:31 PM

I am a tamil brahmin girl aswell but my boyfriend isnt white...hes tamil but a different caste. when my parents found out they flipped shits and started threatening me saying they would kick me out, never speak to me again and completely cut all ties with any extended family aswell. they even went to the extreme of telling me that if i do go through with this marriage that they would never come near my future children because they would be of his caste and eat meat lol ive been in a relationship with my bf for 2 years now and i have been dealing with spurts of anger from my parents [especially my mom] for a long time now. they think im stupid and unable to make a level headed decision because he[my bf] is manipulating me and blinding me with love and only wants to be with me to better himself...how stupid. ive been called every name in the book from backstabber to slut, they even talk badly of him to make me feel like crap. at this point i just take it in one ear and out the other. they really need to stop caring about what the "community" says its not like they'll be feeding me or supporting me in the future lol .. its 2015 for God'sake compromise is key to any relationship and they have raised me to be an intelligent young women. i basically just listen to everything they say and not respond because its sooooo emotionally draining.

So here goes my story's not very verbose. The sentences are long and winding. Not very well formed either. Please excuse.

My mother is emotionally abusing me. I don’t think she realizes this. Maybe what she assumes she is doing is a way to express love/concern. Or a way to express her disapproval over my actions – and all my actions, irrespective of their original intentions. She has very conveniently forgotten all the beautiful precious moments she spent with me or she is simply choosing to ignore them due to this initial stage of shock. Shock over the fact that I am in a relationship with a guy who I intend to marry. In the entire course of convincing me to leave my boyfriend, she has tried her hand at everything that she thinks has a shot at working. These include but are not limited to issuing suicide threats, physically harming herself, verbally and physically abusing me, verbally abusing my boyfriend, teary coercion, angry coercion, abusing my boyfriend in front of me so that I feel bad about being with him and leave him merely due to the fact that he will never be respected in my family, asking my relatives to coerce me, emotional blackmail of the topmost notch, lying, driving her car into a wall, refusing to eat, blocking me from all social platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. and completely icing me out. All this because my boyfriend doesn’t belong to the same state to which I do back in India. Funnily enough, I wasn’t even raised in the said state back when I used to live in India. I recently broke up with my ex-boyfriend of three years. Instead of providing me with any emotional comfort, she had hounded me about she had been right about the guy all along (she never approved of him either). My current boyfriend used to be my best friend for a long time before we realized we have feelings for each other. So, my mother knows him. She has known him for almost two years. When I had to tell her about my boyfriend because of the fact that she was arranging to get me married to some guy whose parents she had met online through an arranged-marriage-enabling website in India (*rolls eyes*; don’t get me started), the idea of me being with him didn’t bide well with her at all too (*surprise surprise*). She was visiting me in Kentucky when I told her about my intention to get married to my boyfriend, she immediately strong-armed me into advancing her tickets back to India and left within a week by launching a hunger strike. She has made it impossible for me to talk to her or contact her in any way. She has made it clear she will only talk to me if I not only break up with my boyfriend immediately, but also agree to meet these random guys she had picked for me to get married to. Unless I agree to do that, she has sworn to not talk to me. Strangely, she expects me to do this, and wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to the guy who she has known for two years as my friend and have a rational discussion with him.

A week after I told her about my boyfriend, when she seemed to have calmed down a little bit after her initial bout of anger and tantrums, I casually asked her if she has blocked my boyfriend on Facebook, in response, she hit me on the face in a laundromat we were at near my house. She left for India the day after. My dad doesn’t stay with my mom. He works in Qatar. So back in India, there is no one to keep an eye on her. My relatives keep calling me and sending me on severe guilt trips of the top-notch quality about how my mother’s health is failing with each passing day because of my ‘antics’. Meanwhile, I am supposed to stay strong without asking for help and/or sympathy from any external agency. I have no siblings. My boyfriend’s siblings have been exceptionally kind to me which my dad appreciates. Because no one in my so-called family gives a damn about me. No one has bothered to ask me how I am. I will tell no one that I am slowly descending into such an abyss of depression and paranoia that I regularly google assisted suicide laws in this country. I have started keeping a track of when the grade crossing behind my apartment shuts down. I don’t want to extort any one, least of all my own parents, into letting me have my own way by making them feel guilty of my suicidal intentions. But I have begun to relapse into my childhood bouts of self-harming. There is a spot on the left tip of my forehead which when I cut, I feel assuaged of the guilt that these people are so intent on making me feel responsible for. Now that I am mature enough to know what it is called, I realize I had been emotionally abused as a child too. Apparently, how my mom is choosing to behave and what she is doing is considered socially acceptable, warranted and even reasonable. What I am doing is deplorable, abusive to my parents and inconsiderate. No one in my family bothers to call me up and ask how I am faring. They seem to think that once you are in a relationship which your parents disapprove of, you are automatically happy 24*7. They assume it takes no toll on you if your parents emotionally abuse and stop talking to you. All the hurt is felt by the parents alone. But that is okay, I don’t want to ride the pity train any way. Soaking in a pity bath to get my way will make my resolve look like something I decided to do just in order to be contrarian and to get on my parents’ nerves. Although, my father calls me up every day to check on me and make sure that I am as strong as ever and am not succumbing to any emotional trauma. I am making it appear as if I am, I am really trying very hard to not lose my mind over my mother’s behavior. Because I want to stay sane until the pair of them agree to talk to me. If I lose my sanity before that happens, it is an endless abyss. This behavior of her makes me sad. I know she is only doing all this to make me agree to marry a Bengali person. Meanwhile my father keeps sending me all these pictures, videos and quotations related to my childhood. When he talks to me on phone he respects my decision to not discuss about the issue until I take my PhD qualifiers. He even made it appear once as if he is ready to have a discussion about it (although he made it pretty clear what the end of the discussion is going to be like) by quoting Boromama’s example of needing an extraordinary amount of time to accept something which goes even slightly against what you took for granted as being default. But what exactly he aims to achieve by sending all these pointedly nostalgic pictures and video recordings I have no idea. Maybe his intentions are not all that sinister (or at least, not so obviously sinister as are my mom’s hysterics). Maybe they are. I have no way of knowing. Only because I am a glass half full kind of a person do I assume that he might be the one with a slightly sounder mind and an open rationale. It is my fault too to some extent I think. I have started over-analyzing everything that the pair of them does. I should probably not subject dad’s actions to such over analysis. Ugh, I don’t know. Maybe I should. Especially since I came to know that my parents are devising a plot to overthrow my relationship by dealing with it ‘tactfully’ (in their own words), I have stopped taking anything at face value. Meanwhile, my boyfriend’s sister, Nitya has provided me with heaps of advice that I never even asked for. She has got to be one of the most emotionally stable and supportive people I have ever come across in my life. She does not even know me that well and she has extended her unconditional support and love to me. She has opened her heart and her home to me in a way none of my friends ever have lately. Since I have started texting her, I have started to regain my stability and have developed a new vigor afresh to face my dad without over scrutinizing his actions and have started sending normal picture messages to my mom without caring a dime about if she replies. My mom ignoring me to make me feel like a filthy rat has started to not bother me so much since I started speaking to Nitya. She has provided me with a kind of self-assurance based on which other people’s approval has started meaning lesser to me with each passing moment. That is kind of saying a lot for a person like me. Maybe it is due to the fact that this is probably the first time in my life that someone has shown faith in me without expecting absolutely nothing in return and in the true sense of the word, sans-condition. It may look like I am over-adulating my boyfriend’s family but I am awed at the way Ganesh himself is handling the situation. I am astounded at his patience and the infinitesimal number of times he has flown into a temper given he is one of the most impatient people I have ever had the misfortune to meet in my life, let alone fall in love with. Prior to all this, I used to think that every action, act of coercion and whatever melodrama my mom subjects me to is all fueled by just one motive-seeing me happy. Maybe she goes overboard and towards borderline hysteria and resorts to unknowing abusive tactics to achieve just that one goal-a happy me. Now, I am not sure. I am not very proud of this, but I secretly go through my mom’s Facebook chats occasionally. She has been discussing with my dad how to handle this affair ‘tactfully’ and how to coerce me into genuinely believing that my boyfriend is indeed an inscrutably unscrupulous and evil guy. And how that is the only way to get me apart from my boyfriend. A few weeks ago, she wrote that by hook or by crook, she will get me married within 6 months by making me voluntarily leave my boyfriend. I don’t know how is that even possible and what that even entails. It might mean that she would frame him for something. I don’t even know if she meant what she wrote. But that makes me scared. More than that, it makes me sad. I have always believed that respect for anyone, even parents, is earned. And it is a child’s responsibility to value and respect his/her parents. But that sense of responsibility is now getting diluted into ever-diminishing proportions mixed with the plethora of evidence against her. I have always known my mom to be a very loving, genuine and generous person. She has always had everyone’s best interests at heart and is a very soft spoken lady who you would never believe would sink to such depths just because something is not going her way. You realize what a person is like by the way he/she reacts to or deals with situations that occur against their wishes. It is a shocking jolt to reality for me. I still don’t believe she wants to hurt me in any way but that’s not on the top of her priority list now. Getting me married to a guy of her choice is at the top of her priorities now. Everything is secondary. Once among all this hysteria, she has even gone so far as to tell me that I MUST get married to someone of her choice and that I am free to divorce him after a couple of months if I want to. That’s just a sampler of what truly is driving her now. After a certain time, I will not be able to listen to her abusing the love of my life. It is only going to be so much after which I will expect you to respect my man, at least show one tiny fraction of the respect to him as do I (and him too by the way, after listening to you abusing him at a length) to you. Incidentally, my boyfriend used to love my mother. Yes, love her, not just respect her, love her, before all this muck started taking place. It is indeed sad that the way she has maligned things, I don’t think he can ever go back to respecting her (, although it will be a mark of how much he loves me if he chooses not to mention how much he hates my mother). It is merely a war of ego and a desire of will to persist now. The trouble is that now that I have seen this side of hers it has become impossible for me to trust her any more. She has lied to me about how my boyfriend treated her when I was right there on a video chat with him when she had called him (to abuse him). How will I ever trust her again? She may choose to forget how much I love her and how much I want to see her happy, dent the car I gifted her, block me and the memories of the trip to the Smoky Mountains National Park that I took her to visit when she was here, but it is impossible for me to forget and ignore the endless backrubs she has given me over the years, the dresses she secretly used to buy for me when we were not so well off and the sleepless nights she spent for my benefits. She is my mother and no one can alter that fact, not even her, her emotionally abusive behavior or her crazy tantrums. So if she chooses to continue with it, it is her call. I don’t want a person in my life whose presence is dictated by the identity of my marital decisions. If she wants a repayment for all the love and care she has showered on me, I am not equipped enough to carry that out. No one can repay that; most of all, my decision to break up with my boyfriend to marry someone of her choice would be an exceptionally ugly currency of repayment as that would entail a lifelong period of embitterment and frequent distrust over the most innocent of her actions. Today, after she gave my number to another stranger she picked up at BengaliMatrimony.com, I was forced to google about laws concerning forced marriage in India. Apparently, emotionally blackmailing and issuing suicidal threats to your children to coerce them into marrying against their will is illegal to some extent. So, after this initial phase of shock and denial subsides, if she is still unaccepting of my life choices and decides to remove herself from my life, I will have to be okay with that. She has threatened to curse me into a life of hardships and marital discontentment (she believes a mother’s curse always works) if I decide to marry my boyfriend and if that stems from the mere bitterness of her wishes not getting fulfilled, so be it. The way I see it, I don’t think I would have ever striven well anyway if the blessings of my own parents were bound taut with conditions.

Right now, after disconnecting me from her in every way, she is trying to give me a taste of what my life would be like if she is absent from it in the hope that it drives me morose and sad, and I consequently dump my boyfriend and agree to do as she says. Sadly, what she doesn’t realize is that what is not killing me is making me stronger. Unknowingly, she is digging a hole for herself. She is making me get used to surviving without her, I wake up every morning and weep for about 15 minutes before getting out of my bed. If she keeps up this charade, soon, I will stop weeping for her because that part of my brain which is used to feelings of affections from her will turn stoic. It is like breaking up with a boyfriend, except that this would take a little more time to get over from as this is my mother. I have had a relationship with her for 24 years. And usually break ups are caused by mutual faults. The way I see it, I have been abused by my own mother, so maybe this breakup may even be a little easier to get over. What she doesn’t realize is that even if I do give in and marry someone of her choice, my relationship with my mother will never return to what it used to be and no daughter who has ever loved her mother would want to hate her for the rest of her life. But if she continues this, she will make building a world without her in it that much easier for me. The mere thought of this turns me into a weeping ball of mess. She honestly believes all these tantrums work and are even healthy and pardonable if she is able to achieve what she thinks is the correct course of action for my life. A few years ago, my aunt and uncle did almost the same with my cousin after they found out she had a boyfriend in college. They had iced her out completely and stopped interacting with her at all. She was not even allowed to pick her younger brother up. The result as they know it was a happy ending for them. She broke up with her boyfriend for her parents’ sake and made sure they knew it. Everything returned back to normal. She was welcomed with open arms and was showered with adulation, love and admiration over her decision to break up with her boyfriend. For them, it was the end of the story and they never bothered to find out what happened to her next. She had started living two different lives. She lost the compass of her morality and started sleeping around. She has claimed on multiple occasions that she is not courageous enough to tolerate that kind of behavior from her parents. She came back to her senses after she found out that she was pregnant before she turned 21. She had to get an abortion on her own and not let anyone in the family know about it. What is remarkable is that she didn’t even break up with her boyfriend because she had any semblance of love or respect for her parents, not once, even to her closest confidante, did she claim that respect or love was what drove her decision to break up with her boyfriend. She has always maintained it was her inability to take a stand and fight back. The absence of her resolve to stand up against her parents’ emotionally abusive behavior was what turned her into what she became.

Mom and especially Dad, who is the only one I trust any more to give my rant an iota of rational thought, I request just one thing of you. Don’t make me lose my integrity and my resolve. Don’t push me to the brink of turning into a remorseless warrior who has lost every facade of moral correctness. The fact that I am courageous enough to stand up for what is right and strong enough that I am not threatening to kill myself like mom is and who I am, in every respect of the term is a mark of what you raised. Please learn to be proud of it rather than trying to belittle it like how mom is doing. She has made it appear like it is my ethical responsibility to sacrifice my love, my life, my morals and my principles to repay what I owe you for raising me by just one act – marrying a Bengali. Every other act of my respect and love for you people is inconsequential for her. I disagree. I can only repay you by being a completely honest version of myself before you. That’s the only thing which separates my identity from anarchy, which helps me distinguish wrong from right. In my mom’s eyes, icing out your kids, and emotionally abusing them by sending them on regular guilt trips is justified because it brings results (cue: my cousin’s story) because she is so confident that her upbringing has resulted in an incredibly moral and righteous kid (whom she feels she needs to protect and save from the big bad world) who will never betray her husband once she is forced into matrimony by any means possible. I too believe I am that person. I will never betray my husband and my values once I marry. But it’s a two-way train. I will never betray myself too. The resolve to stay true to my rectitude and virtue is not selective. Don’t test it and least of all, please don’t force me to be someone I am not. This would completely ruin everything you have sought to see in your daughter. You have already raised me. Now it is time to trust me.