After many years of avoiding one another, we finally met for breakfast dosa near her house. We had been advised against it by everyone, especially our lawyers, but at a certain point relationships have to stop being governed by the law, especially when we all share a child.
The four of us sit at the corner table in a restaurant the kid has mentioned to me many times before, he says it has the second-best dosas in all of Bangalore (which, as a claim, is demonstrably false). We’re all visibly dealing with our own discomfort. She’s doing it by asking generic questions about our trip while avoiding eye-contact, my spouse is doing it by committing to guarded silence, the kid is doing it by studying the expressions of everyone at the table and I am doing it by acknowledging the awkwardness because it is the only way I know to deal with awkwardness.
It is awkward.
This is an unlikely meeting and everyone in my life has questioned my decision to go forward with it. My spouse and her had an acrimonious relationship, an even worse divorce and a very emotionally-fraught custodial agreement. Her and I have had little contact through the years, despite the fact that I have been raising their child as the partner of the custodial parent for eight years and for the first several years of their post-marital relationship, my spouse and her have continued to fight each other over every single thing they could turn into a contentious issue, and some of that resentment still lingers for both of them. As far as our lawyers and court-orders are concerned, these people (including myself) should have no contact with each other except for the contact mandated by law in the interest of the child but, I have found, the law is terrible at navigating relationships. It’s hard to explain to the law how this unlikely unit is in some ways, a family. We’re all raising the same child, after all, and that’s not just a logistical thing, it has the component of shared emotional experiences.
When the child is sick, we all worry. When the child is going through changes or growth, we all deal with that. When the child exhibits behavioral issues, we all have to deal with that. When the child learns something new, we all experience it alongside him. When the child hits a milestone, we all have feelings about it. Someday, if the child has a graduation or a wedding, we shall all be part of that experience and if he chooses to have a family of his own, we shall all expand our existing social structures to incorporate his as well. The law wants our lives to be neatly separated so as to avoid contention and risk, but whether we like it or not, our lives are inextricably linked to one another. I don’t really know this woman but there is something deep and consequential that I share with her.
I look at her. She has well-kept hair, styled and coiffed, very unlike my own wild mop, she has freckles on her nose, thin arms and she is dressed in very simple, casual clothes. I like how she looks. She looks at me. I don’t know what she sees. We talk about the thing we have in common, and surprisingly, it is not the child, it is the man. We have both love(d) the same man. She tells me stories of their time together and the picture she presents is very different from the person I know. I’m aware of this, of course, one of the first things my spouse told me when we met was that he was going through a divorce and that as a husband to his former partner, he hadn’t done as well as he would have liked. He told me a lot about the things she had done, later, but in our first conversation, he said a lot about how much he had learnt from how terribly that relationship had imploded and how resolved he was to not repeat those behaviours in other relationships. It was a big part of why I fell for him, because it is so easy to blame another person for that ails a relationship (and in his case, it really was) but he didn’t talk about his “crazy ex-wife,” he talked about how he hadn’t been a good partner to her either. I respect that. As she tells me about their relationship, I gasp in humorous horror and hold his hand. If her intention is to show me another version of the man I love for a nefarious purpose, it doesn’t have an impact on me but it seems jovial enough.
“No wonder your relationship ended in divorce,” I say, laughing along at the stories.
“You have changed so much,” she says to him and then addresses me, “You and I married different men.”
It is a simple statement but there is a profound truth inside it. For one thing, they met on the “marriage market” and arranged marriages in India are a complex social phenomenon that not only impacts who you marry but how you behave in a marriage as well. Everything that makes me desirable as a partner on the dating scene is unacceptable on the marriage mart, I am too loud, too open, too ambitious, too independent, too autonomous and too modern to be a candidate, I am not the partner you present to your Indian family and expect it to go over smoothly. She is much more traditional than I am, but more than that, when they made the decision to marry it was more about social convention than someone to love, it was more about being at that place in your life, than being madly in love with each other, and outside of love, relationships (especially those like marriage) come with familial and social expectations (that are often the death of any love that may even have developed). It’s no wonder to me that they grew to despise one another so quickly, it would be clear to anyone with eyes that they are not right for each other but by the conventions of the market, they aligned. Same community, same state, same upbringing, similar enough habits and most importantly, at the age to marry. As miserable as he was in their marriage, it is clear she was miserable as well.
Obviously, I am not delusional, I don’t expect this to yield any magical results. It is unlikely we will be close friends or that this will quell all of the resentment they continue to carry for one another but that is not why I am here. I am not here for a grand gesture, I don’t wish to perform a recce on her, I am not here to dig for an agenda, I do not care if there is an ulterior motive at play and I know better than to assume a single meeting will erase any scars the child does bear from their relationship. I am here because I am tired of having a relationship with her by proxy. I am fed up of never being able to speak openly. I cannot govern my behaviour with the assumption of nefarious intention anymore. I cannot hide myself to keep the peace any longer. I am here because we share something—the upbringing of our child—and no matter who she is as a person, I want her to know that we are in that together. We are very different as parents, but we are not different in that we love the child. She loves him, I know that.
There were many times when steeped in hatred my spouse, my own family and his have tried to convince me that she isn’t really interested in the child but I have seen constant evidence to the contrary. She does not love like I do, she is not what one would call a chill parent and she is definitely more inclined to setting stock in the power of roles (like mother and elders) than I am, but she’s been around the whole time. She speaks to him every day, she sees him every holiday and she visits him whenever she can. It’s easy to condemn a mother for giving up custody of her child, way easier than it is to condemn a father for the same thing, and everyone in my life has done that. They’ve questioned it by asking what kind of mother would do something like that but I see something society is eager not to acknowledge. Life is difficult in this environment for a twice-divorced single-mother and in situations like theirs, there is bound to be a parent who sees the child more than the other (when they don’t live in the same city and one has more access to resources than the other) and I know for a fact that everyone would laud my husband if despite not having custody, he made as much of an effort to see the child as she does. No one would bat an eye if his work kept him from the kid as hers does. I am here because I want it known that I do not judge her for this.
I don’t judge anyone here at all.
I am much too wise (on Wednesdays and Saturdays anyway) to take any one person’s word in my quest for the truth and the truth of this situation is that they were both terrible for each other, it wasn’t the best decision to have a child together and it was an even worse decision to continue to commit to their hatred after having parted ways. I am here because it is time to end the hatred.
“I’ve never met two people who are more committed to their passionate hatred of one another than the two of you,” I comment to them when the child is away washing his hands.
“Maybe it’s time to end that,” my spouse says.
“Maybe it is,” she agrees.
That is why I am here.
Mother Inferior 