Open Letter - 22

Dear Society,

How are you? I am good and I hope to hear the same from you. Before anything else, let me wish you a very happy friendship day. You have been a great friend during these tough times and I have to tell you, your patience correspondence worked miracles in my life. But for you, I would have become a lone-duck with none to talk to and none to share my thoughts with.

When I wrote my first letter to you, I had to face a storm of phone calls questioning my loyalty to my family, in-laws, cousins, colleagues and neighbours. Well, being a married woman, I was not supposed to share my news with my friends before I share it with my immediate family and I crossed that line by writing to you. My husband says he used to meet his friends every day until he married me. Now that he got married, he is not finding time to meet them at least once in a month. I tell him, I’ve last seen my friends at our wedding reception and since then, I had no time for them.

Dear society, women are considered to be incapable of maintaining multiple relations at the same time like men do. When they find friends, they forget their family. When they find a partner, they forget their friends. When they get children, they forget their partners. Their attention is said to be single focused and they do not have space for all relations at once.

Men, on the other hand know the art of handling various relationships at the same time. When at home, they spend their time with their family, out on roads, they spend their time with their friends, once at office, they have time for colleagues and back in their locality they have time for neighbours. They can as well stay connected with their cousins, siblings and long-distance friends through weekend calls and virtual hangouts.

Women, notorious to be the chatterboxes of the house, haven’t supposedly mastered this art. The reason being a change in protocol for women and a mandated hierarchy to be followed while sharing one’s news and views. Last week my husband called his friends over for dinner and told me he did so once he came home. I actually had a plan to meet my friends that day but now that he invited his friends over, I had to stay back and cook for them. I could have as well left to meet my friends, but that would have made him feel low before his friends. My friends would understand my situation but his might not. And I have no explanation for it. I just felt so.

This way, my friends and I have been planning to hangout since many months but somehow we are still not able to find a day when all of us can come together. With all the in-laws coming today, my child has holiday, my husband’s ill, I am on my periods excuses, we are a long way to go to find a date to get together with no absentees. Well, we have been talking on call every once in a while but that doesn’t count as a hangout, does it?

Yes, I have colleagues, I have a life-partner, I have cousins, I have siblings, I have neighbours and I have lots of other acquaintances, but friends, though I stay in touch with them, I feel do not have any left.

Like many others, I do not find it easier to recognize someone as a friend just because they occupy the same cabin as mine or just because they attended the same college as I did. Life is full of many relations and friendship is one of them and contrary to popular notion that friends are easily made, I believe they are not. Friends are not those who share a common space with us nor are they those who share common knowledge about a particular issue. So colleagues, classmates, co-workers, neighbours, do no become friends as we generally consider them to be.

To try to define friendship would be impractical because each person has a custom made definition for friendship. In my words, friends are those who share your wavelength of thoughts. For example, in any random situation among a group of people, only one person will be able to have the same train of thoughts as you do. One look at them tells you they are thinking the same thing as you are. When this wavelength runs in a synchronous, one knows one can easily rely on the other to understand one’s situation without much saying.

These kinds of relationships generally form during schooling and college days. It is easier to synchronize one’s wavelength with that of another during those earlier years of learning. In later years, one might find it difficult to encounter a person of similar thought waves as mindsets and ideologies might have already concretized in individuals by then.

Unlike all other relations, friendship takes the brunt of all our wrong-doings and still stands tall and strong. When a kid scrapes his ankle and comes home crying, the blame goes on his friends. When a teenager skips class to watch a movie, the blame goes on her friends. All failed attempts and all successful mischiefs push the blame onto one’s friends. However, friendships are meant to grow with these blame games and name calling, like the one I am now enjoying with you.

When I write a letter to you and someone finds it unacceptable, they tell me I should stop writing to you because they feel I am thinking a lot about your welfare and forgetting about my child. Few say, society never changes and it is futile to write to a passive listener. Few ask me if you have ever replied to my letters while few say you are turning me into a pessimist.

Dear society, why do they not understand that I cannot think about my child without thinking about you? How should I make them realize that a passive listener is a better friend than an active custom-mandated listener? May be you should try to tell them in your own words.

Do write to them if you find some time and tell them that friendships are sacred and by limiting a woman’s access to her friends, we are further cornering her into a closed circle. Hangouts with friends might seem a waste of time but these hangouts are what breathe life into a dull and monotonous life. So, do tell them not to restrict anyone for that instance from hanging out with their friends. If you have by now realized it, do not forget to tell that women are not incapable of maintaining multiple relations at the same time. All they need is some support and empathy from their immediate family in order to stay close with their truly dear people. Because they might not be able to spend time with their friends like they once used to, but every moment of their lives, they pine for those happy days and breathe life into their friendship with their memories.

Hope you have a great day ahead,

Yours Lovingly,

An Expecting Mother.