International Women's Day, Maught, and Post-Rage Melancholy

04/05/2025

There is a Scottish word, maught. It means might. My father told us today over tea and some puffed rice. His organisation is giving its female employees an amount to spend on Women's Day, 8th of March. I often think, what will I do? What will I get on Women's Day as a woman? Even though I took a long journey to accept I have become a woman. Being a woman has become important to me more than ever. And I have grown closer to my mother. Is it a result of the former? Or is the former the result of this new closeness? Who knows which came first? I find it tautological. As mother and daughter, our talk, by and large, revolves around food. Not the surface-level dinner-table conversation. The hunger, the cooking, the process, the lack, the glut. We both are vegetarians in a family where some others are overt non-vegetarians. And some, covert. The hunger is so vicious, stuck in our chests forever. The cooking has bound us forever in the little soaked kitchen. Outside of which, we have no escape, so we cling on to each other. I often think how much strength she must have conjured up over the years to cook while keeping her hunger shut. How many scraps she must have had to gather to pay her debts to the glut. All while burdened with the responsibility of plenty. The lack that isn't lacking. The glut that isn’t gluttony. Because in a world that offers too much but never has enough—that is what being a woman is like. Could it be that Eve came out of her mother's rib after a long-drawn hunger stuck in there, a vortex is born? And Adam was angry.  He was angry because, after all, how could he, the first man, fall short of a rib? And so, he cursed her. Out of malicious frustration—a sort of tragic possessiveness. He cursed her to give birth from her belly, not from her ribs. And the rib was forever lost, buried under layers of flesh and blood, tangled up in a woman’s womb.  The belly, hopeless belly, on its knees, has to cradle, not the freedom of glut, but of the burden Adam chose to place. And that is, in all likelihood, why I took so long to accept being a woman. The world will never let us be (just) women. It will never free us from the weight of what it means to be womanly. Womanly—to be both a source of life and a symbol of sacrifice. A force of nature wrapped in skin. Cursed to be both tender and unbreakable? I wish this Woman's Day, not for a token of privilege, but for the space to be—unburdened, no qualifiers. Some space to lay this hollow one-rib-less chest bare. Let out this vortex of layers of glut and hunger without feeling like a culprit who released a poison in the city. Give up the echo of cursed expectations dragging me back into the kitchen of my ancestresses.

05/05/2025

I fell asleep writing all of this last night, cramped up in a corner. And woke up in my own pool of blood. The excruciating pain was no stranger, but its hellish outburst today was especially of Mark. It ended up being so bad, I gave into the despair and fell into medication. Oh, the magic of medication. It lets you live, numbly and dizzyingly and drowsily.

06/07/2025

The day was almost good. I don't think I ever had a second day of my periods without any pain. We all have a first. It was so good that it all felt like a dream. An illusion. Or, one of my fantasies. Retrospectively, I prayed it should have been one of those days. Because what followed this lack of pain left a scar so deep, broke a chasm so hard. There is no point of return. The lack of pain brought the flurrying rage that was simmered by being unheard, spat at, humiliated, and disrespected. The rage burst in nerves and defiled my silence. Silence that was embedded in every bit of my woman, my mother's woman, my sister's woman. That look on his face, his voice, and his manipulation churned my stomach and accelerated my bile. The audacity, the gall of him, declaring that I had no right. We had no right. It is the singularity and open-endedness in his statement that forced us to lay our odium bare for him. It is the threat of us having no right but also, in the same breath, the accusation of us being the upper hand. It is the threat of burning us down but also, in the same breath, an accusation of us doubling down on him. It is the threat of stripping us of anything we have but also, in the same breath, the accusation of us taking everything away from us. It is the threat of being a disenfranchised daughter in his life but also, in the same breath, an accusation of never having been enough, of never having measured up to some invisible standard he sets, an expectation that seems to shift and bend with his moods. It is the threat of erasing us, yet the accusation of us trying to erase him, as if we are both the victim and the villain in the same twisted dance. It is the threat of silence, the absence of warmth or presence, yet the accusation that we seek to silence him, to remove his voice from the narrative of our lives, as if we ever had the power to begin with. The evening branded a paradox on us, mother and daughters—we are disempowered, never allowed to fully exist in the way we wish—neither here nor there, neither fully seen nor fully free. The whole night, each breath felt like we were swimming in the tension of impossible expectations, and each blink towards sleep felt like a betrayal, no matter which side we turned.

See, the thing about a woman speaking up is it changes every card on the table. In this time or era, if she endures and silently complains while sobbing and enduring some more, you will still have the whole room to acknowledge her, patronise her, guide her, and make her endure some more. But if she speaks up. Oh. The entire room shifts and turns, and suddenly she is the problem. She is the disruption. She is the threat to the carefully curated peace, the one who dares to unravel the illusion of compliance, of quiet suffering. In her voice, they hear not the plea for understanding but a challenge to the status quo, a defiance that makes them uncomfortable, makes them question their own complicity. She becomes the loud, the aggressive, the unreasonable, the one who can never be satisfied. And yet, in her silence, she is expected to be grateful for the crumbs of acknowledgement, to be content with the scraps of respect that are given to her, as though her worth is only validated in her suffering, in her submission. But when she speaks, when she stands tall, she is no longer the meek recipient of pity. She becomes the one who demands, who claims what is rightfully hers. The room no longer welcomes her voice but fears it, for it exposes the cracks in their own carefully built narratives. And in this fear, they try to silence her, not because she is wrong, but because her truth is too loud, too raw, and too real for them to ignore.

Standing up for yourself as a woman is a double-edged sword. On one side, it’s an act of liberation, a reclaiming of your voice, your autonomy, your power. It’s the breaking of chains, the finally vomiting out of the ancient rage that binds you to expectations, to roles, to histories written by others. It’s the moment when you decide that your worth isn’t up for negotiation and that you won’t be silenced any longer. In standing up, you are showing the world that you will no longer be defined by its narrow and shrewd ways, but by the expansive nature of your own truth. But on the other side, that same act of standing up is almost always like a knife pointed towards your own belly. You are stamped as "too much," "too loud," "too demanding"—as though your assertiveness is an affront to the world. It’s a tightrope walk because the very qualities that are celebrated in them are seen as threatening in us. The same strength that would earn them admiration might lead to our vilification. The same self-assurance that’s revered in others might be twisted into accusations of arrogance, aggression, or selfishness when it comes from you. It’s exhausting, this delicate act. To be strong, but not too strong. To be independent, but not isolated. To speak your truth, but not be twistedly perceived as a threat. And even when you walk this razor-thin line, you’re left wondering: If I’m punished for being myself, is it worth standing tall at all?

My mother's words brought a balm for these cut-inflicting thoughts. She said this was long overdue. She was shocked; I could scream in front of him. She remarked, My screams were just like his, and that would be his rude awakening. She also said this might bring forth a change. She has always been a hopeful realist. And, I think, that is what kept her going through all those days and all those nights, all those slaps and all those screams. But my stomach keeps churning. I keep thinking, what if it gets worse? Because, perhaps, that's how life has been for me. Whenever something bad happens, it is followed by some more horrible happenings and then some more with the seven circles of hell freezing over me.

I lay on my bed in a dark and hot room beside my mother. I searched for her palm while I was splitting into two. One, desperate for comfort, for the familiar warmth of her hand, yearning for the simple reassurance that she would hold me steady, grounding me in a world that felt like it was crumbling. That part of me, still a child in many ways, wanted to sink into the softness of her presence, to feel protected from the chaos swirling both inside and outside of me. Scared, shivering, and feverish child me. The other, sharp and restless, like a larva coming out of a cocoon, itching to break free, was fighting against everything she endured—against the silence we had both learnt to endure, against the passive submission that had become a second skin. This part of me felt suffocated by the unspoken, trapped in the weight of expectations that came with being her daughter, being a woman, being expected to keep things together even when I was falling apart. It was as though my very being was being torn between the need for her and the need to escape with her, to break free from the cycle of quiet acceptance that had defined my life. Our lives. I reached for her hand, and for a fleeting moment, her warmth was unsettlingly welcome—but even then, the internal conflict raged within me. In that touch, I felt the comfort of familiarity and the pain of knowing that, just like her, I might one day come to accept the very things I was rebelling against now.

Anyway, happy International Women's Day in advance for us. Could there be a more poetic ending than this?

- Oizys.

[The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by Bell Hooks]