Daily Times

“Dear parents please welcome your daughters back from failed marriages. A divorced daughter is better than a dead daughter.”

These lines caught my attention this morning while scrolling through Instagram. It took a couple of hours for me to process this whole statement that one of the Police IGs made today. Reading this heart-wrenching statement reminded me of something my parents usually say to me: “Listen, girl, if you marry a guy of your choice, all the consequences will be your responsibility then. We won’t take accountability to any of your conflicts and it would be totally up to you how you manage to settle your life, however miserable. You have to make this marriage work out at any cost. However, if you marry someone of our choice, we will take care of everything that has to do with your life, after marriage, be it a divorce. Because then, it would be our responsibility to take care of you.” After bombarding me with these devouring words, my father said very kindly to me: “It is up to you if you marry that guy of your choice, we are giving you a free-will to marry whoever you want to.”

Upon inquiring, I came to know that most of the girls tend to hear the same lines from their parents; whenever they put forth a proposal of their own choice above what their parents had decided from them. A few years back, I researched “Generation Gap” and came up with a conclusion that most of these daughter-parents understanding issues are the result of a huge generation gap between them and their parents.

See, parents always wish the best for you and leave no stones unturned to provide you with perfection. However, they fail to understand that no matter how grown-up their daughters are, they will always need a mother’s shoulder to cry on and a father’s most generous hug to forget all the worries.

Daughters are not just a creation, but an emotion, and a whole new feeling. They can light up your day by making you something delicious to eat. Buy their mothers hand-creams and body lotions to keep their all-day-working-hard skin moisturized. Give their fathers updated fragrances in presents so that they might feel presentable in front of their colleagues. Even if some daughters like me are shy enough to tell their parents how much they love them, they always pray for their parents’ long life. Even the slightest notion of something bad happening to their fathers can lead them to cry for several minutes. Though some of them fight all the time with their mothers, they also miss their mothers the most when they are not at home.

See, parents always wish the best for you and leave no stones unturned to provide you with perfection. However, they fail to understand that no matter how grown-up their daughters are, they will always need a mother’s shoulder to cry on and a father’s most generous hug to forget all the worries

Our parents go through a lot for us and they have a complete right to expect the whole world in return. However, sometimes, parents completely sabotage all the efforts that their daughters are making for them by making them realize that they are somewhat weak. That they are nothing but a subordinate of their fathers before marriage and of their husbands afterward. After all those years of love and care, they shatter their daughters’ pride for once and for all.

I have heard many mothers saying such things that not only crunch their daughters’ pride like a trash paper but also question their whole existence. This feeling is as if you created something with pure love, cherished it throughout your life just to abominate it in the end. Sarah was going to her Aunt’s house on the day of Eid when her father loathed her just because she wore a lot of makeup. He exclaimed in anger that Sarah and her sisters were, in fact, a disgrace for him as he feels shame to introduce them to others because of how bold they look (due to makeup). Zoha has four sisters and no brother. Her mother doesn’t allow her sisters to hang out with their cousins just because they don’t have a brother to take care while away from home.

A Mother is the best friend of her daughter. The one who always gives confidence to her girls. Tells them that they are adored by her and no matter what, she will always cherish them the most. Daughters are like the wandering ship in the deepest and darkest ocean that beholds perilous mysteries. They always look up to the lighthouse for guidance which is none other than their mother. Now imagine what happens to the wandering ship that was looking up to a single lighthouse throughout its journey, but suddenly loses its sight?

Do you know what happens to a daughter who is cherished the most by her parents throughout her life, as a toddler and a grown-up until the time she came of age, suddenly deserted by her parents? She calls out for someone badly and usually ends up in the wrong hands. Frightened by what her parents would say, starts hiding things from you. She suffers from depression yet pretends that she is okay and everything is fine and smooth. She smokes a cigarette in her bathroom to camouflage the ugly realities of life with the shield of dull grey smoke. Even if she marries the dream of her life, things don’t work out sometimes.

Even the happiest marriages can fail at times, even the wealthiest and richest husbands fail to provide their wives with happiness sometimes. Life is uncertain but the only thing that is pure and free of doubts is the love of parents for their daughters. Relationships can fail at times but the thing that always works out is the support system of your parents. Depriving your daughters of this last support means that a perilous fate awaits them.

Many young girls die in domestic violence, acid attacks, and honor-killings. Other majority commits suicide because they married the guy whom their parents didn’t approve in the first place, and mentioned at the progression that she will be responsible for any kind of consequences, or in worst cases disown them. This is a terrible reality and something has to be done against this. I believe that mother-counseling for pregnant women is necessary for Pakistan like many developed countries out there where mothers are given pep-talks about how to raise a child, and in the longer run, to take care of them, to understand them and to listen to whatever they feel like. Parents should extend a hand of friendship towards their children, with a core principle of “Friends don’t lie” as we all saw in “Stranger Things.”

Our government needs to do something against this issue because seeing your beautiful daughter dead, with the bruises that she got on her neck while strangling herself to death would not be easy. The flashbacks of her cheery and full of youth smile would devour her mother’s heart upon finding that these plump, chapped lips would be buried under the coarse soil. Her hands will tremble while bathing her daughter for the last time, with her long and beautiful hair lying low on the floor that she would never be able to comb again. She will cry your heart out, but nothing will matter to release her from an eternal pain anymore.

The writer is a blogger, researcher, freelancer and a social worker. She’s a student of Bachelors at Air University and can be reached at kyxy220@gmail.com