His way of coping was so different from me. While the house filled with tension and uncertainty, he slipped into his own world. He left home to serve food at the Gurdwara Sahib with the United Sikhs team; noble, meaningful work, but work he chose to do alone. He attended AKJ Zoom programs by himself, even though sangat had always been something we shared.
What hurt me wasn’t the seva or his spirituality. I admired his willingness to show up for the community during a time of crisis. What hurt was the solitude he wrapped around them. The choice to go without me. To not even ask if I wanted to join. I needed sangat too but I was left outside the circle. To assume I wouldn’t be interested, or that I didn’t need the same spiritual grounding in a moment when everything around us felt unstable. I needed the stability of community, especially while carrying the emotional load of a household under stress.
Our marriage began to feel like two people walking in circles, each orbiting their own need for comfort, never meeting in the center. In the spiritual distance between us, emotional distance grew deeper. It wasn’t a single big fight, not a dramatic moment. It was the accumulation of small choices: where he went, who he connected with, and who he didn’t invite.
When you spend years with someone, you learn exactly which of your needs are met…and which have been ignored for so long that silence becomes your only response. All I wanted was simple: shared space, shared conversation, shared presence. But while I kept reaching outward, he kept turning inward.
Faith was supposed to be the place where we met. Instead, it became another place where we stood apart. Before the pandemic, sangat had always been something shared between us, not just a spiritual practice, but a rhythm of togetherness. A way to reconnect with something bigger than ourselves. A reminder of our values, our Lavaan, the family we were raising. But during this time of COVID, when our home felt increasingly fragmented, even faith became something we no longer shared.
The tension grew in the smallest corners; the forgotten places where family fractures usually begin. The pandemic magnified every irritation. He resented our son using the family-room TV. His conversations with him became clipped, strained, and brittle. Our home, already fragile, began to crack not from one major event, but from the quiet accumulation of unmet needs and unspoken hurts.
I could feel it happening like watching a rope fray one strand at a time. Still, I tried. I kept trying. Because that is what mothers in the family do; we hold the rope until our hands bleed, praying it might hold just a little longer. Next
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