By May 2020, our younger daughter graduated online, a milestone we had hoped to celebrate together despite the pandemic.
We surprised her with a banner on the garage door, danced out of sheer happiness, and tried to create a moment of shared joy. But the celebration was clouded by a belittling comment my husband made about our son, diminishing the joy of his Bhangra performances, an therapeutic outlet he had relied on to manage the emotional strain of our home environment. It wasn’t just a thoughtless remark; it was a reminder of a recurring pattern; belittling the children instead of nurturing their efforts.
Our older daughter’s mental health was already fragile in quarantine. She felt unheard, unsafe, and misunderstood, especially after repeated confrontations over trivial things and my husband’s insistence on rigid authority. The children were beginning to withdraw from him; emotionally, physically, and in their trust. Communication at home felt like walking through a minefield; every attempt at connection seemed to crumble.
One afternoon, I asked my husband to come grocery shopping with me just couple of hours together. He immediately told me to take the kids instead. I felt rejected, because every attempt I made to carve out even a sliver of couple time during COVID was met with distance. When I told him how hurt I felt, he deflected, blaming a bad dream or insisting I must have read his emails. I remember standing there thinking how impossible that was, he kept his phone locked and close to him every minute. The excuse was strange, disconnected from reality, and left me even more unsettled.
The next day, I calmly asked what he meant. That was when my husband told me a woman from a “futuristic group” had connected with him on LinkedIn. He said she’d written an article about the Akal Takhat and that he had simply responded. But his defensiveness didn’t match the innocence of the story. Why would I be upset about a LinkedIn exchange? What email did he think I had seen? What was written that could upset a wife?
I searched for information about the group and its founder. Slowly, pieces fell into place. Around the time she published that article, my husband had begun criticizing me more harshly, accusing me of being “disinterested” in 1984, something he had never said before. It seemed clear he was drawn to her perspective, her energy, perhaps even her attention. And later, when I walked into his room during a Zoom call, he reacted as if I had witnessed something forbidden. He immediately began talking about her, praising her intellect, her insight, but still never mentioned that she was the founder of the project or that she was recruiting men like him. What he chose not to say shook me more than anything he said aloud.
Still, I tried to salvage us. I asked my husband to meet me in the park, hoping neutral ground would soften the tension between us. We sat on opposite ends of a bench, silence hanging heavy. I told him truthfully that my worries about his feelings for this woman weren’t baseless. I also admitted I had wrongly connected that Zoom moment with another incident that had made me fear he was cheating. It was excruciating to say, but necessary. I needed him to understand the emotional cost of his secrecy. Nothing was fully resolved that day, but at least I had spoken out loud what had been suffocating me. I was still fighting for our marriage, even as I felt increasingly alone in that effort.
By May and June, the distance between us had widened. My husband dismissed my needs, brushed aside the place I held in his life, and retreated further into his own world. He began attending AKJ Zoom meetings on Sundays, and when I asked to join, he told me I wouldn’t be interested. But why wouldn’t a Sikh wife want to join sangat with her husband; the same sangat she had always embraced before COVID? It was painfully clear he didn’t want me beside him, and that hurt more than he realized. He was carving out a spiritual space in which I was no longer welcome.
Then came Mother’s Day. Our children had planned a thoughtful little luncheon for me; simple, sweet, full of love. Our daughter had coordinated the timing with her father, making sure everything was set. Yet my husband still didn’t join us. When I asked why, he said the AKJ meeting had run late. Those meetings were recorded; he could have listened later. Instead, he chose not to show up for me on a day meant to honor the mother of his children. His absence said everything. After months of being pushed to the margins of my own marriage, I finally began to understand why trust; once effortless; was slipping through my fingers.
In June 2020, after months of waiting, my husband's surgery for Hernia was finally approved. When he came home from the procedure, I went to our son’s room and quietly said, “Dad is home” expecting he would come out to check on him. But he didn’t step out; not even to ask how his father was doing. That moment pierced me. It revealed just how deeply the earlier insurance confrontation had affected him. Yet my husband never tried to understand that pain. He never acknowledged how yelling at him, belittling him had pushed him away. There was no apology, no reflection, no repair. Just silence. Next
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