After mid 2021, our family slowly unraveled. What had begun as stress fractures during the pandemic widened into lasting separations, silences, and wounds that refused to heal.
Our younger daughter, who had moved to New York in October 2020, returned home every few months. During one visit, she noticed the physical toll it took on me to drive daily to Los Angeles just to spend time with her. Out of concern, she asked her Vaddi Masi if she could stay with her instead. My sister lived barely ten miles away, yet even that short distance came to symbolize how divided our family had become.
After months of pleading, my husband finally agreed to couples therapy. I entered it with hope; I left each session feeling more alone. It never felt like shared work. Instead, it felt as though I had been invited into his therapist’s space, expected to absorb accusations rather than participate in healing. Very quickly, it became clear that while I was there to repair a marriage, he was there to defend himself.
What broke me most was not his anger, but his certainty. In therapy, he repeatedly accused me of “keeping the children from him.” At first, I dismissed it as defensiveness. But after one particularly devastating session, I realized he truly believed it that I was the reason his relationships with our children had collapsed. When I asked him "why, then, I was drowning in grief over your broken bond with them" he said may be you had never expected things to end this way. Yet it had already been two months since he had even tried to speak to our son, who still came home every Sunday.
That night, and the nights that followed, reopened 28 years of unhealed wounds. I could no longer speak without breaking, so I wrote him a letter. In it, I reminded him of the promise he had written in my 60th birthday card just weeks earlier that with my love and trust, he could “move any mountain.” Yet in reality, he was unwilling to lower his ego even enough to reach out to his own children. I told him how long I had waited; 15 months; for him to mend his relationship with our younger daughter, how the same patterns were now repeating with our son, and how enduring this pain was making me physically and mentally unwell.
I told him the truth I had been carrying quietly for years: that I could no longer be the glue holding together relationships that were tearing me apart. That I had stayed in therapy not to blame him, but to help him see his role. And that once he decided I was the cause of his estrangement from the children, I no longer had the strength to keep absorbing the blows.
I also took responsibility for not knowing how to respond when my dignity was stripped away, when I was yelled at, accused, and insulted in front of our children and extended family. I wrote that I would regret forever the trauma that spilled onto our children because I had not known how to protect them better. I admitted I still did not know how to communicate with him, which was why I was writing instead of speaking.
Most urgently, I wrote about our older daughter. She was very sick, and from my conversations with her, it was painfully clear that our home was no longer an emotionally safe place for her to heal.
At the same time, our older daughter was unraveling. She had lost the emotional support of her siblings entirely. None of them were coming home to hang out with her; just breif weekly visits of our son. Isolated and deeply depressed, she formed a friendship with a transgender girl from our neighborhood; someone we had known years earlier when (s)he played daily with our son, before her parents moved away. Now she had returned to live with her grandmother. At first, the friendship seemed comforting. Only later did I understand that my daughter was making choices from a place of profound loneliness and pain. As estrangements deepened, her depression worsened. I learned much later that she had begun self medicating during this time in the company of that girl. At her request, her psychiatrist adjusted her medications, but the downward spiral continued.
In August 2021, she moved out to begin postgraduate studies. I hoped distance from a toxic home environment and the structure of academics would help her heal. Instead, she went there to escape; to sleep through her pain rather than face it.
By October, I had reached my limit. I told my husband I could no longer continue couples therapy under these conditions. He continued briefly on his own, but the marriage work had failed. He refused accountability, labeling the children disrespectful and accusing me of turning them against him. In desperation, I finally reached out to my older siblings. My sister and brother, along with their spouses, tried earnestly to guide us with compassion and clarity. None of their advice was acted upon.
October through December 2021 were the hardest months of my life as I navigated our older daughter’s declining mental illness. Because she was an adult, I had no legal authority to intervene. When nothing else helped, I created what I called my “sticky note therapy,” covering the kitchen wall with daily reminders - tuks from Gurbani, notes about gratitude, faith over fear, letting go, believing in oneself, refusing oppression, and trusting that neither good days nor bad days last forever.
Realizing my limits, I practiced tough love. I gave her a choice: come home and accept help, or remain in the dorm and face the consequences alone. She came home but still resisted full treatment. Eventually, during a moment of overwhelming anxiety, she overdosed then immediately realized what she had done. I was at work; her father was working from home. When she asked him to take her to the emergency room, he emotionally shut down. Her father was unable to respond with the urgency it required so she drove herself to the ER.
What followed were four horrific months of intensive treatment. Slowly, she began to recover. The one unexpected grace during this time was that her father finally stepped up and partnered fully in her care. She withdrew from her postgraduate program but began working two part time jobs in January 2022.
During those months, our marriage appeared to improve. I allowed myself to trust him again. On our anniversary, he told me he was short on funds and asked me to pay the house taxes. I did so gladly, believing it was an act of shared responsibility only to later discover he had concealed his annual bonus from me.
In November 2021, my father in law passed away in India. We organized a kirtan program in his memory. Our son had been especially close to his grandfather, who had cared for him when I returned to work after maternity leave. Grief often softens hearts and restores perspective. But once again, my husband’s ego outweighed compassion. He expected our son to initiate contact rather than reaching out himself.
In December, our son underwent a medically necessary procedure recommended by a specialist. He chose not to recover at home, so I went to stay with him. Even then, his father made no effort on his own to reach out or invite him home.
By the end of 2021, it became painfully clear that what broke our family was not distance alone. It was a long standing pattern of emotional disengagement, control, denial, and unresolved toxicity; patterns magnified by the pandemic and etched deeply into all of us.
And somewhere in the midst of it all, I realized what I had written in that October letter was true: I was no longer capable of being the wife I once was, nor the mother I wanted to be. I needed peace. I needed a place that felt like home. And I could no longer hold together a family by breaking myself.
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