By the time the new year arrived, the emotional landscape of our home had hardened into something dense and unmoving. The children kept their distance; not out of defiance, but out of instinctive self-preservation. And my husband and I existed in a parallel rhythm that bore little resemblance to a marriage of nearly three decades. We shared space, not intimacy. Silence replaced conversation. Coexistence stood in for partnership.
Each morning began with a familiar ache; a longing for the family we once were, and a growing fear that whatever had been broken might now be beyond repair. My body began to register what my heart had been carrying. Sleep became fractured. I woke in the dark with my heart racing. My appetite shifted. My shoulders stayed braced, even in stillness. I cried often; sometimes quietly in the shower, sometimes alone in my car, parked just outside the house I no longer felt safe inside.
My therapist reminded me that grief does not only follow death. Sometimes it arrives when something is still alive, but unreachable. I was grieving a marriage that looked intact from the outside while hollowing from within. I was grieving children who were alive and well, yet no longer felt safe enough to come home. I was grieving myself; the mother who once held everyone together, and the woman who once felt chosen and loved.
For nearly two years, I had spoken gently with the children, trying to build bridges back to their father. I encouraged forgiveness. I asked them to keep their hearts open. I prayed love would guide them home. But by 2022, a truth finally settled in. They weren’t rejecting family; they were rejecting harm. With my therapist’s help, I understood that forcing reconciliation before safety only deepens wounds. So I stopped pushing. I started listening. I honored their boundaries. It shattered my heart but it also gave them room to breathe again.
The house itself felt calm. No raised voices. No visible conflict. But the relationships inside it were frozen. Nothing was being repaired. Nothing was being rebuilt. We weren’t healing. We were merely existing. And existing is not the same as living.
In March 2022, I was involved in a car accident while driving my husband’s car. The incident nudged me toward a decision I had been postponing. I bought myself a car. I had been driving our old Sequoia SUV after giving my own car to our daughter, but the heavy steering had begun to strain my already exhausted body. We ordered a Tesla Model 3, delivered in June. Life moved forward; mostly without my partner alongside me.
May arrived as it always did. The children celebrated me on Mother’s Day with tenderness that reminded me I was still anchored somewhere.Around that time, I felt something else stirring in me as well. I was spreading my wings;quietly, cautiously. I was learning to detach from the expectations I had carried for so long about what it meant to be a wife. I began reconnecting with old friends, returning to a circle of companionship I had once set aside. I even made plans to attend a Satinder Sartaaj concert, something that felt like choosing myself again. When he learned about it, he suddenly wanted to come too; not to share the joy or enjoy my company, but to keep me tethered, to limit my time with friends. It was another subtle reminder that my movement toward independence unsettled him.
The following Saturday, I planned a simple outing to watch my nephew’s twin sons play a soccer game; time with family, uncomplicated and light. As soon as he learned of my plans, my husband insisted on coming along and added a visit to my sister’s house to the agenda, ensuring that even this small pocket of connection would not exist without his presence. He even asked for the contractor’s contact information. Given that our downstairs renovation had been completed back in 2018, while the upstairs bathrooms remained neglected—vanities broken, mold spreading, carpets decades old and never properly cleaned since 2001. I felt cautiously hopeful. His interest felt like movement, perhaps even willingness, toward tending to the home we still shared.
When we returned, I asked if he could call the contractor, just to see whether an estimate might even be possible. Something in that moment shifted abruptly. When he raised his voice, I left home for a nearby park. What followed was not a conversation but a cascade of angry messages—a text war that left me stunned. My request to address the decaying bathrooms was dismissed as mirg trishna. He equated my simple request to renovate mold-ridden bathrooms with a lack of concern for the suffering of people in Punjab under fascism. Once again, he accused me of turning the children against him. From his texts, it was clear he wanted a wife and children but not the responsibilities of being a husband or a father.
He rewrote our history, claiming I had engulfed him into marriage through a fabricated story and that I had pursued him while he was still married. None of it was true. He questioned my character, even my Punjabiat, using a Netflix comedy, Grace and Frankie, as evidence against me. Because he believed the narrative he had constructed, he concluded that I no longer deserved his respect.
After the text war, I discovered that he had spoken with my close friend about our family issues; a friend who was divorced herself. I was furious. I couldn’t understand why he would confide in someone who had not been able to maintain her own marriage, instead of seeking guidance from happily married Gursikh couples in our sangat. The only explanation that came to mind was that he was trying to triangulate the situation, sharing his sob stories with another woman to make me feel insecure. We argued so intensely that evening at the our favortite spot on the beach that I felt a sharp chest pain, and the next day I went to the ER to rule out a heart attack. He was working from home, just half a mile away, yet did not come with me. Fortunately, it was a panic attack, not a heart attack but the experience left me shaken, both physically and emotionally. That night, I realized more clearly how patterns of control and emotional manipulation had been quietly shaping our family life, and how crucial it had become for me to protect my own well-being.
Later that month, I allowed myself a pause from the strain of home and watched our son give the best performance of his life at Bruins Bhangra. It was an act of self-care, and for those moments, joy flowed without effort or fear. At the same event, I unexpectedly reconnected with the friend who had been my maid of honor at our wedding. It felt intentional, almost divine. Waheguru Ji quietly returning people to my life whom I would soon need.
On Father’s Day, I honored the father of my children by painting a canvas titled “All beautiful things are not perfect.” I was still hoping; still trying, gently, from the margins. Hope had not yet left me.
June marked my eldest sibling’s 75th birthday. We spent time together planning the celebration, and for a brief while, it felt like we were sharing something meaningful again. We even spent a day at Knott’s Berry Farm with one of his friends and their family. I watched him among other parents, other children, and hoped; perhaps foolishly; that something might stir inside him, that he might reflect on his own children and what had been lost.
But he remained sealed inside himself.
Around that time, he told me he had been attending shooting training and had purchased a gun. Not a discussion - a statement.
Our son finally bought the car he had been dreaming of. He came inside, eyes bright, and said, “Let me show you my car.” The three of us; his sister, his father, and I; were standing in the kitchen. His sister and I followed him outside. His father did not. That moment made something unmistakably clear. A father does not become estranged from his child overnight, nor because a mother “manipulates” feelings. Estrangement grows quietly when anger goes unexamined, when presence is replaced by intimidation or indifference, and when a child learns; again and again; that their joy is unsafe, inconvenient, or invisible.What stood between them was not my influence, but his unresolved rage and the absence of repair.
To avoid daily conflict about moving his old vehicle between the street and driveway, I arranged to sell it to a student relative of friends who needed it urgently. When our friend and his son came to pick it up, the topic of guns surfaced casually; their son owned one. Our friend remarked that he would never own a gun because his wife was afraid of them.
My husband heard this, and still he did not tell me where the gun was kept. He did not offer to show it to me. He did not invite a conversation. He knew I was deeply unsettled by the purchase—especially given that we had a daughter struggling with mental illness. Yet his silence felt deliberate. Another reminder that his choices no longer accounted for the emotional safety of anyone else in the house.
Over time, I began to notice a pattern. Whenever something needed care whether our home, our children or our relationships; the focus shifted away from the need itself and onto blame, accusations, or rewriting the past. Anger often replaced dialogue, and repair quietly disappeared. The children weren’t being disrespectful, and I wasn’t asking for too much; we were all responding to an environment where unpredictability made closeness unsafe. Recognizing this pattern helped me understand why distance had become a form of self-preservation, not a choice.
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