July 2020 brought no relief. The weight of the pandemic, financial pressures, and the constant tension within our home had created a level of stress we could no longer outrun. Every day felt like we were bracing for the next emotional blow.
Our younger daughter needed both of us to serve as guarantors for her new apartment in New York. I gave her my income information and encouraged her to get the same directly from her father. What should have been a simple, routine conversation quickly spiraled into another confrontation, another moment where she felt fear instead of support. All this stemmed from of his need to secrecy. By the end of it, she reduced her communication with him to polite greetings, a shield she created to protect herself from further emotional harm.
Her work start date was pushed to October, adding another layer of uncertainty to an already fragile situation. I tried to handle the practical pieces, to protect the children from stress, to hold our family together in any way I could. But each time my husband made unilateral decisions, reacted harshly, or redirected blame, another piece of trust shattered. The children’s resilience was being tested in ways no young adult should ever experience. I watched them withdraw, not out of disrespect, but out of survival.
In the following weeks, it seemed he might have been trying to reconnect. He sent a vague group message asking the kids to meet with him, though none of them could tell whether he meant individually or together. He later asked our younger daughter if she could talk, and she honestly told him she had a stomach ache. But when he didn’t check on her afterward, not that day, or the next, or the next; he convinced himself she was deliberately avoiding him.
Around this time, he changed our family’s cell phone carrier and asked everyone to come get their new SIM cards. Everyone except our younger daughter went. She asked me repeatedly to bring hers upstairs, but she still didn’t feel safe going down alone. I waited for the right moment, hoping for calm.
That moment came on a Sunday evening when we were having tea together. She sat next to him as he replaced her SIM, quietly trying to cooperate. Suddenly, in a raised, authoritative tone, he said, “When we’re done with this, you sit down and talk to me.” She burst into tears. She tried to explain that every time she asked a simple question, he responded by yelling that she didn’t feel safe, or heard, or respected.
Instead of softening, he mocked her tears. When she said he could talk to her anytime, he snapped, “You’re not the president of America that I need an appointment with. I’m busy with work.” I stepped in, trying to calm the situation, but he grew angrier, insisting we were the ones making him miserable. He said he couldn’t divorce me because of our laavan, but he could “divorce all the children.”
Our daughter left the house crying and didn’t return. Hours later, I learned she had suffered a panic attack at the neighbor’s home. Her brother brought her a change of clothes and drove her to a friend’s place where she finally felt safe enough to breathe. That night, she told me she was not coming home again.
She asked me to help her figure out where she could live. With COVID raging and limited options, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life. I asked our son to move back into his apartment in Los Angeles and take her with him. It terrified me; his asthma, the pandemic, the risks, but their safety, their sanity, their emotional survival had to come first.
In Sikh families, daughters leave their father’s home in a doli surrounded by love, blessings, and the bittersweet joy of a new beginning. But my daughter left under the weight of fear, panic, and heartbreak. Not in a doli. Not with happiness. She walked out in tears, breaking all relationship with her father to save herself.
Watching her leave like that pushed me into a grief I can barely describe. It felt as though I was losing her, not to marriage, not to a new life, but to trauma. A kind of grieving that felt like mourning a child who is still alive, yet no longer able to stay in the home that should have protected her.
And in that silence after the storm, I stood there; roots trembling, branches wounded, wondering if my family would ever grow whole again. Next
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