I Quit

The maid is on leave for a week. I need to complete all the household chores before leaving for office. The kids are having their annual exams round the corner. I need to supervise their studies too. My husband is a bad cook so I cannot rely on him to prepare even a single meal. My career does not seem to shape up well. There are a lot of conflicts with my manager and others. Life is not easy for a headstrong, opinionated woman. Why can’t I quit my job? After all I have a home and kids to look after! The answer, I guess I know. My husband does not earn well enough to give us a comfortable life. We need to bring up our children, run a household and save for post-retirement expenses. The bills need to be paid before the due date, school fees must be paid every year, insurance premiums have to be given without fail, and the list is never ending.

Weekends are no different for me. My family wants to eat good homemade food. Most of the time is spent in entertaining the relatives who drop by. Neighbors come over tea uninvited. The responsibility of buying groceries and other things is entirely mine. Attending family dinners and sometimes hosting them is what gets on my nerves more than anything else. The man of the house is just not bothered about what is going on in his house, how are his children doing in academics, the maid has left the job, his wife is struggling with her career, the dog is down with an infection, anything and everything else.

The maid has the privilege to take leaves, but I don’t. My husband can comfortably ignore his children and home because he is working 24X7 but I can’t. My kids can make demands to me, however I have no right to ask for what I want. The dog needs to be taken to the hospital, but nobody is even aware that I have been suffering from a severe toothache for a month. The house needs to be painted in the coming year when children will have their vacations. My mother in law is going to be operated for her cataract. A lot of our savings will go for that. We need to curtail our expenses in the coming months. I guess every woman is born with budgeting skills or rather skills to cope up with a not so loving husband and a saturating life.

Sometimes, I feel that I should quit. No warnings, no intimations, no realizations. Just leave my family, husband, this job or at least one of them. I want to accept that I have failed to manage this over-demanding lifestyle. My husband can find another wife and my kids are not babies any more. I can live a better life on my own. My family has stolen my individuality. It is not necessary to have a man in your life and children to feel complete. I truly wanted to leave, but something stopped me.

One Sunday morning I was busy packing the bags for the kids as they had to leave for a school trip. My husband was as usual enjoying his morning newspaper over tea. The situation at home was very chaotic and the neighbour added to it by calling up to ask for some recipe. I was dancing all over the house while talking over the phone and suddenly fell over the shoes scattered on the floor and hurt my foot.

 My husband came yelling to me, “Can’t you be careful!! You are a careless woman.” He lifted me up in his arms and put me on the sofa. He immediately sprayed the painkiller spray on my foot. He got some water for me. I was warned not to walk for the entire day. He finished the rest of the packing and sent the kids away. Till that day I didn’t know that my husband can cook well. The lunch was good enough.

I dropped my plan. No quitting.