Hold yourself tenderly. Let your inner nurturing parent protect your inner child. We need more space to act out our anxieties.
“Do you call him your husband?” my therapist, Father Os, asked me one day.
“We don’t like the words—husband and wife,” I answered. “I rarely use this word for him.”
“Maybe you should,” he said. Father Os had a characteristic shrug. It was subtle. It spoke to me.
One thing common between Afzal and me was that both of us had a poor opinion of marriage as a concept. We judged the marriages we had witnessed, especially the ones that our parents had endured as they raised us. In our own way, we had made the decision to not fall …
Natasha is a writer, filmmaker and communications coach. She is the author of the popular memoirs My Daughters’ Mum and Immortal for a Moment. Her columns have appeared in publications such as Mint Lounge, The Hindu, Outlook, The Globe and Mail, The Indian Express, the Hindustan Times and Quint.
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