Do’s and Don’ts for the Mother of the Bride

Countless research articles have been written about the epic relationship between a bride and her mother-in-law. ‘Saas-Bahu’ relationship has been the subject of thousands of stories, movies, plays and folklores. In all these, saas, or the mother of the groom, has been especially painted all black with little shades of white, if any. Daughter-in-law is the ultimate tormented soul and mother-in-law is the ultimate villain or vamp. This notion has been fixed in our collective conscience for generations. A lot of help or self-help literature is available for the new bride. Do’s and don’ts on how to survive the ‘new life’ has been written by one and all. In all this clutter, there is one character which has remained in the shadows but still commands position of great power. In fact her power is hundred times more effective because of remaining away from the public attention. That, my dear friend, is the topic of my article - Mother of the Bride.

If you happen to be in the shoes of mother of the bride, it is important that you follow a few do’s and don’ts. Following these will not only help you but also your daughter who is so dear to your heart.

1. Realize Your Special Place in the Relationship Matrix

First of all, you must realize that your position is not to be taken casually. You hold a very special place in the heart of your child, your daughter, and you must tread carefully. Just like you have protected your child from the time she was a baby till the point of time when she is now married, you are going to keep playing a very important role till a very long time to come. Realizing this will not only give you comfort but also strength and stability which are going to prove all very important to you and your child.

2. Do Not get Insecure; Do Not Think You are Irrelevant

If you think that after your daughter has got married you are about to become irrelevant to her is only going to make you insecure and will harm both of you. If you allow such an insecurity to seep into your psyche, you are going to act in a variety of manners like being possessive, over-protective and intruding – all these can be harmful for the success of your daughter’s happy married life, as described in more detail below.

3. Give Your Daughter Time to Adjust to the New Environment

After marriage most probably your daughter is going to move to a new place either at her in-laws’ place or at her husband’s separate place of residence. She will take time to adjust to the new family members, to the new ‘parents’-in-law, and most importantly to the groom who is going to be her life-partner. Brides undergo a variety of emotions due to this change which may appear ‘abrupt’ or ‘forced’ to her. She will show an inclination to long for her old life and may crave to find pretext to go back to you. At this stage, you must realize that just like a sapling needs to remain rooted enough in the soil for it to grow, your daughter must spend enough time with her husband and in-laws in order for their mutual relationships to grow. Therefore, control your emotional urge to bring your daughter back to you as soon and as frequently as possible due to pretexts and excuses which may appear ‘important’ enough to your heart.

4. Do Not Criticize the Son-in-Law or His Parents

Especially in case of marriages where bride and grooms did not know each other for long enough before marriage, they are still in an exploration phase. They would continue to know and discover new things about each other. So would you most probably. In this phase, it is natural for your daughter to worry or be critical about a few things about her husband or her in-laws. When she shares her concerns with you, it is important that you maintain a fine balance while sharing your opinion. Control and stop your urge to speak your mind without thinking the impact your words would have on your daughter’s mind. My suggestion is that you should never be openly critical about your son-in-law or his parents. Because very often daughters look for a guidance and inspiration from mothers when they share their concerns and your criticism may compound your daughter’s negativity. All such negative emotions can only attract more negativity and make matters worse.

5. Do Not Intrude into your Daughter’s Life

At times you will have to control your urge to spoon-feed your daughter with advices and guidance which you might have gotten into habit to deliver to her. Realize that your daughter is now a grown-up woman and she needs to learn to stand tall by herself. She is not going to become all wise and strong merely by your advices. Let her try things out and learn from her mistakes. In the new environment she will sometimes need to make mistakes, take a step back and adjust. Your suggestions and daily doses of guidance may appear noble to you but those will harm your daughter’s prospects in the long term. I have used a harsh word ‘intrude’ to describe it for a purpose. Stop a temptation to pre-calibrate your daughter. It is much better to let her ask for help and then offer suggestions in an impartial manner which would be good both for your daughter and her new family.

6. Be Watchful But Maintain a Healthy Distance

While your daughter has been an inseparable part of you for her whole life and you feel the urge to keep watching out for her and protecting her, it is much better to control this urge a little after your daughter gets married. Maintain a healthy distance, a kind of ‘detached’ association in which you are watching your daughter but never crossing the line. Your over-protection would make your daughter come back to you on smallest pretexts and it won’t allow a strong ‘bond’ to develop between her and her in-laws. It is like if you keep feeding a baby with milk, the baby won’t ask for milk from anyone else. Similarly, if you keep filling whole of the emotional needs of your daughter, she is going to feel ‘filled’ always and she would never need to quench some of her emotional thirst by bonding with her husband or in-laws.

7. Let Her Cope Up With Difficult Times As Well

Like the way life is designed, there is going to be ‘good times’ and ‘bad times’. After her marriage, there will be a phase when your daughter will face some serious challenges. During such a phase it is important that she should ‘grow’ and rise up to the occasion. Therefore you must control your urge to be over-protective. Allow your daughter to face the tough times alongside her husband and her in-laws. The mutual love and respect they will develop while coping up with the tough times together are going to be ‘assets’ for her whole life.

8. Self Analyze Your Behavior and Keep Correcting

Life is such that at times we get overboard. Therefore it is important for you to do self-analysis every once in a while and answer for yourself if you are doing it well or not. You can have your own methods to know when to do this. For example, after every call your daughter makes to you to share some problem or concern, just pause and think in a detached manner. Due to what you have said to her, is she going to develop better relationship with her husband and her in-laws? If the answer is yes, you are a fabulous mother. If the answer is no and you think you have worsened your daughter’s problems, take corrective actions immediately. After a while this will come naturally to you.

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Being a mother is perhaps the world’s greatest gift. But giving your child a healthy development is even greater in many aspects. When you realize that your behavior is going to impact rest of your daughter’s life, you are bound to be more careful. Remember that your daughter is going to spend more years with her husband than she has spent with you. But she is not going to learn ‘life-lessons’ again – she is going to act in the manner you have taught her. Therefore being a responsible mother, you must control yourself more than you try to control your daughter. A healthy and positive relationship between you and your daughter is very important for success of your daughter’s marriage.

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[Disclaimer: This piece is written by Rahul Tiwary who is Not a Relationship Expert. Views expressed are his personal and do not reflect views of the organization he is professionally associated with.]

Importance of father’s role

I think since we are with our mother from early childhood and since we have soul-connect with her, progressively our mutual bonding gets stronger; or at least remains the same. A father on the other hand spends less time with kids largely due to his other responsibilities in the world and also tries to inculcate discipline in the kids in order to make them fit into this world and hence often fathers are not so similarly popular. I know that individually people may find some variations from above theory but I think in general this is the trend. But in the few years after my marriage and responsibilities, I can see a silver lining. If mother is like foundation, father is like walls and roof. Both are equally important.

I think our history; art and literature have been a bit unfair towards fathers and not given them their proper due. For example if a novelist has to show good character traits of some person, one would try to show one’s bonding with mother. In general mothers are shown as doing the right thing or keeping the right opinion while fathers are in a way if not demonised at least shown in bad light more often. Situation is similar in movies and other art forms. In world famous epic of Ramayana, though mother Kaikeyi is shown in very bad light, the story also tells about two other mothers in the same house who were very virtuous and pious. On the other hand, father Dashrath is shown as a weak person who directly or indirectly played into the hands of a woman with ulterior motive and caused much pain to his sons. Here also the mathematical proportion is in favour of mothers and against fathers. Similarly in Mahabharata, blind father Dhritirashtra is shown as a weak king who went on to tolerate atrocities to the virtuous young Pandavas; on the other hand her queen is blameless into whatever was being done by their sons.

I see one reason for such discriminatory treatment is since fathers or males in general don’t show much of emotions while literature and script writers want to demonstrate or elaborate emotions in all relationships and hence they don’t count fathers in as much high regard. Or else the reason may be that since males would be making proportionately more of the readership base, by the law of opposites a writer describing mothers as virtuous would be more successful than the one showing fathers as virtuous. For quite some time in their life, sons have this problem of getting compared with their father’s achievements and hence their relationship towards them is often one of competition for many years; mothers on the other hand are non-competing by virtue of nature and hence are more likely to become an embodiment of all that is good. Whatever be the reason, this historical and literary distortion against fathers needs some balancing act.

Changing Nature of Relationships

One oft-repeated phrase of our time is, “Change is the only constant thing of this world.” And this is a very apt statement. I call it a phrase of “our time” because the world never moved as fast as it has been moving in the past decades. Almost everything has undergone fundamental changes; be it the way we live, the things we own, the things we looked forward to own, and even our value system. Our relationships have also changed. But my focus right now is not on the macro level changes happening at global scale. I am looking at the way things change for the constant person within his/her lifetime… This change is something which has remained constant over time, though the nature and intensity of changes always vary…

The kid is free from the burden of expectations on him. He can shout, cry, sleep, or laugh whenever/wherever he wants or feels like. It doesn’t remain the same as he grows up. At times even kids feel that their early-childhood was better than their then-childhood’s stage which is more mature and responsible. Along with time, they feel they are able to enjoy lesser things and in lesser ways and have to live up to the patterns of the society. As they grow up to a certain age, they get to know and feel things which had been invisible to them so far. They get to know that their friends are of two types – boys and girls – and hence they decide to make groups amongst the same gender. “Discipline” is a word which youngsters listen a lot, and at times to the frustrating limits. Their freedom is chained and their behaviors are monitored. Life becomes less fun and more mechanical. After some more years, during what we call adolescence or teenage, when they confuse themselves between being a kid and a grownup man/woman, they get revolting feelings. Their relationships to even their parents are not the same. There is more thinking, judging, and protest, than simply obeying. These years can be very turbulent, depending on the circumstances and environment shaping them. Boys and girls have now their distinct individual personalities, aspirations, value system, philosophies, likes & dislikes. Almost everything changes now, and there is also a kind of “clarity” which they experienced never before. By the time they survive the teen years, they almost become what they had never dreamt of becoming – “part of society” confirming to its standards…

It is interesting to think that all through the changes, is there something which remains constant? Spirituality will say that only our “soul” remains constant, while our body, our mind, and everything else changes. But talking on a different plane, I wonder again: is there anything which remains the same? It is obvious that everything material would have undergone changes – be it our house, city, gadgets, technology, our bodies, our hair, etc. Are the soft aspects of life the same? Even our likes and dislikes would have changed much. Some things may not change, like kids with sweet tooth may grow up but still love sweet stuff; may be cakes instead of candies. Now, do our relationships change? A son who has now a boss in office and a wife at home to please, does he remain as warm and sweet to his parents as before? A daughter who has got an altogether new family to adjust in and entertain, will she have a change in her priorities? Will a brother behave the same with his sister who is married now? Will a father interrupt his daughter like before even if she has a whole new world to look after? It seems life becomes more complex, more challenging and difficult – but at the same time people also become tougher, abler, and stronger. The point is not the way things go – for better or for worse. The point is that almost nothing remains the same… Is that a pity? Is that a blessing? I am sure more vote would go for the former, but that is not because of facts of life but because of the way we are designed…

I think we are all designed in a way that we like and seek stability and security. Things which seem predictable to us, things which we can understand and hence judge, look better to us than things which are unpredictable, opaque, dark and aloof, even if appearing more profitable. Hence I think that along with our growing up, we tend to have more insecurities and fears piling inside us… The more we are exposed to new and changed things, somewhere inside our system we should be seeking more stability and less changes, in some way or the other… These insecurities or fears may turn out into complexes of our mind, or may make us do or not do some things. Again the question is not if this is good or bad, because by and large we don’t have a choice! Yet, I think the more we are ‘aware of ourselves’, the ‘stronger’ we are from the inside, and hence better we shall be able to manage these changes… And in the end, managing the changes is same as managing ourselves…

- Rahul

Having a company is nice

Watched the movie ‘Up in the Air’ starring George Clooney. His character is a free man who doesn’t believe in marriage or any social commitment. He lives like that for years, dating women whenever he found interest in, and just travelling around the world which was part of his job. At one stage his sister’s to-wed fiancé develops a cold feed the day before their wedding and he was asked to convince the guy. He enters with a clean slate, and managed to find logic. He says something like, “Remember all the best moments in your life. Did you enjoy them alone?” The guys says, “no”. He hits the nail then, “That’s it. All the best moments in our life are enjoyed in someone’s company… It’s nice to have company…” The scared groom had a change of mind and everything turns out well…

That is so true. All things we enjoy in our life have some other people involved in it. Our spouse is that ‘permanent’ company. We are social beings, and having a permanent company and friend gives us emotional strength. On the other side of the coin, we can tend to depend excessively on others for those pleasures of our life. And theoretically there may be things for which we need our ‘space’, but I think there are very few things, if any, which can’t be enjoyed with our companion with us. Purpose of our life is also to learn by having relationships.

- Rahul