Guilt, Light Me Up
Image: Unsplash
I am, in many ways, a brown mother’s nightmare.
When I was five, I had a little crush on a boy in my class. My sister and I giggled about it as I declared my love for him in blocky, tilting print across the pages of my pink, ever-so-secret diary. I don’t remember the kid’s name, but I remember the sear of discomfort when my parents found out, their firm hand, their disappointment at my impropriety and disgrace.
I spent roughly a year of my life pining after one of my friends when I was ten. I’m not sure who told my mother, she likely figured it out through how pathetically obvious I was, but she yelled at me about it one evening. My father was blessedly not home yet; my sister whisked herself away to some corner; my mother and I stood under the scorching glare of the living room light. She asked me why I wasn’t more focused on school, why I had these feelings, if I wanted to hug this boy, if I wanted to kiss him. I shouted back a resounding, “No!” with hot tears and shame.
In a fit of embodying the only existing narrative of young, brown girls in Western media, I had a secret boyfriend when I was twelve. I held his hand, let him put his arm around me, and messaged him endlessly on a secret Facebook account. I did not kiss him. However, much to the shame of my twelve-year-old self, I was definitely planning to. My parents (as they were bound to) found out; I had not yet perfected the art of secrecy at that young age. There was much yelling and fighting and talks of shipping me back home; the details of it all are frankly boring. What swirls and lingers in my sieve of memory is that I never debated my parents about my wrongdoing; it never occurred to me to do so. I accepted it from the start. I was wrong, sinful, a disgrace to my family; in the months I held this boy’s hand, my conscience boiled.
My sister and I often fought, especially when we were younger. Like many older siblings who raise their younger ones, she knows me well; she always knows what to say to strike me down. When I was in middle school, she would sometimes call me lovesick. We sat in front of our empty woodstove once, and she spat, “You’re nothing but a lovesick fool,” as if I was deranged, as if I was perverse as if I abandoned all sense of morality and aspiration. My skin burned.
When she was nineteen and unmarried, my mother told me that she had suggested that her married, pregnant, older sister save all the baby things, should she no longer need them, for when my mother has baby. My mother told me that my aunt and grandmother looked at her with disgust, called her perverted, and she felt scalded by the heat of shame.
I am, in many ways, a ‘good’ daughter. I do well in school; I don’t go to parties, I support my family thoroughly. Nowadays, my mother even tells me that I’m a good daughter. But for the tender parts of my heart out of which love and care are born, I cannot hold the title, the torch, of good and decent for my family’s name. Its light glares at me instead. These parts of my heart have been painted over by the oh-so-sinful brush of sex and sexuality in an assumption of depravity. I believe many young South Asian girls and women find these parts of our hearts entrenched with the filth of guilt. Whether they care for someone or simply entertain the thought of being romantically involved, even as tangentially and innocently as my mother had, this guilt lingers, flammable and at the ready. The taught notion of romance as something derailing or immoral right until one is married shares the obscenity of an oil spill; its stains are incendiary and enduring.
