What if the most demanding job you ever had came with no salary, no designation, no weekends off, and not even a line on your resume?
You remember everyone's appointments. You know when the groceries are running low, which child needs what for school tomorrow, whose birthday is next week. You notice when someone's gone quiet at dinner and know it means something. And when something goes wrong in the family, somehow everyone already knows whom to call.
You. But nobody calls it work.
A Court Judgment That Made Me Stop And Think
A recent Karnataka High Court order has been doing the rounds, and for good reason. The case involved a husband challenging a Family Court direction to pay ₹9,000 a month in maintenance to his wife and daughter. His argument was that his wife hadn't done enough: she didn't handle the housework properly, didn't look after his parents, and once visited her own parents without asking his permission
Justice Chillakur Sumalatha rejected that line of reasoning. She said a husband cannot command his wife to do household work or care for his parents — that housework should be shared, and that caring for parents is primarily the job of their own children, sons and daughters both. And then she asked the question that's stayed with me since:
"Why should a married woman need anyone's permission to visit her own parents?"
The court went on to say something even bigger — that marriage isn't a license to control, command, or conquer another person's individuality, freedom, or will.
That's not a small thing for a court to put in writing. It's also, if you think about it, a fairly damning comment on how ordinary this expectation has become — ordinary enough that a woman actually had to go to court to say it out loud.
The Job Nobody Applied For
Nobody hands a woman a contract before her wedding. There's no interview, no job description, no discussion of working hours. And yet somewhere between the rituals, the new surname, and the pressure to be a "good wife" and a "good daughter-in-law," a whole list of duties just appears. Cook. Remember. Adjust. Host. Forgive. Don't complain. I mean why?
And if you do complain, someone will eventually ask, in that mild, wounding way: but what exactly do you do all day?
That question stings because so much of this work is invisible by design. There's a real difference between doing a task and being the one who remembers it needs doing at all. Someone might spend an hour helping a child with a school project. But who remembered it was due? Who bought the chart paper, checked the school group for the deadline, lay awake the night before worrying about it?
That mental tally never really switches off. It's running quietly in the background even while you're watching TV, even after everyone else has gone to sleep — did we buy milk, when's the doctor's appointment, did she submit that form. Nobody sees it happening. But it still costs her something.
She's usually the household's official cook, too, and when guests show up unannounced she quietly turns into a ten-minute delivery service — except there's no app, no delivery fee, and no option to say the kitchen is closed. On an ordinary day that's cooking, laundry, making the beds, keeping the floors and the fridge and the family calendar in some kind of order. On a festival day, all of it doubles: extra cooking, deep cleaning, sweets to prepare, guests to host, a house to decorate, on top of everything that was already hers to begin with. What looks like a celebration to everyone else is often just more work wearing a nicer outfit.
She's also the default parent for anything that requires remembering — homework, tiffin, PTMs, which exam is next week — and the household's unofficial search engine besides, the one everyone asks when they can't find their socks, their charger, their keys, their glasses. Somehow she always has the answer.
And after all that, she may still hear the question that started this whole piece: but what do you do all day? Maybe partly because she's never kept a timesheet for any of it — never counted the meals, the loads of laundry, the reminders, the number of times she put her own rest aside because someone needed her. She doesn't keep an account. Which may be exactly why the rest of us have gotten so comfortable pretending there's nothing to add up.
I'd rather call her a homemaker than a housewife, because what she runs is a great deal more than a house — routines, people, moods, schedules, a thousand details nobody else notices until they're missing. And a homemaker, unlike almost anyone else who works, has no fixed hours, no lunch break, no weekend, no leave, no salary, and no official moment when the job ends. It just runs quietly in the background, all day, every day.
Then there's the part that's even harder to put into words — the emotional labour. Knowing someone's upset before they've said a thing. Knowing your child needs a hug and not a lecture tonight. Making the phone call after a fight to smooth it over. Being the person everyone brings their feelings to, and somehow having nobody left to bring yours to at the end of the day.
Caring Isn't The Problem — Obligation Is
None of this is an argument against caring for your family. Cooking for someone you love, looking after an ageing parent, showing up for your in-laws — none of that is the issue. Giving isn't the problem.
The problem starts the moment giving becomes a duty attached to your gender rather than a choice that comes from you. "I want to do this for my family" and "you're the woman, so this is yours to do" might look similar from the outside, but one comes from love and the other from entitlement, and they are not the same thing. The Karnataka High Court made almost exactly this point — that caring for in-laws should be voluntary, not imposed on a daughter-in-law as a condition of the marriage.
A woman marrying into a family doesn't automatically inherit responsibility for everyone in it. She can love her in-laws, cook for them, take them to the doctor, treat them like her own — but it should grow out of an actual relationship, not out of an assignment she never agreed to. The moment affection turns into obligation, resentment tends to follow close behind. And a woman's goodness was never something that should be measured by how quietly she puts up with things.
This gets even harder to sit with when it comes to her own parents. Somewhere along the way it became normal for a woman to need to explain how often she calls her mother and father, or to feel she has to ask permission to visit the house she grew up in. Marriage adds a relationship to her life. It was never supposed to erase the ones she already had.
Marriage Should Add To You, Not Replace You
Marriage should mean partnership, mutual respect, and understanding — not one person abandoning their own life to follow the other's.
Somewhere in all of this, women are quietly taught that becoming a wife means becoming less of themselves. The home changes, the routines change, the priorities change, and slowly, if you're not paying attention, so does your sense of who you are underneath all those roles. Wife. Mother. Daughter-in-law. Everyone's emotional support system.
But underneath all of that is still a woman who had dreams before any of this started. She had friends, hobbies, ambitions, a career she wanted, a habit of reading or writing or dancing, a relationship with her own parents, and perhaps the simple wish to sit alone sometimes with a cup of tea or coffee.
She didn't disappear when she got married. She's still there.
The court called marriage a relationship between equals. Maybe that's what we should be aiming for — not a marriage where one person serves and the other is served, but one where both people are allowed to remain whole.
A woman should be allowed to say, I need help. I don't agree. I want to see my parents. I want to work. I have a dream too — and still be loved.
This isn't a men-versus-women argument. There are plenty of marriages where the load is shared without anyone keeping score — husbands who cook, fathers who show up, sons who care for their own parents, and daughters-in-law who genuinely adore the family they married into.
That's not a favour. That's partnership.
Maybe the question worth asking isn't how much does she do for her family? Maybe it's simpler than that: how much room does she still have to be herself?
Stay Blessed, Be Happy..!! :-)
