Marriage made in hell
Ramona watched her precious child sleeping in her lap. She watched the rise and fall of her breath for a while. Her eyes were peacefully closed and the soft dark hair that covered her round head. Just ten days ago, she had been born into this world. A mounting sadness came over her, as she contemplated the events that enfolded at the time of her birth.
As Ramona was gripped with the delivery pains in the maternity ward, her husband was torturing her emotionally with his cruel sarcastic, crude and snide remarks. He had been fighting with her parents who were just too stumped to know or think what to do. She could hear him yelling at them for their supposedly callous attitude towards his relations at the time of marriage. The whole hospital staff seemed to sympathise with her parents while the rogue that he was ranted on and on seemingly enjoying the moment of power that he seemed to hold on them all. Ramona was at a loss to understand whether she suffered more with the delivery pains or due to her husband’s caustic barbs.
So far whatever insults or abuses were hurled at her by her husband she bore stoically and had only prayed to God to forgive her husband for the wrongs he committed. But after that day she could not bring herself to ask God to pardon him. She was broken and too emotionally shattered. Wasn’t it due to her that her parents too had to face the insults and allow themselves to be tormented by this ogre that was her husband.
Sometimes she had wondered if there was really human blood flowing in his veins. She secretly thought that he and her in-laws were ghosts or evil spirits that took the form of humans just so they could suck her blood. She had returned to her maternal home carrying her new-born defeated and drained of the life force.
The reason she had put up with so much suffering in her marriage was because she had come to associate her identity with her husband, she would have been too ashamed to let the world know that her marriage had gone sour and that her husband did not love her. She lost the will to survive but looking at the small child who was sleeping peacefully whom she had brought into this world – she no longer contemplated suicide which she had so many times before. Her child was sleeping unaware of the pits and the falls of the adult world. How blissfully unaware she was. She smiled as she stroked her head gently. She had found her reason to live and got the strength and the will power to face life.
She kissed her gently laying her in her cradle and turned to see her parents - tears streaming down their faces. They had stood by her silently bearing perhaps more torment than she was. Her marriage indeed was made not in heaven but in hell. And when her marriage had failed it was her family that was there to support her in her hour of crisis and Ramona promised herself that she would not waste her mental and physical energies of a worthless character -who didn’t deserve her or his daughter. God had given her the angel that would lead her through life.
