u/Logical_Tour_9339

My mom is the biggest believer of any Facebook conspiracy theories. Today she literally said that 5G towers are going to “activate” something inside people who got the covid vaccine and people will start dying. She saw this somewhere on facebook and believes it wholeheartedly😭😭. She even stopped me from going to this 5G seminar at my uni because of this😭😭

Then later she was watching this Facebook guy “Dr. Nabeel Durrani” saying that in 1-2 years money will become useless, people will use cash as tissue paper😭, people will go back to barter systems, and everyone should start buying silver/gold, storing food, buying land, farming, etc.

The thing is, I genuinely try to understand her. I’m open to hearing different opinions and even conspiracy theories sometimes because why not.But I always try to make her understand the importance of research too but she keeps believing whatever pops up, and especially the people who use religion in their talks.

The thing that frustrates me is that she not only believes all the things she sees she also pushes them onto us like they’re undeniable facts.

One of my school friends once said that the food, the cloths and the roof can also be found at Eidi Center, love consideration and affection of your parents are what makes a home different from an orphanage, and seriously it hit me.

When I was little, I feared my father because he physically abused my brother constantly. Not for huge mistakes either sometimes for the smallest things. He expected perfection without ever communicating anything. He would just suddenly start hitting him. I was never the one getting beaten, he once said I’m his favourite when we were very little, but being the abuse observer put me into this shit depression.

I grew up anxious all the time. Hyperaware. Always expecting something bad to happen because that was the atmosphere at home every single day. Fear became normal to me. Eventually that fear turned into hate as I was transitioning to my teenage, I hated him from the bottom of my heart.

Now we’re older, and my father stopped hitting him years ago. Sometimes I think the only reason he stopped is because my brother became old enough to fully understand things and react like a grown man. And that realization is honestly sad in its own way.

What I never thought was that my father would be an actual coward outside of parenting too. He comes from a huge, wealthy family with land, farms, businesses, influence the kind of family everyone in the village knows. Yet he has never taken a stand for himself a single time in his life. Most of the family businesses and opportunities went to my uncles, and he just let it happen.

He’s been working the same job since I was around one year old, stuck at the same rank, watching everyone around him get promoted while he stays exactly where he started. My mother has spent years encouraging him to do more with his life start a business, ask the family for support, apply elsewhere, send his CV somewhere better. She’s always had ideas and ambition. But he either ignores her or gets angry and says he knows what he’s doing, even though nothing ever changes.

I think his self-esteem is so low that he genuinely doesn’t believe he deserves better. So instead of trying, he escapes. He comes home from work and disappears into his phone for hours. Even when people are talking to him, he barely listens. He lives like someone constantly avoiding reality.

Now that I’m seeing him everyday, I feel the resentment even more. Watching him humiliate his wife in front of others, stay silent about his own rights, respect strangers more than his own family, and never fight for a better life it changed the way I saw him.

Today I’m writing this to remind myself in a few years to never end up with a man like my father, because I never want to end up trapped in the kind of life my mother had to live, or tied to someone who lacks both emotional strength and self-respect.

I know our typical Pakistani parents’ mindset usually can’t be changed, especially once they’re in their 40s or 50s. I would genuinely be happy if my kid wanted my opinion on the topics of their interests but eh my mom isn’t.

Today I made the mistake of bringing up “Bahishti Zewar” by Ashraf Ali Thanvi after seeing a tweet about it. We started discussing one passage where it says that if a husband tells his wife to stand all night, she should obey him because obeying the husband pleases God.

“Ashraf Ali Thani was very mukhlis to women(as in more women will go to hell so he wanted to raise their ranks in front of god by making them do things like this) he didn’t want the women to go to hell so he wrote that if a man tells his wife to stand up whole night she should obey him for the sake of god as god said a women must follow what her husband says” is what she said.

She was more fixated on the fact that Thanvi was just being sincere, instead of seeing how saying crap like this actually gives a ticket pass to the husbands to do whatever to their wives and then the wives are expected to stay quiet because obeying the husband is like obeying god.