A Woman Decides: Rejecting my ‘Emotional’ Legacy

Sometimes I spiral into a frenzy, obsessively clearing out my cupboards, rearranging the furniture, or mopping the house. It peaked during Covid, but it’s slowly calming down. Whenever I fall into one of these manic phases, my sister likes to remind me that I am being like our mother—which is definitely not a compliment. As far as I know, her mother was exactly the same—it’s a hereditary problem, and it serves no one anymore.

And rightly so. What might have worked in their youth, in the 1940s and 1980s, doesn’t work for me. I don’t have to believe that household responsibilities are supreme— that the house should look impeccable, every meal cooked at home to perfection. If I have a day job, it’s to build a career, not just to increase the family income.

Chasing perfection is a monumental task, and I obviously failed at it. I realised that I wasn’t going to have guests over as often as I thought, and no one except me was having dinner at my place regularly. That meant I could throw clothes onto an armchair and forget about them for days (sometimes, that’s fine!) and cooking could be low-effort. I found no pride in being both a domestic goddess and a silent sufferer.

It’s only natural for a child to emulate the adults in their lives. However, I was taught to take these lessons as the absolute truth, the grundnorm to live life by. Where I grew up fathers, brothers and husbands often dictated the lives of the women around them. Women could not claim autonomy or walk away from unhealthy, or even, dangerous situations. I didn’t expect I would mimic this pattern one day. But I did. Every time a guy I was seeing raised his voice, I went right back. If he attempted to leave, I doubled down on my efforts to salvage that relationship. It didn’t feel like a self-respect issue; I was recreating what I remembered a partnership looked like.

As I grew older, I developed a strong disdain for male authority figures in my life. I hated them because I feared them. I feared them because I had been taught to so from an early age—fathers were exalted figures. All men became, in my mind, an embodiment of patriarchy and oppression. Only when I met certain guy friends later in life did I realise that men weren’t the devil incarnate. Many of them were sympathetic and kind, and they saw women as people first. I thought, “Maybe all’s not lost”.

But patriarchy didn’t just damage how I saw men—it warped how women saw each other, too. I grew up believing that sisters and girlfriends were supposed to compete, to put each other down in order to feel better about themselves. But when I saw how kind and loving my sister was to me, that reality didn’t hold water. I came to see that my female friendships mattered deeply— like signing a blood oath of sisterhood.

All this is to say: our legacy is not unchangeable. I have the power to reclaim my autonomy and shed the parts of my conditioning that no longer serve me. Unlearning is a lengthy but rewarding process.