I Don’t Want to Be the Kind of Wife My Mother Was

I Don’t Want to Be the Kind of Wife My Mother Was

Not blaming my mother but refusing to inherit the silence that shaped her

Photo by Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash

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In a world where men make the rules, pay a bride price, and somehow receive the invisible remote control to another person’s life. Girls, I mean daughters grow up watching women and their mothers perform marriages they never consciously agreed to.

I was one of those girls, I watched my mother not with judgment because I didn’t understand fully too, but with questions.

As a child, I thought love looked like sacrifice. I thought respect meant silence. I thought a good wife was a woman who swallowed her opinions before breakfast and served everyone else before she remembered she needs to eat too.

What I learned about marriage by watching my mother

No one sat me down to teach me these lessons, I simply watched. I watched my mother apologize for things that were never her fault.

I watched my mother leave her high-paying job because she was told to stay at home to nurture the kids. She would cry her eyes out on days when she could not afford to buy things that were worth very little. This made her turn to a fruit seller.

This was a woman who bought me the most expensive shoes and socks when she was still working but she was perfect at hiding her sadness. She would still keep up with buying us the most beautiful things with debts.

I watched her ask permission to attend parties, to visit her friends or to even invite family over, in a house she cleaned and maintains? And my father will only inform us that a family member is on their way when they are already knocking at the door.

I watched her carry everyone’s emotional burdens, my father’s bad day at work, my poor result in school, my sister’s food that spilled away and there she was pretending she wasn’t tired too.

I watched her agree to all traditions, customs, and beliefs that are not hers just because she chose to be a wife elsewhere. There, they cut my clitoris and even my face as per my father’s tradition.

I watched her make herself smaller so everyone else could feel bigger. When my father insisted he wanted a son, forgetting that the chromosome determining a baby’s sex comes from the father, not the mother, he blamed my mother anyway and to make him the bigger person, my mother choose silence.

Eventually, he had children with another woman, only to have two more daughters.

The older I became, the more I realized something painful: my mother wasn’t weak. She trained us hard, she always stood up for herself outside but she was surviving in her marriage. Because she had been taught that protecting her home mattered more than protecting herself.

She was living inside a world that rewarded obedient wives and punished women who wanted too much freedom.

She did what countless women before her had done, not because they lacked dreams, but because survival often demanded surrender, their home deserves them more. Not their future or career.

I don’t want to become a wife like my mother, not because she failed, but because I finally understand the price she paid to be called a “good wife.” and I am no longer sure that title is worth the woman you have to disappear to earn it.

What I’m choosing to unlearn

Watching my mother taught me many things. Some of those lessons made me kinder, some made me more resilient and some taught me the quiet strength it takes to hold a family together.

But not every lesson deserves to become an inheritance, some lessons are meant to end with the generation that survived them.

I am choosing to unlearn the belief that being a good wife means disappearing just like our mothers did.

I will not apologize for existing simply because my opinions make someone uncomfortable. Because in my own belief “women run the world too.”

I will not abandon a career that gives me purpose just to prove my commitment to a marriage and childbearing. Love should never require me to bury the parts of myself that make me feel alive to make another part of me live.

I will not ask permission to see my parents, my siblings, or the friends who knew me before I became someone’s wife. Marriage should expand my world, not place it under lock and key.

I will not allow my daughter to be subjected to a tradition that could cost her happiness and lower her confidence in the near future because I choose to marry from a tradition that does that. I’m here to marry by choice and not to be married by demand so I can ask questions and talk it out.

I will not carry everyone’s emotional burdens while convincing myself that my own exhaustion can wait, I deserve care too.

I will not make myself smaller so another person can feel bigger. A confident man should not need a woman to shrink before he can stand tall. A confident man should know his world is complete when everyone in it is living without fear.

I will not measure my worth by my ability to endure suffering in silence. Endurance may have been my mother’s survival strategy, but it does not have to become my life story.

If I ever become a wife, I want my marriage to recognize my humanity before it celebrates my sacrifices. I want a home where respect flows in both directions, where decisions are shared, where love does not demand the death of my identity, and where happiness is free for all, not a one-party thing.

However, this is not rebellion against my mother because she is not the first, her only offence was choosing to follow the same time path her mothers walked.

This is gratitude for everything she endured and taught me while watching so I could learn something different and ride on a different pedestal.

She survived the marriage she had while I’m hoping to build the marriage I choose.

Partnership: The inheritance i want to leave behind

I love my mother and I love the woman who gave so much of herself that the rest of us never had to wonder whether we were loved because there was so much love at home.

I love the woman who survived a marriage that demanded more from her than it ever demanded from the man she married.

I’m only refusing to inherit the circumstances that shaped her.

My mother is not the only woman whose life was built around sacrifice. I have read stories of women across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and countless homes in between, generations of women have been taught that a successful marriage is measured by how much of themselves they are willing to lose.

They have been praised for their silence, celebrated for their endurance, and called good wives because they carried burdens that should never have belonged to them alone even when the female was the one who paid her bride price.

Their sacrifices also built families but too often, those same sacrifices buried dreams, careers, friendships, freedom, their sense of self and sometimes cost their lives. I do not judge those women when I grew up watching my mother too.

Many of them made the best decisions they could with the choices they had because surviving is not the same as choosing.

Perhaps that is the greatest gift one generation can give the next, not the expectation to repeat their lives, but the freedom to question their kind of lives.

As women of the new generation, we owe it to those who came before us not to romanticize their suffering but to learn from it. If our mothers endured so that we could have more choices, then honoring them does not mean repeating their pain. It means making sure their daughters no longer have to.

Therefore, I hope that if I ever become a wife, and in turn a mother, my marriage will not ask me to disappear to be loved.

I hope my daughters, if I have them, will grow up watching a marriage that teaches them partnership instead of submission, respect instead of fear, and love that makes both people feel seen. That way they would never submit too.

And that is the inheritance I want to leave behind.

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