The Woe men

The house hums with a rehearsed delight — guests gathered in fluttering clusters, their laughter rising as sparrows startled into flight. The air is heavy with the fragrance of delicacies, each dish an offering to celebration. Draped in festivity, the home gleams… yet within me, a quiet storm coils and writhes.

Tell me, dear elders — why must you rejoice at this so-called threshold of maturity? Why garland a passage that ushers in cycles of silent suffering, of pain that returns like an unwelcome tide, month after relentless month?

I have watched — oh, I have watched — mothers and sisters contort their endurance into grace, their agony masked as strength. Their “maturity” becomes a cloak stitched with expectation: to forgive endlessly, to understand unquestioningly, to bear without breaking under the casual weight of others’ failings. Is this growth… or a sanctified martyrdom?

I am twenty-three — young, luminous, shaped not merely by lineage but by my own relentless pursuit of excellence. My parents beam with pride, parading my beauty like a prized plume, yet what of my mind? What of the nights spent conquering problems that confound even my seniors, the words I weave into essays that breathe and think? Why does intellect bow before appearance? Is that not maturity — the ability to think, to create, to rise?

Yet here I stand, besieged by a parade of suitors, my consent a whisper lost in the cacophony of approval. My mother, wearied by persuasion, yields to what she deems the “best match.” And I — where am I in this grand design? My aspirations — my degree, my dreams of healing as a doctor — are dismissed with a wave, as though ambition were a childish indulgence to be outgrown.

What a paradox this world presents: the very being created to nurture life is slowly, methodically diminished by the very society she sustains. This is no isolated cruelty — it is a quiet initiation, a lifelong ragging etched into the existence of countless women.

But rise, rise from this quiet suffocation. You are no fragile bloom to be arranged and replaced at will. You are the wild growth that cracks stone — the weed that endures storms and refuses erasure. Do not wilt in borrowed vases; root yourself in your own soil. Let your worth not be assigned, but asserted.

And to the mothers — tell not tales that bind your daughters to glass slippers and gilded cages. Lay aside the dollhouses and teach them instead the architecture of independence. Give them a skill, a craft, a fire that teaches them first and foremost to love themselves.

So let the lament — the woe — no longer belong to women. Let it turn its gaze elsewhere. For when women claim their voice, their space, their power — They do not merely endure the world. They reshape it.