"a good woman is a woman who suffers"

can we recognize sacrifices without sacralizing sacrifice itself?

There is a whispered inheritance passed between generations of South Asian women, an unspoken axiom that a good woman is measured by her capacity to endure. I have seen it in the bent backs of our mothers, the quiet acceptance in our grandmothers' eyes, the silent persistence through pain that runs like an underground river through our collective consciousness. It is the belief that feminine virtue is synonymous with sacrifice, that a woman's worth can be quantified by how much she surrenders of herself.

The unspoken bargain of womanhood in our culture is that your pain is irrelevant if it serves someone else's comfort.

In most South Asian households (and I am sure many other cultures as well) mothers become living monuments to this ideology. They wake before dawn to prepare elaborate meals that they themselves eat last, cold and hurried. They surrender dreams with practiced ease, tuck away ambitions like precious fabrics stored for some occasion that never arrives. Their suffering becomes sanctified... The more visibly they diminish themselves, the more they are venerated. And yet! This veneration is often hollow. Not expressed through genuine gratitude or respect, but through a perfunctory acknowledgment that merely confirms she has fulfilled her predetermined role. Their sacrifice becomes not extraordinary but expected, not appreciated but assumed.

Sons witness this spectacle of maternal martyrdom throughout their formative years. They observe their fathers accepting this arrangement as natural law, see their communities reinforcing it through praise: "What a good wife, what a devoted mother." The equation becomes simple yet profound! Maternal suffering equals maternal love; female sacrifice equals female virtue.