Author: Don't be invisible
You shouldn’t try to be Super Mom, but there’s power in being a woman.
That’s the message behind Jay’s Legacy, a non-profit organization created by a physician and psychiatrist in honor of his late wife, Jayashree.
Inspired by his wife, Dr. Jagdish Kulkarni also wrote the book: “Invisible Woman, I to I: Invisibility to Invincibility.”
Basically, he wants women everywhere to hold on to their sense of pride and value, to take care of themselves even as they’re taking care of their children.
Through the website, www.invisiblewoman.org, workshops and mentoring programs, Kulkarni hopes to inspire women to celebrate their “innate qualities without the burden of self doubt and fear of judgement.”
Sometimes as a journalist, an interview really sticks with you.
Listen to Kulkarni talk about his late wife and you can’t help but be inspired.
Whatever he did for her in 39 years of marriage, he said, was not enough. So he has set out to leave a legacy behind for her.
“It’s not because she was invisible,” he said. “She was by no means invisible. Extremely vibrant, she was a classical dancer. She was always the center of attraction in any group.”
She was a woman of nature. She’d call to tell him to look at the full moon. She’d point out a beautiful flower.
“I would just say, ‘yeah, yeah.’ I was busy with my computer and my things,” he said.
He wishes he would have been more in tune with her, that he would have celebrated and cherished her more.
“Why didn’t I take time, sit down, hold her hands, look into her eyes? I wish we would have capitalized on those silent moments,” he said.
“As long as her husband was fine and the kids were happy, she was happy. How much more invisible can a person be?” he said. “Look at the bulbs in the room. ... Nobody remembers the electricity behind those bulbs. I feel like she was my electricity. I was the bulb.”
He now hopes to pass along that realization to others. His book identifies common personality traits that frequently lead to “feelings of invisibility in a woman.”
Through these traits, he created eight categories: The Merger, The Pleaser, The Defeated, The Doubter, The Masochist, The Martyr, The Exasperated and The Lost.
The book basically shows women how to recognize the traits and overcome them.
The categories are somewhat self-explanatory by their titles. For instance, “The Merger” loses her identity in comparison to her husband, while “The Pleaser” asks, “If I suffer for you, will you love me?”
“The Defeated” gets caught in a rut and feels lost, while “The Doubter” doesn’t believe in herself. And so on. I think we can all relate to Kulkarni’s overall message in one way or another.
“I feel like the people who have wives or loved ones, these are the things they can realize in their lives much more intently and intensely as compared to what I have done,” he said. “They say I had a great life. I wish I had realized it sooner.”
