Whose hand do I hold?

Thoughts in a room where I was suddenly alone.

Very few people know that I am currently visiting my sister. I am at my older sister’s place as she has gifted me a brand new, and my very first and own, niece. This is also the first time, in my adult life, I have spent time, uninterrupted (rather as uninterrupted as possible) time with her. All our early adult lives, she has had a job and even on my last visit, to see her, she would go to work in the day and take me out in the evening. Parental leave is a blessing, even for visiting sisters.

The other day, I was talking to my sis about her career and ambition. She told me that she does not want much of a career as much as she would like to spend her afternoons reading. She would love to spend her life, working of course, but also doing other things. She sounded like a zillennial to my millennial ears. Also, my feminist, time poverty, unpaid labour and the recent Jessica Velenti article on housewives’ mind, was in alarm. Why would my sister, employed with one of the top technology companies in the world want to read books in the afternoon? What was wrong with her current life? What needed fixing? How can her life be changed to incorporate books in the afternoon (and let’s throw in a nap) but still keep her career going? I immediately put on my Naila Kabeer hat and told her about adjusted preferences. That women and young girls adjust their ambitions and preferences depending on what they know is available to them. I told her, that there are very few girls in technology and that she should be a role model to all of them. I went on. I think I was turning breathless in my desperate attempt to come to terms with the fact that my sister was choosing a way of life very different from mine. My sister was, in fact, not choosing erm… me.

After my close to fifteen minutes of a cobbled together pep talk, my sister finally said, that yeah, maybe she would like to stay in the labour force but do something else. Small win, I thought and went off to get myself a small muffin. I had saved a woman from leaving the workforce. I had restored a young girl’s chance of having a role model. My student, who I will call Mehj, had said years ago, that she was my older sister’s fangirl. I had done this for Mehj.

About a week after this exchange, my sister, my husband (yes, he is here too) and I were meeting a friend. I have known this friend for a long time. I have the deepest respect for them and the greatest admiration. I told my sister that she had to meet them. My friend is all that my sister didn’t want to be - visible, hyper career-focused, doesn’t nap in the afternoon. They are someone I would have wanted to be in my life. And on that day, it appeared, my friend is also someone who doesn’t know what I do for a living.

I looked around the room at that point. My elder sister on one side, my husband next to me. And my friend with some other people around us. The only thought I had was that at that very moment, if there was just one person I could hold and leave the room with, I would do it with my sister. And simultaneously at that point, I knew that maybe the life my sister was not choosing, is also the life I ‘shouldn’t’ want. Of course, I still love the work I do and would like to be a role model, if I am worthy. I would love to be in the labour force. I still would like to ask myself every day how would I like to contribute and what would I like to leave behind. But what I definitely don’t want to do is surrounded myself with people who don’t even know who I am. What is the point of this work if it leaves me depleted and tries to tell me all the time, how much harder I need to try? Why was I making my sister choose this vacuity? Maybe I need my own pep talk at this moment, because I still think that the world needs a me. But what I definitely need is people whose hands I can hold, to leave and find a someplace else.