Empowerment. Engagement. Authenticity.
Prodigal Daughter
“Marriage isn’t a priority for me right now. I
like my independence.” On the other end of the phone line, Ashmira heard
her mother’s sharp intake of breath, could almost feel the shock jolt
her like a lightning bolt. She continued. “I come and go as I please,
cook or not if I feel like it. Clean when I remember.” The latter was a
deliberate jab. Her mother was a houseworkaholic.
“Well,” she spluttered, “that’s how you feel now. But you must want
someone to take care of you. You must want a nice house. And
children…what about children?”
“I love children. I’m great with them. And then I give them back to
their parents.”
She was breaking all the golden rules of solid East Indian upbringing
but Ashmira didn’t care. Syed had the wife and kids, two houses, two
cars. Her brother was living the dream…and working his butt off to
maintain it. His kids spent ten hours a day in daycare, he and her
sister-in-law worked full days, odd nights and occasional weekends so
that their kids enjoyed the best of everything.
All the power to them. That rat race was not for her, Ashmira thought.
“So what did you cook for dinner?” her mother asked, going for
nonchalance.
“On Sunday, I made pasta with veggies for the week.”
“No meat?”
“Don’t need meat everyday.”
Ashmira could imagine more alarm bells clanging in her mother’s head.
First she didn’t want marriage or children and now she wasn’t eating
meat everyday? What kind of Indian girl was she? Where had her mother
gone wrong?
“You’re so Canadian,” her mother sighed, nonchalance degenerating into
despair. “I don’t understand you anymore.”
Ashmira recalled the rush of ziplining across Vancouver during the 2010
Olympics. She thought of the joy of seeing her literacy students read
and write a new word for the first time. “Life is what you make it,”
Ashmira said. “Not everyone has to play by the same rules.”
(c) Kristy Kassie, 2016
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Family Rules
Every family or close-knit group has rules. The
inspiration for this piece came from wondering what would happen if a
character broke one of these rules.
