Good Girls Marry Doctors by Piyali Bhattacharya

Author:Piyali Bhattacharya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aunt Lute Books

Becoming a Reluctant Breadwinner

Swati Khurana

I. Breadwinner

I imagine that word in all capitals, outlined in yellow, against a red background – the graphics befitting a superhero. As a child, I never actually played princess or imagined myself being rescued. Take a summer afternoon in 1981, when I was fearless, in a Wonder Woman bathing suit over my six-year-old frame, lanky, knobby, and hirsute. My sister was a year old. She was toddling, squatting, tipping over. We had a pool, with a perimeter of concrete, and then a garden to the side. My grandmother was gardening and watching my sister toddle. I was on the swing set.

Then I heard a scream unlike any I had heard. It was my grandmother. My baby sister had fallen in the pool. My grandmother, who had just arrived from India with all of us a few years ago, didn’t know how to swim. I leapt off the swing set, ran past the pear tree, and jumped into the pool. I had been taking lessons, but I hadn’t learned to swim in the deep end yet. I jumped in, pulled her up, and handed her to my grandmother. My mother heard the commotion and ran outside. My sister coughed out water, but she was fine.

When I try to summon my bravery and resolve, I remember that moment of being a superhero. It’s also my creation story of my own feminism – feeling that I could summon the strength to do anything. When I hear about women being able to lift up cars for their babies, I feel as if I have first-hand experience at doing what seems physically impossible when a baby’s life is at stake.

Decades later, when my two-month paid maternity leave ended, I returned to work full-time. My husband was leaving his sales-based career and was in the process of going back to university to become a school teacher – decisions we made together. I had the flexibility to be full- or part-time and the job security to go back to work later. But we couldn’t afford that.

When I was pregnant, this plan to return to work was abstract. Soon, I realized I was the breadwinner and had transformed into neither the mother I grew up with nor the one I expected to be. I had a baby girl, a husband, and a stepdaughter, a job that was fulfilling with a degree of flexibility, the ability to provide for my family while pursuing my creative work, and yet, I felt like a failure.

I failed because I missed too many moments, including my daughter’s first steps, which were recorded on her babysitter’s cell phone and sent to me. I actually missed the video message for an hour because I was in a meeting. I missed seeing these steps in person for three days because I left the house before she woke up and came home after she fell asleep. On the fourth day of her walking, when I could take a day off, I finally saw her steps for myself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.