How To Live
Being the daughter of Indian immigrant parents is tough. I’m constantly told how to live my life (aka get married, give my parents grandchildren, quit my job, and raise children). My mom drops “hints” all the time. I was wearing a spiral hair tie on my arm near my bicep since it fit snugly there. My mom said, “Wow! This is like one of the bangles that ladies wear at weddings, I’ll wear this to your wedding.” I clenched my fist so hard out of anger.
Being gay and being the daughter of Indian immigrant parents is even more tough. I always experience this internal struggle of not being able to explore who I was because I was bombarded with messages about how I should live my life, how I should dress, who I should marry, how many kids I should have. I hated how the world defined me before I could define myself.
My mom was really upset when I rejected 7 medical schools to pursue business at one of the top Ivys. Any immigrant parent would be — after all, medicine is put on a pedestal for them. Her fear was that in business, it’s really cut-throat and that I’ll be sitting in front of a computer all day in meetings and won’t have time to spend with my hypothetical kids.
She gives me the example of how businesswomen like Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi, are characterized as rough; my mom believes that women shouldn’t be in positions of power because they’re emotional, and they also “mess up” their kids because they’re so focused on climbing the corporate ladder that they forgo family life. But the thing my mom couldn’t even fathom was asking me if I wanted kids in the first place. It was a nonnegotiable for her. Her world was very black and white.
I am not sure why Indian parents think that a woman’s fertility is solely defined by her ability to have children. Women (and people who can biologically give birth) are so much more than baby-making beings. We have more pressing priorities in life like taking midday naps, for example. It feels like society tries to constantly subdue and take away our voices. We can still be loving, nurturing, and mother-like without having a child. Maybe that’s just a concept that is so foreign and unacceptable for traditional immigrant parents.
On top of the immigrant household I grew up in, I come from a very religious Hindu background. As a child, I was really hard on myself because I thought I was “sinning” for thinking a girl was cute or wanting to dress more masculine. Those things were not common in our Hindu community, and so I thought that what I was doing was considered wrong. I would pray to God to not send me to the depths of hell. Living in fear, I told myself I couldn’t be gay, I had to marry a man, and raise a religious child in order to be “good.” That was what I thought God wanted. But little did I know that that was simply a social script. The thing is, I didn’t know the difference between God and social scripts as a middle schooler, so I thought that whatever everyone at the mandir (temple) was doing was based on God’s words.
This quote is straight out of Hillary McBride’s book, The Wisdom of the Body, but it completely changed my perspective on my queer identity:
Scholar and therapist Paul Giblin has said:
‘Sexuality and spirituality spring from the same vital life source and have the same end. They are both about relationship; loving and being loved, desiring and being desired; and being vulnerable honest, and intimate. They both require growth in self-knowledge, including awareness of one’s limitations and ‘shadow.’’
Sexuality is not at odds with spirituality but, in fact, a deep human expression of it.
