For the last 35 years I have firmly held onto a rather common notion among women in modern America. Each and every major decision involving my adult life has been made by me. I chose to go to college at the University of New Orleans. I chose to stay in New Orleans, the city of my birth, after college and work a variety of jobs until I chose to leave New Orleans and move to New York City. I chose to passively pursue a career in stand up comedy. I just as passively chose to forsake ambitions as an entertainer and continue to develop as a writer. I, then, chose to go to graduate school. Somewhere around this time, I decided I needed to see more of the world. So, I chose to spend any large amounts of extra money I had on plane tickets. To Mexico. To Morocco. To Europe. To India. Eventually, I chose to be an "adult," taking on the rather traditional female profession of school teacher and buying an apartment. Yes, I even chose to acquire a mortgage. My belief has always been that I am satisifed with my life as a direct result of having CHOSEN my life. It has been an ideal fit for me. The setting of my life. The characters involved in the plot of my life. The narrative arcs, the conflicts all have been chosen by me. And this is the sole reason why I am so at peace with my life. Because I chose it, right?
I did not realize how much I assumed the ability to chose one's life circumstances played a key role in how well one accepted or even felt satisifed with one's life. If the conversations I had with the women here in Delhi taught me one thing, it is this: Western women such as myself place too much value on this notion of choice.
None of the women I talked to chose the circumstances of their lives. No, their families did not forbid them to go to school, bringing some random fellow to the house and forcing them to marry him. The families didn't have to do that. The women I talked to knew they would reach a certain point in their schooling before their parents began taking proposals for their marriage among worthy boys. Eventually, their parents would select young men who were appropriate and the young women would marry them. These young women would then move into their husbands' families' homes, taking care of their husbands, in laws and the children that they would definitely produce within a reasonable amount of time. This would be their lives.
"We raise our daughters with this custom," the women kept repeating. "They don't think about what they want because they already know what they will get." I asked the 19 year old daughter of one of the women how she thought her mother would react if she respectfully said: "Mom, I don't want to get married in the next few years. I may want to just do something else first. Or I may not want to marry at all." The daughter looked quizzically at me and calmly responded: "I wouldn't say that to my mother." When I asked her why not, she asked me: "Why would I tell my mother I didn't want to get married?" I didn't have an answer to her question. So, I asked her mother: "Can she put in requests for the TYPE of husband she wants? Qualities she'd like in the man she's going to spend the rest of her life with?"
All of the women in the room chuckled. One of the younger women said she wouldn't request any qualities in a husband. It seemed to be my understanding that there weren't any specific qualities or special "personality" traits that went into the selection of a husband. Her parents would, of course, only entertain proposals from boys who were respectful, kind, caring and had good earning potential. What need would she have for a "list" of qualities? I kept waiting for someone to voice dissatisfaction with this major life decision being made by other people, even if those other people were your parents. I kept waiting for one of the ladies to speak to the unfairness of such an arrangement. For some woman to ruefully wonder how different her life would have been if she had stayed in school longer, travelled or pursued some other dream besides family.
I waited in vain. From the older women (late 30s to early 40s), to the younger women (late teens and early 20s), no one questioned fairness. Even Hema Lata, the 46 year old woman who had to quit school at 19 to take on her deceased sister's husband and son, never spoke of what could have been or how her lack of choice left her resentful of her life. It was certainly not Hema's idea to marry her sister's husband. I am certain it would not have been her preferred route to the life as wife and mother she knew she would eventually take, anyway. Her family chose for her and she honored the choice they made. Although Hema resigned herself to the duty she did not really choose for herself, she expresses satisfaction with the life that duty has brought her. She has steadily built up her beauty salon, the business once only consisting of Hema going from house to house in her neighborhood and giving her friends facials. "My husband is a good man," she confirms. "I have a nice home. I have raised decent, respectable children." Hema seems just as satisfied with her life as my friend, Rhonda, who chose to marry at an age and time in her life that seemed right to her and eventually chose to put her career and needs on the side to support her husband's career and to raise her children.
Rhonda made a decided choice. Hema did not. Both proudly chatter on about their children. Both go about their daily duties of caring for their husbands, compromising when necessary to keep the family in tact. And both Rhonda and Hema have their own personal pursuits - Rhonda is working on her doctorate through an online course and Hema earns extra money for her family through the beauty salon she runs out of her home. These personal pursuits obviously come second to the needs of the family, but the women do pursue them with gusto.
Does it really matter that Rhonda chose her husband? Chose to be a wife and mother when her family would have respected (and allowed) any other lifestyle she thought best suited her? At the end of the day, both women seem to have ended up with very similiar lives. I asked Hema and her neighbors if they were happy. While none of them seemed to put much value in what I, as an American woman, count as "personal happiness," all of them expressed a sense of satisfaction. "I am content with the life my husband has given me," I heard on several occasions.
In the western world, which offers a malaria-like dizziness of choices, how many women can even claim contentment, let alone something as difficult to define as happiness?
I have immensely benefited from this luxury of choice. I do not distance myself from my appreciation of and desire to maintain it. In one short generation, the lives of women in the west have afforded them with this luxury of "not being so sure if I want to _______." This not being sure, this rather adolescent ability to explore one's self and reinvent the wheel of an adult life is what I most appreciate about my life. It is why I have comfortably chosen to live in an American city where on any given block you will find hundreds of people choosing hundreds of variations of an adult life. But, I now question if we are assuming that this luxury of choice is our special little key to happiness. That today's generation of American women are somehow luckier than their mothers who can probably identify more with the 19 year old girl in Delhi than they can with their 35 year old daughters here in the states.
And here is the funny part: most of us women who "choose" our lives eventually end up choosing what the women in Delhi do not have a say in. The road to our version of it seems to take longer and is often more complicated and requires more negotiation than sometimes seems neccesary. In two days, I will be leaving this country, wondering why we are so smug about this benefit we have. Questioning if choice alone is why I am happy with my life. Had I been raised without the expectation of making these life choices on my own, would it have made any difference in the end?
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