Here’s a secret, and it will come as a surprise for even those who think they know me well: I hate working for money.
I love taking care of kids, and running the household, and trying new recipes (no, I cannot cook a whole meal, but I am fine supervising a cook), and shopping, and getting homework done, and planning playdates, and throwing parties, and picking people up and dropping them off, and reading, and listening to music, and taking care of travel plans, and keeping accounts, and training and managing household staff, and watching tv, and surfing on social media, and indulging in hobbies like golf or aerobics or singing or wine-tasting, and working for nothing or low pay just to find something to do with spare time, and other similar activities seen more as ‘home-making’ than ‘career-building’.
Unfortunately, the gender roles that we have assigned ourselves and have conditioned ourselves to live up to have somehow trapped me into the role of a bread-earner and provider, something I have rarely enjoyed ever since I made my first buck at 18 years of age in 1990.
I wish I could have found an ambitious career woman with whom I could have had many children and set up a nice home for the family, looking after its needs and the needs of my children and my wife as she pursued her career and brought home the bacon. Maybe that is why my marriages don’t seem to work. It isn’t them. It’s me!
There. I said it.
P.S: I must hasten to add, lest this be misunderstood, that I have tried to do only those money-making activities that have made me happy since I was 18. Mostly, I have succeeded. It isn’t doing all the things I did and continue to do that causes me joylessness, but taking money for them, especially money that is deemed essential to maintain my (and my family’s) lifestyle, without which we would not be able to live comfortably. It is the must-make-money-or-else that bothers me. I have a problem with my career being my sole identity rather than other things that I do so enjoy that I would, in a jiffy give up my career for them. Unlike most boys, I always wanted to be a father (when elders would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was ‘father’, though I knew, and said things society would rather have me say, like pilot or engineer or whatever), and now that I have tasted the joy, I do not wish to be anything but. The reason I cannot just be ‘father and homemaker’ is because I am now destined to be ‘provider and bread-earner’ and anything less is seen as, at best a lessening of my masculinity and at worst a breach of promise, something I have learnt gentlemen never ever should be accused of. Unfortunately, time’s vector moves only forward and it is alas too late for my life to be any different.
