My parents made it clear throughout my childhood that the reason they emigrated from Pakistan to the United States was to give their children a good education. This was equally true for both my brothers and sisters—my parents didn’t discriminate when it came to academic expectations. And lucky for them, all five of us were studious. Each week, my mother would take us to the local library, where we would check out as many books as we could carry—fiction or science or history, we had no restrictions. Every book was an opportunity to learn.
As I got older, my ambition turned into something sharper than that of my siblings. That drive stemmed from our family history. Particularly, my mother’s history.
My mother was the first woman in her family to get a graduate degree. She attended university in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the 1970s and got a master of science in botany with the intention of having a career as a scientist. Since she regularly got the highest marks, she didn’t think it would be difficult to find a job. But despite graduating at the top of her class and appearing in local newspapers in lists of students with academic honors, there was no job for her after graduation. She volunteered her time at a lab, taking a long bus ride each way, hoping that once the other scientists saw how great she was, they would hire her. That was not the case. They were happy to have her free labor.
Disheartened, she eventually quit the lab and decided to get married. She was soon introduced to my father, and once they were married, they moved to the United States, where she had five kids in eight years. Although she never got a job once she got to the United States (having five kids to take care of was plenty of work!), we grew up with beautiful rose and vegetable gardens in our yard, thanks to my botanist mom.
I had heard this story—of my mom’s working for free in the lab—many times. My brilliant mother, who worked hard her whole life, was not able to get a job … because she was a girl. The unfairness of it stayed with me. Somewhere along the way, I became determined not only to get a great job after graduating college but also to succeed in whatever my chosen career turned out to be. I needed to do this as her daughter. To push back against societal standards that put people in narrow boxes based on gender or race or any other factor, and right what felt like a deep wrong.
I’m in my thirties now, the same age my mother was when she was telling my siblings and me stories about her childhood in Pakistan and taking us to the library to read as much as we could. My chosen career in children’s book publishing is every bit as inspired by my mother as by my drive to succeed. And in 2016, after fourteen years of working in publishing, I launched a history-making children’s book imprint, Salaam Reads, which publishes positive representations of Muslim kids and families, the first imprint to do so.
The news of the imprint was first introduced in the New York Times’s “Arts” section in February 2016, and from there, word spread. Given that the imprint’s launch comes at a time in US history when the rights of Muslims, and other marginalized communities, are under attack, book lovers around the globe received news of the imprint as a step toward empathy and compassion in a world that seemed hostile to differences. My work on Salaam Reads was also mentioned in Dawn, the oldest English-language newspaper in my mother’s homeland of Pakistan. It turned out I had made the papers, too.
MY BRILLIANT MOTHER, WHO WORKED HARD HER WHOLE LIFE, WAS NOT ABLE TO GET A JOB … BECAUSE SHE WAS A GIRL.
I HAD RARELY LET MYSELF CRY IN THE WORKPLACE. I HAD INTERNALIZED THE CRITICISM THAT BEING EMOTIONAL WAS GIRLISH AND UNPROFESSIONAL.
When I first announced the creation of the imprint at a meeting at my company, I couldn’t hold back my feelings. I had rarely let myself cry in the workplace. I had internalized the criticism that being emotional was girlish and unprofessional. Although I tried to stop crying, it didn’t work, and I cried through the entire presentation. Maybe I was emotional because I am a girl. Or maybe because I am my mother’s girl, and I had succeeded.