Female Agency: Danish-Egyptian, Yasmin Abdel-Hak, in Conversation with Host, Australian, Louise Ross [Ep 38]

In this last episode of Season 2 and 2022, my guest from Episode 9, Danish-Egyptian, Yasmin Abdel-Hak, starts by interviewing me, Australian, Louise Ross, the host of Women Who Walk podcast. Halfway through the episode, we switch, and I interview Yasmin. Ahead of time, we decided that the focus of our conversation would be female agency in our lives and work. I chose this as the topic because it's the red thread connecting the stories shared in this podcast. In other words, to some degree all the women I've interviewed exercise agency in their lives. Relative to our discussion, agency is a woman's ability to make her own decisions and live her life on her terms.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I'm Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I'll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who've made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom - reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com. 

Hello, listeners. Welcome to Episode 38 of Women Who Walk. 

[00:00:51] Louise: It's November 30th, 2022, and this is the final episode of Season 2 the last episode that I'll be posting this year. I'll be back with Season 3 in January, 2023. 

[00:01:06] Louise: By way of finishing up this season, I'm doing something a little. For regular listeners, you may recall my conversation with Danish-Egyptian human rights lawyer, Yasmin Abdel-Hak, and for those listeners who are new to my podcast, Yasmin was my Episode 9 guest, back in July, 2021.

[00:01:29] Louise: Well, Yasmin lives a few miles from me, 30-minutes outside of Lisbon, and periodically we have lunch. When we last lunched, she proposed that we switch roles and that she interview me for my podcast. I had to think about that and because I've shared something of my story in the very first episode, within the context of talking about why I decided to launch the Women Who Walk podcast, and because a more in-depth version of my personal story appears in the last chapter of my book, Women Who Walk: How 20 Women from 16 Countries came to Live in Portugal, and because there are also a number of interviews with me as the guest on my YouTube channel, I thought having a conversation with Yasmin on one of the Women Who Walk podcast themes would be a thought provoking way to end Season 2. 

[00:02:27] Louise: And that theme, or red thread is female agency, which is to say a woman's ability to make her own decisions and live her life on her terms. That said, we all encounter limits as a result of culture, laws, geography, health, finances, et cetera. Nevertheless, I've been consistently awe struck with the ways that the women I've spoken with have lived their lives with agency. And oftentimes despite limiting circumstances. For instance, in Episode 5, Joia Lewis talks about living with multiple sclerosis since her fifties and moving to Portugal in her sixties in spite of her physical disabilities. And Sandhya Acevinkumar in Episode 12, who regardless of the restrictions of her arranged marriage, grew to become an empowered woman, a leader in her community. And adventurer Landis Wyatt, who in Episode 37 talks of following her husband to Liberia, one of Africa's poorest countries, and to do so, she had to push through her anxieties and fears, which facilitated her growing and learning to do things she never imagined she was capable of.

[00:03:52] Louise: And so by way of discussing female agency, Yasmin starts our conversation by asking me some questions about where and how it has manifested in my life. And then we switch gears and I ask her about it as a theme in her life and work as a human rights lawyer and Middle East expert.

 [00:04:24] Louise: Hi Yasmin, thanks for being a part of this very different podcast episode that we're going to do and actually thanks for suggesting it. 

[00:04:33] Yasmin: And thank you so much for being on board with the idea Louise, I'm so happy we're doing it. So, today I'm gonna be asking you some questions about your life. What was it like growing up in Australia. And what back then gave you a sense of agency as an adult?

[00:04:49] Louise: Well, my Australian childhood was somewhat ideal. Lots of freedom to be outdoors. Always a feeling of safety and security. We lived about two hours southeast of Melbourne in a small town, it had a fluctuating population of around 1500, so quite small. And small-town rural Australia in the 1960s was very insular and closed-minded. But fortunately my father was a highly educated man who instilled in us a sense of curiosity about the world; he was a real history buff, loved literature, the classics. And my mother too was an incredibly creative woman, extremely talented in her own right. 

[00:05:37] Louise: I remember going places with her as a child, even to the point of having this strong recollection of standing by her, up to her thigh, holding onto her hand, while she was carrying on a slightly heated conversation with someone, maybe a customer service person, pressing her point until she got what she wanted. And this was not unusual. It wasn't a, a one-off incident. She could be formidable. And that makes an impression on a young kid. 

[00:06:08] Louise: As I got older, I was never backward in coming forward with my ideas and opinions because I believed as a result of my mum demonstrating it that I had a voice and that I had a right to express and assert that voice, which I think gave me a sense of agency. 

[00:06:27] Yasmin: Yeah. Yeah. Was that unusual given your rural environment you know, at the time? Was your mother unusual for where you lived? 

[00:06:38] Louise: It was somewhat unusual for the early 1960s. I mean, I was born in 1960 and in those days in Australia, a woman's place was still in the home. I don't know that Mum felt that she had the agency that she wanted, towards her middle years, but when we were kids, I think she, she still felt that she did. And perhaps that was because she'd had her own career before she married and she'd been successful in her career. I think she was unusual for the time and for the place. 

[00:07:17] Yasmin: So you left Australia in your early twenties to travel. Was this with family, friends, or with a group of friends, or what made you want to travel?

[00:07:28] Louise: It was not unusual for kids in the seventies to take off from Australia. It was by virtue, I think, of us being so geographically isolated from the rest of the world that people would travel. Kids would backpack for extended periods of time abroad. When I was, I think I was 21 or 22, that's what I did. Around the same time some friends were heading to Europe to, to backpack. Just because it seems to be part of my nature or my desire to have agency over where I go and what I do, or maybe in other words, it's because of my preference to not follow the pack, I decided to go to the US and I traveled around on my own hopping on and off Greyhound buses and after about six months I did get a little bit lonely.

[00:08:22] Louise: I ended up in London and I was staying with some friends, they were renting a flat and working in London, and, and that's where I worked for a period, until I secured a job with a company that operated chalets in the French Alps, which is what I really wanted to do, work and ski in Europe. That's what I did, I secured a job with a British company operating in Courcheval in the French Alps, and that's where I worked for the next seven to eight months. 

[00:08:50] Yasmin: Do you speak French then? 

[00:08:51] Louise: Well, I had schoolgirl French, uh, I managed kind of like I do here in Portugal. I managed. 

[00:09:00] Yasmin: Yeah, yeah. Well, later on you went back to the US a few years later to, to study. What precipitated that? 

[00:09:09] Louise: I'd completed a couple of years of a BA in Psychology and Philosophy in Melbourne, and I was terribly bored with that program. So on a reciprocal student-working visa, between the US and Australia, I went to Park City, Utah one summer, which was the Northern Hemisphere winter, and I worked and skied there for six months.

[00:09:31] Louise: And while there, I found out about several graduate schools in California and one in Colorado, all of which offered programs that were totally different to anything available in Australia. I requested their catalogs and the catalog that came from Boulder Graduate School offered a program that was hugely interesting to me. It was a program in Jungian psychology, that's Carl Jung the, the Swiss psychiatrist, who early on in his career was a student of Freud's. I applied and my application was accepted. This was over a period of many months, I was back in Australia at this point. And because my father believed in the importance of education for his daughters, and no doubt underlying that was his belief that women with an education had a means of supporting themselves, and thus agency in their lives, he agreed to finance this two-year program. So at 27, I headed off to Colorado to study. 

[00:10:37] Louise: But my mother on the other hand was not supportive. She did not want me to go, which in retrospect was so at odds with the woman that I believed as a child role modeled female agency. And over time it did become very clear that she was not supportive of me living abroad. In fact, there were times when it felt to me as though she was trying to undermine my sense of agency, so I would come back to, to live in Australia. 

[00:11:09] Yasmin: Do you think this was out of sort of concern of you living in the states or you know, being far away from her not being able to protect you or what was that about do you think? 

[00:11:20] Louise: As I mentioned earlier, I think when she, when she got into middle age, I think she was starting to feel that she was losing her sense of agency, which was such a shame. So much of her life and her identity had gone into mothering and parenting, and I was the youngest, I think with me living abroad, it really challenged her identity as a parent. And in fact she was never able to make the transition to friend. As I got older, she was still trying to, to mother me in a way that I didn't need. 

[00:11:58] Yasmin: I think a lot of women probably struggle with that sort of transitioning into another role as, not as much as a mother, but more as a friend or supporter. But I imagine a lot of women dealing with that struggle and it comes with age as well. Women feel they become invisible as they get older. 

[00:12:19] Louise: Mm, mm And there were other issues going on as well that she wasn't able to resolve. 

[00:12:25] Yasmin: Yeah. 

[00:12:25] Louise: It was a very difficult time because obviously I was at a distance and I ultimately chose to stay at a distance. When I would visit, it was difficult because she was always sort of angry and then with that punishing. I often wondered, well, why did I bother coming home if she's not thrilled to see me? However. 

[00:12:46] Yasmin: So did she ever settle with it or find peace with it?

[00:12:50] Louise: No, never. 

[00:12:51] Yasmin: Oh, well, um, living in the US at a point you marry an American. And you didn't have a family with your husband. Was that a conscious choice? 

[00:13:03] Louise: Yes to both those questions. And even though we knew he wanted kids, and that I didn't, we still had a few good years together. And actually, I'll tell him this story too. It was in my mid-thirties when we were still married that I participated in a book project as an interviewee. Terri Casey, who wrote the book, which is titled, Pride and Joy: The lives and Passions of Women Without Children compiled a series of interviews with women like me, who'd chosen not to have kids, and she prefaced each of our stories with a quote that she felt was an accurate representation of something of our character and for me, she quoted Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th century Scottish novelist, and I don't know how she found these quotes, but the one that she found for me goes like this: "To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive." I remember back then that I loved that she'd picked that quote for me. It felt then, and it still does feel so accurate, all these years later, and within the context of our conversation today, I think it speaks to having a sense of agency.

[00:14:27] Yasmin: Absolutely. But that particular decision not to have kids, seems to be very provocative for a lot of people. That women have to defend their decision on not wanting kids. Was that your experience too, in, in the US? 

[00:14:44] Louise: Absolutely. And particularly because I was married, there seemed to be what I felt was pressure both from my parents and his parents. And I think that that was one of the things that led me to reach out to Terri. Basically I wrote a little story for her and sent it to her proposing that I be a participant in this project. She'd put out a call for interviewees, in a newsletter, and so I proposed, via this story that I wrote, that I be one of the interviewees. It was a way for me to give voice to something I felt strongly about, the choice that, that I felt was appropriate for me. 

[00:15:27] Yasmin: Do you think you still have to justify your choice. It's my impression that women today still have to justify their wish not to have children. I don't think we as a society has changed much in that regard. 

[00:15:40] Louise: Indeed. Reproductive rights are a big issue again. 

[00:15:43] Yasmin: Yes. And also motherhood, how it's put on a pedestal, like it's this holy thing we are doing. And when women choose not to, that's questioned. And I think that's intriguing that we haven't progressed from that perception. 

[00:15:57] Louise: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, all of that is true. And that's why I thought that this book, I think there were 28 stories in it, was hugely important. And it was actually a very successful book. I think it was republished three times, that's about 15,000 books so those stories obviously spoke to many, many women. 

[00:16:19] Louise: It was about a year after the book came out that I left the marriage, but that didn't have anything to do with the book or me going public with my choice not to have kids. I think the, the marriage had just run its course. After I left the marriage, I didn't have any credit in my name; it was all in my ex-husband's, and this will be familiar to listeners in the US, but in the US you need credit and I didn't have it. And because my cash had gone to securing the apartment, I'd found to rent, I didn't have enough leftover to set it up. So I had to go back to my ex and ask him to co-sign on a loan so I could buy a bed. 

[00:17:03] Louise: Yeah. Funny now, but it wasn't back then because talk about having no agency, having to go back to him and ask for his help. I remember there was a moment when he wavered, just a moment, and I knew he was wavering because he realized in that moment he had the power. And I think he was so hurt and angry cuz I'd left him, that he really wanted me to feel that he had the power in that moment. And it was this dreadful feeling of, Oh my God, what am I gonna do if he won't co-sign this loan so I can buy a bed? But fortunately, the moment passed and, and he, he did co-sign the loan. 

[00:17:48] Louise: Anyway, eventually I, I got on my feet. And then it was in my mid-forties that, that I felt the pull to come back to Europe. But prior to that, when I was about 41, my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Now, you asked me before did she ever resolve her disapproval of me living abroad, which she didn't. But despite that, and despite that our relationship wasn't great, um, it's one of the challenges of living outside your country of origin that when a parent experiences ill- health, you wanna be there for them, so I was going back and forth to Australia a couple of times a year till she passed away. 

[00:18:29] Louise: And I remember the first time I came out to to be there, she said, 'Well, what are you doing here?' I said, 'Well, I'm here to help you. I'm here to look after you.' In other words, she still hadn't resolved her upset at me living abroad. And, and then of course as happens, my father started to decline. And the same thing, I went back and forth to Australia to look after him. Even putting my life on hold in the US for about a year so I could move in with him to care for him until we moved him out into a, a retirement community with tiered-care services and so on. And it was after Dad passed away when I was 50 that I thought, now it's my time to move back to Europe and to once again, I think claim agency and create a new life for myself. So that's when I moved to Portugal. 

[00:19:23] Yasmin: Was this when you started becoming interested in writing and collecting stories or when did you come about to do that? 

[00:19:31] Louise: It was when I was newly divorced and I had this marvelous job working in marketing and promotions for a preparatory school for mature-age international students coming from developing countries. Their governments had, uh, sent them to the US to complete graduate studies in economics, business and development with the intention that they'd return to their home countries to work in government positions. But first they had to attend the institute where I worked to prepare to enter the US University system.

[00:20:05] Louise: The students were fascinating. They were from countries such as Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, South Korea, South America, the Middle East, Africa, the former Yugoslavia, which at the time was at war. And, uh, in fact, there was a student, a Muslim from Kosovo and a student, a Serb from Montenegro. And the young woman, uh, I'll call her M, to protect her privacy, was from Kosovo. And she had an incredible story. Of course, part of my job was to bring attention to the Institute via publicity. And so I worked with M to prep her for radio interviews and public presentations. 

[00:20:54] Louise: Meanwhile, I'd befriended the young man from Montenegro, who I'll call A. And as my friendship with them both developed, I was aware of their deep hatred for one another, the ethnic Albanian Muslim and the Serb, which at the time was playing out on the world stage via media coverage of the war. What struck me in my personal conversations with A was his firm belief that because M was a woman, she was a nobody, a nothing, and because of her gender and her ethnicity, she would fade into oblivion once she left the US and returned to Kosovo. 

[00:21:37] Yasmin: Okay. 

[00:21:38] Louise: Yeah. Yeah. His arrogance was astonishing to me. Particularly because in the midst of all of this, M was quickly drawing significant local interest due to her compelling personal story. And she was incredibly charismatic as a presenter, as a public speaker. M went on to complete her graduate studies at a school on the East coast. She made quite an impression there too, to the extent that she wound up meeting Madeline Albright, who was President Clinton's Secretary of State and that meeting was quite a news event. But M's story doesn't end there because when she returned to Kosovo, she eventually went on to hold positions of leadership within her government, whereas A, bless him, was the one who faded into oblivion.

[00:22:33] Louise: Anyway, their story made such an impression on me, that I wrote it into an essay, and I think that's where it all began, where my love of collecting stories began, particularly those of women like M, who oftentimes against all odds do amazing things in their lives, they're such an inspiration to other women, role modeling, courage ... 

[00:22:59] Yasmin: Yeah. 

[00:22:59] Louise: Resiliency, determination, and of course agency. 

[00:23:04] Yasmin: And just outta curiosity, are you still in touch with M? Do you know how she's doing today? 

[00:23:10] Louise: I'm not, I mean, she is in a significant position of leadership. And the friendship broke down because I sent them both a copy of the essay. I tried to get it published in literary magazines, I got very good feedback, but I didn't get it published. The most significant feedback was, we love M's side of the story, would you be willing to rewrite it and focus just on M? In other words, they wanted me to write A out of the story. 

[00:23:46] Louise: Neither of them liked that I had written about them. They didn't like that I had a relationship with them both because as I alluded to, they really held a great hatred for one another so they didn't like that I was friends with them both. Both of them sort of faded away after that. 

[00:24:10] Louise: I thought that somehow this story could be used as an olive branch for them to understand one another. It that was incredibly naive given what was going on in the former Yugoslavia at the time. So I had to let it go. And I think the longer I let it go, the more I felt I couldn't reach out to M. 

[00:24:32] Yasmin: But this was actually your first time you started getting into writing about women and their, their story. This is where it all started. 

[00:24:40] Louise: I was in a writing group at that point and I was writing some very short columns and, uh, at the forefront of those short columns was a protagonist that I'd created and ultimately wrote a couple of romantic comedies featuring her. But writing nonfiction, began with this essay featuring, uh, M and A.

[00:25:05] Louise: in retrospect, that feedback from the literary magazine proposing that I focus just on M is really fascinating. I haven't really thought about that until now, that her story was the one that was identified as the more interesting story, the more compelling. And that that's what I've ultimately done. Gone on to write the compelling stories of women who've moved countries, many countries. And now with the podcast, the story of women like you, Yasmin, living their lives doing extraordinary things. So what about if we switch gears and I ask you now about female agency in your life and was it role-modeled for you growing up in Denmark with a Danish mum and an Egyptian dad?

[00:26:02] Yasmin: Yeah. I grew up in this very mixed family with my dad being from Egypt and my mom obviously from Denmark, but a big part of our family was also living in the US and we'd have our aunts coming over visiting us, uh, a couple of times a year. So there was also this American influence. And, one of my aunts, she's a great aunt, she would, um, often come to Denmark and she was a white woman from Denmark, but had married an African American in the fifties, which was very, very unusual at the time to have mixed marriages. I thought, you know, that's, that's badass, married with an African American man in New York. 

[00:26:48] Yasmin: In general, our family was very much dominated by women. My great-grandmother was alive. I grew up with my great-grandmother. She had three daughters. My grandmother had two daughters and both of them had daughters. It was a predominantly women, family. We were all girls and so the men that actually were in the family, they were brought in from outside, so to speak.

[00:27:13] Yasmin: We didn't have, uh, any male cousins or any male, you know, brothers or siblings, it was just women and girls. In that regard, I think that made us very aware of female power, if you like. Cause it was a very dominating feature in our family, that this is how we live. 

[00:27:35] Louise: But your father is an Egyptian, which is a very different culture. Did he at any point, um, try to express male dominance in the family with this harem of girls? 

[00:27:48] Yasmin: No, my dad is very different from the typical Egyptian male and not necessarily, what we perceive in the West as a typical macho attitude to its women. Nothing like that. He, he came to Denmark at a very young age and, um, I think just had a very modern take on, on life as such. Um, so I, I don't see that as a cultural clash of any kind between him being uh, Muslim and he, he's never been a practicing Muslim. He's a Muslim, but I, I never grew up in a religious environment.

[00:28:30] Yasmin: It was just Dad. He did have a different look. He was dark skin, compared to regular Danish guys. And, his name is Aladdin so that was very exotic compared to other Danish dads. But other than that, I didn't really feel different in that sense. 

[00:28:50] Louise: This environment of all women then empowered you and it empowered you to the extent that you went on to higher education. You became a Human Rights Lawyer. And then how is female agency a part of the work that you do now? 

[00:29:08] Yasmin: I often write about women in the Middle East, and one of my ambitions this year is to launch my own podcast series about the Middle East. I really want to debunk a lot of these stereotypes and misconceptions we all have about the Middle East. Particularly about women in the Middle East. For instance, I teach a group of women, we meet once a week and we discuss political topics from the Middle East. A couple of weeks ago we started discussing female rights in the Middle East, and some of them said, 'Oh, I just assumed that women in the Middle East weren't allowed to work.' That's just mind blowing to me because that is not the case at all. Some women stay at home, but some don't. A lot of women are highly educated in the Middle East throughout the different countries. 

[00:30:01] Louise: Just, just before you move on, can I get you to define the Middle East? What, what countries would be considered part of the Middle East? 

[00:30:08] Yasmin: That would be Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, um, Iran, even though Iran is not an Arabic country, it's Persian, it's a different ethnic group, but it's, it's, uh, still part of the Middle East. So it covers countries going from the African continent into the Asian continent, and then all the Gulf States, um, uh, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian, uh, areas in, in Israel as well. So it's a very vast geographic area and just to assume that women in that whole part of the world are not allowed to work, it's a real shame that this is a misconception of how women live in the Middle East. 

[00:31:01] Yasmin: I'd like to bring those nuances to the table that we get a better picture of women in the Middle East. There are a lot of badass women in the Middle East who fight for their rights and who have the guts to stand up and protest against authoritarian regimes and I think we need to honor them and we need to pay them the attention they deserve. 

[00:31:25] Louise: Yes, Yes. Thanks for that. In fact, we're seeing that play out in Iran right now. It's still going on the protests about the, uh, hijab, the head scarf. I, I sent you a link to a podcast, we've, we've both listened to it now and I thought it might be something you end up sharing in your class that you mentioned. I found it on the BBC Sounds and it's called The Documentary, and this particular episode is titled The Real Lives of Doha's Housewives. 

[00:31:55] Yasmin: Yes. 

[00:31:56] Louise: Which, uh, I don't know if that's a play on, um, Celebrity Housewife series on Netflix. But anyway, it was fascinating because a British. 

[00:32:07] Yasmin: She's half Egyptian as well. Yes. 

[00:32:09] Louise: British- Egyptian journalist went to Doha to interview a cross-section of women, and I suppose challenge some of the stereotypes we hold about women in the Middle East and their inability to have agency in their lives. But when she finishes up, she says that, um, despite the freedoms that come with the privilege of this oil rich country, because many of these women are incredibly privileged as a result of, of their wealth, um, male consent is still required. What's your feeling about that? And then are you able to explain male consent?

[00:32:52] Yasmin: It's really interesting in the program because she keeps on asking about male consent, and some of them get really annoyed with her and say, 'Look, it's really not an issue because more than anything it's not a legal thing it's a cultural thing that we do ask our dad for permission and we do ask our husband for his, um, not necessarily permission, but his blueprint on things we want to do.'

[00:33:16] Yasmin: For some of them, they don't see that as an infringement of their freedom of movement. They see it as a way of paying respect to their father. There are so many layers in this whole thing about male consent or guardianship um, and essentially it comes down to what kind of approach of that particular dad or husband? Is he tolerant? Well, then things are fine and then it's not a problem because that works both ways that he respects his daughter, supports her choices. Uh, and on the other hand, if this is a total dark-minded dad or husband, then that whole setup obviously doesn't work. 

[00:34:00] Yasmin: But I think the main point in, in, in the show was that I don't think women liked, I don't think they liked having that whole concept criticized. That implied to me, maybe I got it wrong that, um, they don't want their culture to be criticized. They don't want an outsider to criticize because this is part of their culture. And if it works, fine. If it doesn't, then leave it to them to deal with it. It's not for us to come as outsiders and say, 'Look, this obviously doesn't work,' because to some it does. And to others it doesn't, and then they will have to deal with that on their own terms.

[00:34:45] Yasmin: That was probably what I got out of it, that it's, it's fine for us to be critical, we can have our own ideas and, and opinions, but it doesn't always leave us in the right position to criticize these things because I think there are many layers in this discussion and one of them being, it's a cultural matter.

[00:35:07] Louise: The other thing I understood too, it was part of the family culture. Yes, part of the larger culture, but a number of the women referenced respect for the family culture and respect for the father by asking his permission. And I hadn't even thought about this Yasmin, but that's exactly what I did when I decided I wanted to study abroad. I didn't go to Mum, I went straight to Dad and I said, 'Dad, this is what I want to do.' And I knew he would be, um, equally as concerned as mom about my living and studying abroad, but it was his permission that I was seeking. It was his permission and support that he granted me because he believed, as I also said, so I'm repeating myself now, that for him higher education was the most important thing for a woman because then she would be well positioned to take care of herself and thus have agency in life. So I think I was actually hearing the same thing from these women most of whom were highly educated. That they had received the support from their father or their husband to pursue a life outside of the home. Though they also had very active home lives. They were oftentimes mothers and career women, which they were able to juggle because they had a lot of home help. In that regard, they had very privileged lives. 

[00:36:44] Louise: Now, what about you? Do you think that you had that experience in your, uh, family too, that you went to your father when you were making certain decisions about your life to just kind of check in with him, to get his approval or his permission? 

[00:36:59] Yasmin: He's a really important person in my life, but I check in with both my parents because I really enjoy getting their feedback and their thoughts on my ideas and things I love to do. I don't think they would ever say, 'Oh no, no, you shouldn't do that.' They've always both been very, very supportive. It's never been in the sense of needing my dad's consent to things more, you know, I'd love to have your support on this. Also, we are, we're quite stubborn in our family, so I think I would probably just go ahead with it.

[00:37:34] Louise: And has it been an issue for your parents, you living abroad with your family? 

[00:37:39] Yasmin: Well, for my mom, it has, uh, because she wants to see her grandchildren on a daily basis if possible. So that's an issue. But my dad thinks it's this wonderful life for us here in, in Portugal, the best possible life we could have. I think he has a different view on this because he's a migrant himself. He knows what it's like to settle abroad away from your family. That's really, um, a big part of his approach to us living abroad.

[00:38:09] Louise: Mm. Mm. Understandably. It seems like for mothers it's a little bit more difficult to let their children go. 

[00:38:15] Yasmin: Very much so. Yeah. Yeah. There's unbreakable bond apparently. 

[00:38:22] Louise: Apparently. Well, what about you? I mean your boys are still teenagers, but they're third culture kids and at some point they'll launch, they'll probably study abroad. Are you preparing for that in some way? 

[00:38:37] Yasmin: Yes. Uh, I expect them to live abroad. I expect them to be studying abroad, not in necessarily in Portugal. I had a friend, we were talking, 'Oh, what's gonna happen when the boys will leave for university.' And she said, 'Well, I won't be staying here in Portugal, I'll be going to that country wherever he's going to be studying.' And I thought that's a really dreadful idea, leave your kid alone! He doesn't want Mum going with him when he's going to university. He needs to stand on his own feet and get that sense of freedom. 

[00:39:11] Louise: Mm-hmm, that sense of agency, which is what we've been about today. Even boys need agency. 

[00:39:16] Yasmin: They certainly do. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

[00:39:20] Louise: Well this feels like a nice place to finish up, Yasmin. Uh, I wanna thank you for your time today and for suggesting switching roles. We had a very different kind of conversation and I've shared a little bit more than I normally do, which is a bit awkward. But thanks for prompting me and let's do it again. 

[00:39:38] Yasmin: I'd love to! I want to thank you, Louise, for giving me the chance to interview you. That was a real pleasure. 

[00:39:48] Louise: Thank you so much Yasmin, and we'll be in touch. 

[00:39:51] Yasmin: Bye. 

[00:39:52] Louise: Thank you for listening today. So you don’t miss future episodes, subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel @WomenWhoWalkPodcast. Also, feel free to connect with comments on Instagram @LouiseRossWriter or Writer & Podcaster, Louise Ross on Facebook, or find me on LinkedIn. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode, spread the word and tell your friends.