“Love was dashed in Mother’s demands to eat, sometimes scolding.
Other times, threatening with a rolling pin or spice jar.
It could’ve easily been mistaken for anger.
But I was learning her language.”
Sometimes love is silent, sometimes it screams. Sometimes it emerges even despite pain, crude but pure.
– From my memoir, Where the Tiger Dwells, on the ways love speaks despite obstacles of class, caste & racism.
Rules do not always mean safety. In fact, they can cause the very harm we’re trying to prevent. To be told to be dutiful provides boundaries, but do they exist to keep us safe or to lock us in and be more vulnerable to danger? Duty is a heavy word, sometimes a powerful thing that fills our hearts with honor and reinforces a sense of community. It is a parent’s duty to care for their child. Yet, this same word can then be used to imprison a woman to fulfill her wifely duties.
When raised in duty, it is difficult to know if it is the elixir or the poison. People just automatically follow what they’re taught. But somewhere along the way, there’s a separation between what we’re told and what we want. When these two are misaligned but we’re forced to comply, duty is becoming something unhealthy. It’s important to know the difference. Otherwise, we can be pushed into doing things we may not feel are the best for us. We can integrate this forced way of seeing the world and then require that others comply with these same controlling views.
You might sometimes wonder how whole groups of people agree with some scary notion of how things should be. A classic example is Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale. A society of people thought that controlling girls and women should become the norm. This society believed that it is a higher power’s will for females to be stripped of power and be used for whatever their delusions thought necessary.
This is why we must stay vigilant in understanding the difference between duty and trauma. The definition of a word, a concept, a law, how a human being is labeled, should not be taken lightly. Protection of self means protection of others.
What would you share if you could bare to? What would you write if you had the courage to tell your parents about all the sadness, the rage, the confusion, the joy? It doesn’t matter if they’re close by, whether you have a loving relationship, or a contentious or estranged one. Even if they’ve passed on, there will always be more to say. You may be wondering though, where you should even begin. With feelings colliding into one another like, it could feel paralyzing.
It would help to start by identifying the emotions you feel. What would you want to tell them based on that? You can start small. You can start with gratitude. But you can also start with anger. It’s about where you are in your relationship. You can travel through one set of feelings to another very contradictory one, depending on how you truly feel.
I’ll be doing a guided series on writing letters to our parents, where I’ll prompt questions that help get to a place of increased clarity. Because when it comes to parents, it’s usually muddied with all the paradoxical feelings, in big waves, and sometimes emotions subconsciously hidden we didn’t even realize until pen meets paper.
Contact me for more info on my letter writing gathering. And let me know if you’ve ever written a letter to your parents. Did you give it to them or keep it? Maybe you burnt it, tore it up or hid it. Regardless, it’s a courageous thing to do and it can be a gift to yourself whether shared or not.
Take good care.
Cultural trauma has harmed people deeply, overpowering how we operate, whether by society’s standards or family expectations, often an overlap of both. Here are some ways to understand whether it’s something that impacts you. If so, examine it so you can begin to heal.
Learn where the boundaries are between cultural demands and what you authentically seek out of life. It’s healthy to recognize these differences. It leads to the ability to say no. It leads to finding a sense of self after living under restrictive cultural mandates that may have been a barrier to peace, joy and the freedom to connect with ourselves. It leads to embracing the parts of culture that define us and separate from the ones that are enforced upon us.
Children in immigrant families often don’t have language to identify what we’re experiencing. Is it spankings or beatings, discipline or trauma? Much of what happens behind closed doors is normalized because it has gone on for generations. However, that doesn’t make it alright. Not everything can be included under the umbrella of culture.
When we don’t know what to call something, we also don’t know how it affects us. If it’s just what happens, we tend to minimize how painful it is. But calling it out for what it is gives it the proper attention and weight. To name something means to identify and examine it, to possibly change it or keep it the same. Naming ultimately helps us see how we see ourselves.
An article by Sunil Noronha powerfully describes the harm endured by a child who is beaten under the guise of discipline: Spare the child, stash the rod, it’s time to make your minds broad
Name what you feel. It holds power.
Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash
I was an Indian girl whose conservative Christian parents were giddily arranging my marriage while I became faint at the thought of telling them I was pregnant by my secret American boyfriend.
This is my elevator pitch, one funky little sentence that took almost as long to write as the book itself. I had to conjure it up, press it down and have it sizzle and simmer to near surgical precision. I had to make it gripping, informative, fast-moving. And I knew, even if no one else said it in all the articles about proposal writing I pored through, it had to be the rawest thing I wrote.
It was about throwing everyone, including myself, under the bus. It was a loaded nutshell. It was the one place I couldn’t mask the big stuff, no matter how poetically and metaphorically I wrote the book.
I tried to protect them, my parents, who were scared immigrants in an unkind place. No one told them about the oppressive systems that were snugly in place and under the guise of, oh this is just how things are in America. However, these systems kept them from their dreams and dismissed their efforts. One look at their medium brown skin, their ethnic clothes, and their molasses thick accents, and they were quickly thrown aside.
All that came streaming down onto me like a waterfall of sorrow pooling into a raging sea. It became a melancholy childhood cloaked in conforming, the reckless teenage years and the making of generational immigrant trauma. It poured into me and clashed, because my American-infused Indian customs didn’t align with their rigid Indian rules.
And awesome for me, I got to write about all of it. I say this with only slight sarcasm, because it has been one of the most painfully satisfying things I’ve done. But it sure was hard. Ironically too, the difficult part was arriving at the place of being the realest I could possibly be with myself. Once there, it didn’t feel so torturous anymore. It felt like freedom. It felt a little like delusion too, like telling myself that my parents and whoever else would understand my perspective. I told myself they would have empathy for my telling of what we all remember, likely in different ways sometimes.
And to do that, I had to understand what the core of the story was. I had to muddle through the memories, eek through the emotions, sift through what didn’t need telling and come to a place of knowing where the heart of the story lived.
And that led me to the elevator pitch, a kinda run on sentence that captured the root and all the real of my story. But I guess that’s memoir. It’s keeps running on, digs up those memories in the corners of our minds and catapults them into deeper wells of recollections, pain and maybe even a little joy.
I will listen to my body and mind, and honor the signals they reveal.
If I’m tired, I will rest.
If I’m anxious, I will ground.
If I’m sad, I won’t try to hide it.
I know that suppressing what I feel will take too much of a toll on me.
I deserve to express my needs.
No matter how loving you may be to some people, they may have difficulty receiving it. It may even be your own parents or partner. Know that it isn’t your fault. It’s the pain they’re carrying. It’s their choice to work toward healing. You can keep loving them but you’re not responsible for their reactions.
Your parents may also have difficulty identifying what it is. But then, when you think about it, they left everything they knew, and likely most everyone they knew, to find opportunity. That was their main goal. Opportunity. And really it can be translated to mean deep sacrifice, even sacrifice of connecting with themselves.
So everything else takes second place. I often wonder if my parents had time to grieve. But I think I know the answer. Many had little time to pause, breathe, rest, in the ways they deserved. And may have unintentionally passed the heartache down to their children. Generational patterns, modeling, trauma, we can’t always tangibly place it, because it sits in our bones. But you know it’s there.
Work on identifying the ways you also hold a sadness, maybe for them, for yourself, for both. Take it, examine it, try to know it so you can release it. Allow it to stop here.
If you have wounds from childhood that continue to come up and you’re not sure how to address them, write down these reflections to explore what you needed back then, and how those needs have been carried into adulthood.
After you’ve reflected, and maybe written some thoughts on them, make sure to take care of your current self. Going back into childhood and exploring the hurt can feel heavy. So take a walk, a nap, talk to someone you trust, or whatever soothes your soul.
