My Parents as Friends
I believe in living with my parents. It’s been almost two years since I came to live at home. I never meant to stay this long—not after years of boundless freedom at schools, stumbling out of cabs at four in the morning, leaving kitchen sinks filled with week-old dishes.
Coming home was meant to be a short, inexpensive stint until I passed the bar, fixed my broken bank account, and moved to the Big City. Today, at twenty-seven, long after my bank account is softly purring, I continue to live with my parents. I have come to rediscover them in ways that my teenage mind would not allow—as adults and as friends with flaws and oddities very simply their own. And sometimes, even mine.
Growing up, I remember my father as a silent, stern man—not the sort of person around whom one could laugh. As a teenager arriving in America, knowing nothing, I wanted a father who could explain the human journey. In college, when friends called home for advice, I would slump into a deep melancholy for what I did not have.
Then one night after my move back home, I overheard my father on the telephone. There was some trouble. Later, Appa shared the problem with me. Apparently my legal training had earned me some privileges in his eyes. I talked through the problem with Appa, analyzing the motives of the people involved and offering several negotiation strategies.
He listened patiently before finally admitting, “I can’t think like that. I am a simple man.”
Appa is a brilliant scientist who can deconstruct the building blocks of nature. Yet human nature is a mystery to him. That night I realized that he was simply not skilled at dealing with people, much less the turbulence of a conflicted teenager. It’s not in his nature to understand human desires.
And so, there it was—it was no one’s fault that my father held no interest in human lives while I placed great importance in them. We are at times born more sensitive, wide-eyed, and dreamy than our parents and become more compassionate, curious, and idealistic than them. Appa perhaps never expected me for a child. And I, who knew Appa as an intelligent man, had never understood that his intelligence did not cover all of my passions.
So what do I believe? I believe that coming home has saved me hours of wrestling with my angst on a shrink’s couch. It has saved me years of questioning and confusion. It has saved my friends from carrying my destructive emotional baggage. I now see my parents as people who have other relationships than just Appa and Amma, relationships that shape and define them. I now overlook their many quirks—quirks that once seemed like monumental whims directed at me and me alone. I have forgiven myself for my picked-up habits, my homegrown eccentricities.
Best of all, I now know my parents as friends: people who ask me for advice; people who need my support and understanding. And I’ve come to see my past clearer. After our move from India, my parents have become my only link to a great part of my heritage. Knowing them makes me secure in where I come from and where I’m going.
Bhavani G. Murugesan is a litigator in Sacramento, California. Every day she pauses to relish one small moment of happiness, whether it be a baby’s head bobbing over his father’s shoulder, the rustling of leaves, or a clean and empty sink at the end of the day—a sight still rare in her life.