Skip to main content

Three Truths

Over two decades ago, my parents and I went through a very traumatic life event. The worst of it lasted a couple of years but the echoes remained in our lives for much longer. Recently, we had to revisit that time and I was amazed at how differently we each have processed what happened. I have seen with relative clarity the roles we each played - my personal responsibility in the outcomes and my big mistakes. For my father, the event is an undefined block with clear input and output parameters that he correctly recognizes but he uninterested introspecting the process by which things came to pass. It is a logical approach. He has cleared to the field of outputs to focus on what matters to him. The rest is irrelevant. I am not aligned with him but I understand his position. 

Mother's way is by far the hardest for me to reconcile with. She has re-imagined just about everything to creative a narrative that absolves her of any responsibility or accounts for her contributions to what happened. In her alternately remembered version of the facts, she is far backstage of the events with not even a supporting role in defining outcomes. The truth is very far from that. Her has made the entire cast of characters except herself accountable and responsible for all that happened. 

Revisiting the event was painful on its own but with three different version of the facts to deal with even worse. For than anything, it left me feeling I don't know or understand this woman at all that is my mother. In that sense, I am saying I don't know or understand atleast one half of me. That is like having a stranger's body and soul reside in what you think is you. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...