The other night I called home and found my mother to be very distracted by some smell being emitted by the stove. “Like burning popcorn, but different somehow,” she said, as she pried open the cover of the stove to get a look inside, making it hard to hear her though all the clanking noises from metal on metal.
After I hung up, I had the same unsettled feeling I often get after a call to my parents. You see, for some reason I think I’m going to have some major connection with them now that I’m an adult. Sharing our lives as if we were friends. As this doesn’t actually happen, generally I feel dissatisfied. But why? After all, what do my parents and I ever really talk about?
Let’s see…Dad generally asks if I need money, and after I decline, we talk about the weather for a minute or two before my mom takes the phone. Mom often just tells me a lot of information about people I don’t know too well. I end up hearing more about some auntie I never met’s gallbladder surgery than I ever want to know. If the conversation doesn’t end with mom suggesting I then call this sickly auntie to wish her a speedy recovery, I consider myself lucky.
The point being, we can “talk” for thirty minutes without actually having a conversation. For some reason, lately that’s been bothering me.
Is it strange that my parents seem to know so little about my day to day? But even if they did know, I can’t imagine them ever relating to it. It reminds of when I was in 6th grade and a boy named Jason asked me out to a movie – my first date! It meant a lot to me, as it would to any budding teenage girl. I was really happy, and so nervous. When I told my mom, her reaction was less, let’s say, enthusiastic than Maggie Seaver, for example, may have contrived. After all, the word “date” was not in my mom’s vocabulary.
I know this is not an uncommon occurrence for immigrant families (Jhumpa Lahiri tells us so) that the experiences of the first-generation children verge so dramatically from those of their parents. It still is sad, though, that I can’t really ever convey to my parents feelings of concern, joy, inspiration, or even heartache in my life and have them truly understand why. And maybe they feel the same way about me.
Truth is, my parents are sweethearts and we all really care about each other and get along well. And when I don’t talk to or see them for a while, I do feel a strong urge to call or visit. Even though we don’t have relatability, we have a lot of affection. But I can’t help but long for that connection which never will be…
Oh, the smell was from ghee my mom used in cooking- it seems some of it had dripped right into the burners of the gas stove. Mystery solved.
Half way...where? 