"Be yourself, but different, damn it!"

The folly of expecting our loved ones to meet our expectations.

1.

I recently unearthed the memory of an argument I had with my mother when I was in my 20s and believed there was some point in arguing with her. I suppose I was still invested enough in the relationship to want my grievances heard and still hopeful enough that she had the capacity to hear them. (Oh, foolish youth.)

You expect me to be a different kind of daughter than who I am! is what I yelled.

It was, I thought, an obvious enough complaint, a summary judgment after years of being subjected both to her specifically voiced disappointments (namely, that I wasn’t a modestly dressed, mousy, churchgoing medical doctor or microbiologist with an equally docile and conforming Christian Indian husband) and to her favorite epithets, which she hurled at me on a regular basis, using a whiny, mournful voice that made it sound as if I were somehow victimizing her simply by being who I was. She’d tell me I was willful, disobedient, lazy, jungli (meaning “wild” or “out of control” in Gujarati), karapu (meaning “black,” but a racist term, essentially the n-word, which she used if I’d stayed out in the sun with my white friends to get “tanned”), and—when I, a fundamentally fit and actually quite beautiful young person, was in the “up” part of the idiotic yo-yo dieting cycle which she had trained me in—obese. (Like too many self-loathing mothers, she seemed to think that piling on slurs would somehow help her self-loathing daughter achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Oh, foolish womanhood.)

You expect me to be a different kind of daughter than who I am! is what I yelled at her after all those years of badgering and name-calling, and she locked eyes with me briefly and shot right back,

Well, you expect me to be a different kind of mother, don’t you?

I was stunned and could not respond, and even decades later I am sad to find myself a little stumped when I should not be. The answer here is simple: my complaint was legitimate, but hers was not. I was her child and was entitled to her unconditional love and her delight in finding out who I was meant to be. She was my mother and obligated to create the conditions for my thriving, to the best of her ability, without foisting her own neuroses, fears, and unmet narcissistic needs upon me.

These are not neutral or universal statements, I am well aware. Plenty of families, plenty of cultures, and plenty of dynastic clans throughout history operate or have operated upon the idea that children exist precisely in order to fulfill the obligations of their progenitors. Work on the family farm, inherit the family business, or accept the family crown one day. But I have come to understand that this is my deepest bedrock value and the idea I worked hardest, if not always perfectly, to enact with my own son. Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) put it succinctly. “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”¹ I believe this to be a political statement, as well; I think the world would be a much better place if human beings aimed to observe, honor, and guide their progeny without trying to control or mold them.

2.

This memory came up when I was journaling in the late afternoon this past Tuesday, just before a first date with someone I’d met on the app Hinge. After nine months of intentional and often blissful celibacy, I had decided to make a few small attempts at being out and about, without any particular goal in mind. The key to having any fun at all via dating apps is to keep your expectations extremely low and to maintain a solid sense of humor about the whole thing. Because really, in the right frame of mind, it’s all funny as hell, all these people out there—yourself included—marketing their personalities and broadcasting their desires and attempting to look alluring in their poorly lit, terribly angled, markedly nonprofessional photos.

In the right frame of mind, people’s frankness about matters like wanting a monogamous life partner ASAP, or seeking a “unicorn” playmate for discreet threesomes with their spouse of decades, or dating in a polyamorous manner with 360-degree honest disclosures until they find The One…is, it seems to me, simultaneously very modern and very quaint. There’s no cool detachment here, no fronting of nonchalance, no pretense that one is simply going to live one’s best life and then—maybe perchance while distracted by other much more immediate and important things—encountering someone you first dislike and later find you can’t live without. Nope, no meet-cute as in a rom-com: everyone’s actively looking for something with someone.

Tuesday’s “someone” happened to be nine years younger than me, had approached me by liking a picture of me and my dog, is a divorced therapist with no children, and—upon our first texts and then a long phone conversation—was an absolute blast to connect with. But he, too, is the child of a bad mother, a mother so operatically and violently abusive that my own mother seems charming by comparison.

Earlier that very day I had canceled a date with another nice guy (and fellow member of the shitty mother club) and had told him, in earnest, that I was considering deleting the app and returning to my no-dating policy in order to keep the focus on my reading and writing ambitions for 2023. So responding to the second guy made me a retroactive liar, I suppose. Something compelled me forward anyway.

The problem with instant chemistry is that it’s often a signal of too-well-matching dysfunctional family backgrounds. (There’s supposedly some science behind this, which I’ll have to explore in a more evidence-oriented post one of these days.) Before making a plan to meet, the youngish therapist and I acknowledged both the fun and the potential danger of bonding with someone over your rotten childhoods. But there’s also an undeniable comfort there. It’s as if you were standing on a train platform in a foreign country, with people rushing by speaking a language you only barely understand, and you see a person wearing a sweatshirt from your alma mater, some small Midwestern college almost nobody in the world has heard about. How could you keep from rushing toward them to say hello?

So this man and I met halfway between our towns for dinner, and although the conversation flowed easily and we laughed a lot, within an hour it was obvious to both of us that there wouldn’t be a follow-up date. Suffice it to say that we’re in very different stages of life, not just because of the years between us but because of our separate and very different long roads to recovering ourselves. Having both kept our expectations in check, it was easy to agree our first date would also be our only date, and send each other off with sincere good wishes.

I’m very glad that we met for one reason alone. I told him my newly unearthed memory of yelling at my mother about wanting a different kind of daughter, and how she had turned it around on me and accused me of the same sort of thing.

He looked straight at me and said, in no uncertain terms: No! They’re not the same thing. There’s no equivalence at all. You were right and she was wrong. She was the parent. You were not supposed to be treated as if you were on the same level. That’s similar to what my mother did to me, treated me like a boyfriend she was always angry at instead of her son, and it was just wrong. You’re not supposed to be equals with your parents. They’re responsible for your well-being, not the other way around.

The overwhelming relief I felt at that moment tells me I had been needing someone to say exactly those words for a very long time.

3.

All that said, it’s clear to me now that in my mother’s last stage of life, it has in fact become my job—as a full-grown adult now in charge of her care—to stop expecting her to be anything other than herself.

In late November when I first arrived in California, she was still in her assisted-living apartment and still seemed somewhat able to have conversations—a word I use loosely to describe the way she vigorously presses her own opinions and agenda without really hearing what the other person has to say. She asked what her grandson was studying at college. When I described my son’s courses in business leadership, sports management, media production, psychology, and writing, as well as his growing avocational interest in art museums, she immediately started complaining in typical Asian parent fashion.

Those are the easy subjects! He should be taking chemistry, math, physics…!

I felt a tightness in my chest and I almost began arguing with her. I stopped myself, went dead silent for a few minutes, and then changed the subject entirely. She barely knows my son. She chose to move to California rather than stick around on the East Coast to be near him, and then I estranged myself for seven years, and during all that time I was grateful not to have her around to interfere while I worked hard to become a much better mother than my deeply problematic role model. The fact is, in expecting such boring pro-forma things from him, my mother will never see or know what’s so uniquely wonderful about her only grandchild: his almost preternatural psychological astuteness, his ability to make new friends and keep old ones, his devious sense of humor, his capacity for independent thought. This is a 19-year-old college sophomore who, when describing his first serious girlfriend to me just a few months ago, said that what he liked best about her is her honesty and her willingness to talk about stuff, even if it’s hard stuff.

I mean: fuck chemistry, math, and physics. This kid already knows the most important things he needs to know.

4.

My lovely therapist has been saying a certain thing very often in the past two years but only recently have I stopped arguing with her in my mind between sessions.

Why have expectations? she’ll say, with a shrug and a smile.

And I’ve wanted to counter with something along the lines of, Wait, you mean, why have too high expectations, right? Or inappropriate expectations, or misplaced expectations, or untimely and onerous expectations, or… right?

No, she says it without any such qualification. Why have expectations? Just those three words.

I interpret it as a simple restatement of the wisdom of Eastern philosophies—since expectations are just desires, and desire is the root of all suffering—but it’s also related to one of the few useful ideas I’ve retained from my churchly upbringing. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Holy crap! You read that right! Your favorite outspoken atheist just threw a little Jesus at you! King James version at that! Don’t worry, it won’t happen too often.) They aren’t exactly the same idea, of course, but they operate in a similar fashion, reminding us to stop ourselves before asking too much from others, so as not to waste time feeling hurt and disappointed, holding grudges, or (I suppose) wallowing too long in unresolved trauma. (Physician’s daughter, heal thyself.)

I made a choice two years ago to end my marriage because I could neither expect my husband to be someone other than he is nor to give me things he isn’t able or willing to give. I also realized I couldn’t expect myself to stop wanting and even needing those very things. After my separation, I had to come to terms with two very different romantic disappointments. The first person offered some deeply welcome gifts of intellectual friendship, charming flirtation, post-divorce empathy, meaningful physical attention, and even some hints of genuine love, but could not follow those items up with timely, honest disclosures or the bravery to face minor conflicts rather than flee them. (Apparently, he could take a few lessons from my son’s girlfriend.) The second person was a zen master of forthright and truthful communication, and completely unafraid of discussing emotional matters, but he never developed the same level of ardor and attachment as I’d begun to feel for him.

In each case, I spent a lot of time in the aftermath wondering if I could have said or done something different to create a different outcome—if I could have curtailed my expectations to keep things going longer, or changed their expectations so I could somehow fit them better. But that’s silly and I know it. People do what they do and choose what they choose. Maybe those guys didn’t live up to my hopes for them or, in each case, my hopes for “us”—but then again…obviously neither did I live up to theirs.

Forgiveness for us all. Gratitude for every happy and connected moment but also for the lessons embedded in the disconnections. Let us be us. We want what we want, and we’re each so sure of it…but then again, we really have no idea what we’re doing.

I suppose we are just the vessels of Life’s longing for itself.

But—damn it—I really wish Life could be as clear and intentional as the people on the dating apps, and just come right out and tell us what It expects from us, and what we can and can’t expect from It.

(Oh, foolish humanity.)

1. “On Children” by Kahlil Gibran