Before the pandemic, the distances separating me from my cross-continental family seemed so small. But this freedom was never a birthright, as previous generations of my family knew all too well.
On November 15, 2012, I woke up to discover that my partner had died while we slept. He was forty. I was thirty-seven. Our kids were three and six. The cause would later be identified as an undiagnosed heart condition, but in the hours right after his death, I had no idea what had happened. I remember the seemingly endless procession of strangers who crowded into our small Brooklyn apartment that day. EMTs. Two incredibly young cops. A pair of detectives. The city’s medical examiner. All asked the same things. Later I realized that most of their queries were designed to clear me of any wrongdoing before they allowed me and my children to leave the apartment and decamp to my aunt and uncle’s home in the suburbs. But at the time I just couldn’t figure out why I had to keep repeating myself, and why—when I had called 911 at 7 a.m.—my children and I were required to remain in the apartment with my partner’s lifeless body still on our couch late into the afternoon.
Within thirty-six hours, my parents and my two brothers arrived from my hometown, Vancouver. Over the next few days, other family and friends showed up as well. I was shocked by the number of people who flew in from out of town for the funeral. “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far,” I kept saying.
A year and a half later, I was the one making a rushed trip across the continent. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier. After a period of remission, the cancer had returned, and my mother was dying. I booked a flight to see her one last time. Days later my father called to tell me her condition was deteriorating faster than expected, and I hurriedly bumped up the arrival date, changing my ticket to the next day. When my plane landed, I saw my father standing outside baggage claim, and I knew I was too late. At her funeral, I found myself uttering a familiar refrain to others who had traveled: “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far.”
That mobility—that ability to come from so far—was something I took for granted before the global pandemic closed borders and sheltered us in place. Continue reading Distance from Home→
After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
Today’s stay-at-home dads have little in common with Mr. Mom. Responsible, nurturing, and home by choice, they are eager to prove that—aside from the breastfeeding—they can do whatever a woman can.
Like many of today’s loud-and-proud stay-at-home dads, R.C. Liley has no qualms about saying he is good at running a household—something he’s done since the beginning of his marriage to his wife Kelley. After their daughter Avery was born, Liley chose to put a hold on his career as an accountant in order to care for her.
“W
e’re gonna be on this airplane,” R. C. Liley says, showing his two-year-old daughter a pink, two-seater toy plane. Twenty-nine, Liley is tall and fit and towers over Avery, a toddler in a light-green T-shirt with the words “Never Mess.” “We’re gonna start from the ground, and w-o-o-o-o-sh!” he says, mimicking the sound of the jet engines as he lifts the plane higher and higher.
Liley ends his demonstration. “Okay, Avery, that’s an airplane,” he says. “We’re gonna fly on it—are we gonna be good?”
“Yes,” Avery says, a bit hesitant, her dimples sinking into her cheeks as she smiles.
Liley is a stay-at-home dad. He looks after Avery when his wife Kelley, Avery’s mother, is working at the finance department of a large corporation. Unlike some stay-at-home dads, who feel awkward about taking on a role that many people still consider feminine, Liley is open about being the primary caretaker for his child—so open, in fact, that he regularly shares his experiences on his blog.
Since 1989, the number of stay-at-home dads, or SAHDs, has nearly doubled, according to the Pew Research Center. About two million fathers in America now care for children younger than eighteen while not working outside the home. They account for 16 percent of at-home parents. Likewise, across Europe and even in more traditional cultures around the world, men who take on this role are increasingly visible.
After the birth of his daughter Adeline, Dustin Davis became a “work-at-home dad”—picking up his design career after a layoff by doing freelance work, but making his daughter his chief priority.
In the United States, many men who lost their jobs during the recession wound up staying at home with their kids, at least temporarily. For a growing number of men, however, their choice to become stay-at-home dads is actually that—a choice. Surveys support this view that fathers’ attitudes are changing. For example, just 5 percent of stay-at-home dads in 1989 said that the main reason they were home was to care for their home or family; today, 21 percent do.
These fathers have little in common with Jack Butler, the hapless stay-at-home dad played by Michael Keaton in the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom—still the cultural reference many people turn to when thinking of men at work at home. Forced to care for his kids after being sacked, Butler seemed bent on wreaking havoc in the house.
Today’s more gender-equal generation of stay-at-home dads shoulder domestic tasks more responsibly. For his part, Liley grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Texas. He studied finance and got a well-paying job as an accountant at a mutual fund. But in 2013, he decided to quit his job and care for Avery. “My wife always made more,” he says. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” Staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”
But as much as attitudes about parenting have changed, stay-at-home dads still find themselves facing skepticism and derision, often subtle in form—the ways that stay-at-home moms steer clear of them at the playground, or the media portrays them as clueless and dumb, or friends and family drop hints that what they’re doing is strange.
“Being the man, it sounded crazy for me to quit my job,” says Matt Dudzinski, thirty-six, a former interior designer for an architectural firm in Detroit who now cares for his two daughters, six and three. He and his wife Aya, a trim engineer for an automotive company, had each thought—to themselves—that having Dad at home would work best for them as a couple. But they avoided talking about it. “We were both worried about being judged—her, for wanting to keep her career while being a mother, and me, for not being a breadwinning man.”
Then Dudzinski was laid off. “The arrangement we both knew we wanted, but were afraid to voice, was decided for us.”
“My daughter will get more physical growing up with me,” Liley says. “She will get more practical, more assertive.”
In certain parts of the world, men (and women) have an easier time staying at home with their kids. For more than two decades, Canada has granted paid leave to fathers who want to be the primary caretakers of their children. In Japan, a country known for its stark gender divide, the law nonetheless requires employers to give their workers—men and women—time off after the birth of a child. In Sweden, one of the most SAHD-friendly countries, both moms and dads can receive government benefits for up to 480 days if they choose to care for their kids at home.
In America and Australia, there is much less in the way of support. Stay-at-home dads have fewer role models or resources to help them, and when government policies do exist to assist families with young children, they tend to treat these men as second-class parents.
Regardless of what their governments do, however, broad economic and cultural shifts seem to be pushing new dads in all these countries to consider what their own fathers would not.
In the United States, the number of stay-at-home dads peaked at 2.2 million in 2010, but then fell slightly once the economy picked up. Clearly, household decisions about who does what have much to do with the state of a family’s finances: in an uncertain economy, men who wouldn’t otherwise stay home are willing to do so when it seems practical. The massive unemployment of the economic downturn is only part of this story, though. Years after the official end of the recession, the typical American household makes less income, adjusted for inflation, than it did in 2007. Having a parent stay at home sometimes makes more sense than paying for a nanny or daycare—and now that women often make more than their partners, the sensible choice in some cases is for the dad, not the mom, to stay home.
Changing values may also be drawing men out of the workplace and into the home. Today, parenting is seen as both the cause and solution to a wide variety of social ills, says writer and sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, while “work is not as important as it used to be for one’s identity and purpose.” As work inside the home becomes, as Jenkins puts it, “professionalized,” more men may think of it a worthy life calling.
In turn, some of today’s new fathers may be reacting to what they think their own dads got wrong. GenXers and millennials, who grew up at a time when dual-income families were the norm, are already more comfortable with the idea of a woman breadwinner. Like every generation before them, they are finding their own ways to rebel—and in the case of the stay-at-home dads among them, this may involve rejecting their fathers’ workaholic schedules, which left little time for children. “I think a lot of people from my generation grew up without dads, or without good dads, and we are trying to change that—showing that we can be great dads,” says Josh Hardt, twenty-eight, a stay-at-home dad in Durham, North Carolina.
For his part, Hardt never felt close to his biological father, he says. After he moved away from home, he did find a fatherly role model in his stepdad, who was a more hands-on parent. Now that he’s a father himself, Hardt works on a freelance basis as a filmmaker but focuses on caring for his two-year-old daughter. His wife works as a retail store manager and provides most of the family’s income.
Hardt enjoys his role at home. The idea of a woman supporting a man financially isn’t that far a cultural leap for someone young like him, but Hardt knows that others—especially the older generation—think otherwise. “They come from a different time, so I understand why it’s hard to understand,” he says.
Stay-at-home dad Paul Schwartz with his wife Amy Wilson and son Malcolm. “I felt like a social movement of my own when I quit my lawyer’s job to stay at home with my son,” he says. Photo by Catherine O’Hara
If capable stay-at-home dads like Hardt are growing in numbers, though, you wouldn’t know it by watching TV. From Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson, from Al Bundy to Alan Harper, the most popular on-screen dads of the past several decades have been roundly portrayed as doofuses. And the stay-at-home dads among them have not been spared the low expectations that both men and women have concerning male parenting skills. Even when TV dads are praised for being practically minded problem solvers in the home, the compliments are woefully backhanded—in a controversial 2011 detergent commercial, for instance, the savvy stay-at-home dad has to qualify his competence by calling himself a “dad-mom.”
Paul Schwartz knows the stereotype of the bumbling dad well: he was asked to play one on TV. Schwartz, a forty-two-year-old former labor lawyer, has gained a large following on his blog, which chronicles his adventures as a stay-at-home dad in Paris. A few months ago, a cable channel asked him if he wanted to be in a reality show they were developing about stay-at-home dads. The idea was interesting, but in the end Schwartz backed out. “They insisted that we act like morons,” he says.
Perhaps the negative portrayals of stay-at-home dads in the media aren’t so surprising, though, given how prevalent these stereotypes are in the public at large. It needs to be stressed that perceptions of stay-at-home dads tend to be much more hostile outside of America and Europe: in China, SAHDs often hide their status, fearing humiliation, and in many Muslim nations, such a role for men is considered religiously subversive. Nevertheless, large numbers of people in rich Western countries continue to have a lopsided view of who should be taking care of the kids. In a 2013 Pew survey, for instance, 51 percent of Americans said that children are better off if their mothers are home, while only 8 percent said the same of fathers.
Stay-at-home dads are regularly reminded that other people see them as, at best, an oddity. “I usually get one of two responses when people ask what I do for a living,” Dudzinski, the stay-at-home dad from Detroit, writes in an email. “‘Oh, that’s great’ (with a straight face, changes subject and stops talking to me). Or: ‘That’s awesome! If I didn’t have to work, I’d totally stay home all day!’ (assuming I watch TV and order pizza every day).”
Schwartz has stayed at home with his son Malcolm for a decade, but he still gets his share of clueless and patronizing questions from people he meets—inquiries along the lines of, “How does it work? Do you do laundry, too?” “Most are a bit shocked to learn that I have been a stay-at-home parent for all of Malcolm’s life,” Schwartz says. At PTA events, parent gatherings, and playdates, Schwartz is still frequently the only man in the room. “I don’t have a problem with it, although it occasionally means that my sense of humor doesn’t go over well.”
Liley with his wife Kelley and daughter Avery. “My wife always made more,” says Liley. “I was already the one doing the cooking and the rest of the household.” But staying home with Avery wasn’t something Liley felt forced into. Quite the contrary, he says—“I was counting down the days till I became a SAHD.”
Schwartz and his family used to live in San Francisco. After Malcolm was born, he quit his job as a lawyer to take care of him. Then, in 2013, an international software company offered his wife Amy an executive position in Paris. She decided to take the job, and the family relocated overseas. Once in Paris, Schwartz immediately set to work establishing a new support network for Malcolm. He reached out to a local moms’ group about joining—only to learn that he, as a man, wasn’t invited.
When he did meet other stay-at-home parents, their interactions were “a bit weird,” he says. At a coffee for parents new to Paris, the group talked for half an hour about breast feeding, vaginal births versus C-sections, and similar topics. “You’d think that sitting around with a bunch of women talking about their intimate body parts would be terribly exciting, but to tell you the truth, I was bored.” To find more parents he could relate to, Schwartz eventually turned to the SAHD networks that have sprouted up around the globe in recent years. The people he’s met in this virtually connected community have been an important source of support, he says.
There is some irony to the fact that stay-at-home-moms can be some of the least understanding people whom SAHDs encounter. One obvious reason for the distance these women keep is apprehensiveness about sexual tensions—fears, for instance, that SAHDs must get lonely and want to hit on them. “Women are afraid they are forming a relationship that’s more [than] a friendship, so they don’t want any part of that,’” says Michelle P. Maidenberg, president and clinical director of Westchester Group Works, a community center in New York focused on group therapy.
The awkwardness, however, may have to do with more than just unwanted sexual attention. Women may see stay-at-home dads as threats—interlopers in a domestic sphere they thought was theirs alone, Maidenberg says. Or, they may see the SAHD as a sign of their own inferiority. The modern woman faces a daunting work-life balancing act: the need to juggle a thriving career and a thriving family. Meeting a stay-at-home dad, then, might raise some unsettling questions about how others have succeeded where she has failed—questions like, “Who is the high-powered female married to this man? How incredibly successful and rich is she that she has her husband at home?”
There is a joke going around his circles, Schwartz says. “The new status symbols for women are driving a hybrid car, and having a stay-at-home-dad for a spouse.”
During the day, Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home while his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency.
Among other things, skepticism about stay-at-home dads is rooted in the widespread view that women are just more caring and empathetic than men, and thus better suited to be caregivers. Science backs that view up—though the degree to which it does, and the degree to which any gender difference is due to nature or nurture, are hotly contested.
Women tend to have higher levels of activity in their mirror neurons, brain cells linked to the workings of empathy. But scientists disagree whether empathy is determined by mirror neurons alone. Furthermore, research finds that these mirrors neurons can be altered through simple and brief training tasks. This suggests that empathy is not impervious to the power of culture, and that the gender differences we see may be due, at least in part, to the way children are socialized, not their innate traits. Indeed, studies of infant boys and girls find that boys are equally sensitive and attentive to other people at this early stage in their development.
What happens, then, when men care for their kids at home? Not surprisingly, studies find that it is a good idea for fathers to get involved, generally speaking, in their children’s lives. For example, one British study gathered a sample of 11,000 adults and asked their mothers how often the children’s fathers had read to them, gone out with them, and otherwise spent time with them during their childhoods. The researchers found that, on average, adults whose fathers had been more involved when they were growing up had higher IQs, were more sociable, and enjoyed a healthier sense of self. Perhaps being raised by the most involved kind of father—a stay-at-home dad—can lead to even more benefits for children’s sense of self-worth.
That is a hypothesis that researchers are evaluating, says Dr. Michael B. Donner, president of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Another is that men who care for their kids have personality traits that distinguish them from other men. For instance, there is anecdotal evidence that stay-at-home dads are more connected to, and comfortable with, their feminine side, Donner says. (For their part, many stay-at-home dads delight in the idea they are different: they want to show other people—especially their own children—that masculinity is also about compassion and nurturing, they told me.)
As interesting as this research can be, Donner is quick to add that the debate over gender differences can obscure the larger point: children just need supportive parents. “It’s not about gender or testosterone levels, or who nurtures or challenges. It is about feeling safe and secure in your parents’ hands, and these properties have no gender.” The bottom line is that children raised in nurturing environments exude confidence when they become adults, he says. “Two can play at that game, moms or dads.”
Don’t worry, she’s not actually driving the car.
Dustin Davis has spent the last few years proving just how nurturing a dad can be. In 2013, Davis was laid off from his job as a designer. When his daughter Adeline was born two years ago, he decided he would use the opportunity to become—as he puts it on his personal blog—a “work-from-home dad.” During the day, his wife Jessica works as a designer at a marketing agency, while Davis cares for Adeline in their St. Louis home.
Davis, thirty-three, is as manly as you can get, as evidenced by his impressive ZZ Top beard. But like any stay-at-home parent, he revels in the milestones he’s been able to see first-hand—the other day, it was the five steps Adeline took, in a moment of particularly good coordination. Like many stay-at-home dads (and for that matter, like many stay-at-home moms), he has a career he continues to pursue. But now he is a freelancer working part-time from home, and his chief priority, he says, is Adeline.
“While I cannot breastfeed a child, I can do everything else a woman does. I can be nurturing and loving. I can raise a child.”
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
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A note inscribed in the margin of an ancient book connected me, across an ocean and a century, to a fateful decision.
Peter M. Nardi
The Church of S. Giovanni Battista in Tiedoli.
The musty aroma of mushrooms was everywhere. It was the Fiera del Fungo, a festival of porcini mushrooms held every year in the northern mountain town of Borgo Val di Taro, Italy, and I was here sightseeing with two colleagues of mine. What had lured us was the mushrooms, creatively incorporated into dishes of all kinds—from soup to gelato. But what that smell evoked in me was memories from an ocean away, of my childhood in the Bronx and the times when my grandparents, immigrants from Italy, would excitedly open a package of funghi from the “old country.”
That was my real reason for visiting Italy. I wanted to see the part of the country where my grandparents used to live. The college where I teach happens to have a study-abroad program in the nearby city of Parma, and in 2005, I flew out there and met up with two of the program’s directors. One morning, we drove out to the festival in Borgo Val di Taro, taking a few hours to indulge in the town’s more famous dishes. Then we decided to head into Tiedoli.
My grandfather Pietro had grown up there. A small village nestled on the edge of the Apennines mountains, Tiedoli was not even on our Google map. We drove up a winding road until we came across a tiny, barely legible sign that reassured us we were headed in the right direction. As we drove into Tiedoli, I could make out the double steeples of a church—by far the largest building among the village’s smattering of houses and farms.
I wondered if the church had any records of my grandfather. We walked over to the building, an imposing stone structure topped by a statue of John the Baptist. A priest emerged from the front doors just as we arrived. I asked him if there were documents dating back to the 1880s. He laughed. Their records went back to the 1700s, he said.
The priest quickly found a book with baptismal notices from 1886, the year my grandfather was born. He slowly turned the pages, folio-sized sheets filled with handwritten paragraphs of names, dates, and family information. All of a sudden my grandfather’s name jumped out. There it was, in a baptismal announcement in Latin.
The priest confessed he could not read Latin—“O tempora! O mores!” I wanted to exclaim—but I assured him that between his Italian and my four years of high school Latin, we could probably stumble through the paragraph.
Although we have different middle names, my grandfather, my father, and I share the first name Peter, or Pietro. The name, which means “rock,” goes back to the founding of the Roman church. My grandfather would sometimes remind me that June 29 was our name day—the feast of St. Peter.
Standing in front of a house in Tiedoli and a sign with the village’s name.
I have always admired my grandfather. He left Tiedoli to join the carabinieri at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when members of the national police force looked not unlike the figure stamped on the old Galliano liqueur bottle. He was stationed in Rome, and there he learned about the cosmopolitan world outside the farm country where he had grown up.
When he was in his mid-twenties, Pietro left Italy to seek a new life in America. Many decades later, he told me stories from those early years. After passing through Ellis Island, he looked for work in New York. Signs in store windows told Italians not to bother applying for jobs. But my grandfather would not be discouraged. His first gig was sweeping up in a burlesque house, where the pay amounted to whatever coins had been tossed at the dancing girls and left on the floor. Eventually, he worked his way up to becoming the chief room-service waiter at the prestigious Hotel St. Regis, where he served Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, and the silent film star Nita Naldi.
Pietro met my grandmother Celestina in New York’s ethnic neighborhood for northern Italians—what is now the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. As it turned out, she had grown up in a small hill town just twenty miles from Tiedoli. They were married for fifty-two years before she died. He lived to the age of eighty-nine, remaining to the end a smart, self-educated man who loved to read the newspapers.
When my grandfather died in 1975, I was in my late twenties. I realized then how fortunate I’d been to be able to ask him some of the questions I wished I had brought up with my other grandparents before they died.
My grandfather’s baptismal notice.
According to my grandfather’s August 10 entry in the church’s baptismal records, he had been born the day before, on August 9. The names of his parents—my great-grandparents—were also listed. The entry noted that his father was an orphan with no parents identified. (Back then, these words could have meant that the parents had died, or that the child had been abandoned for being illegitimate.) My grandfather had once told me that it would be difficult to trace our family tree because of his father’s unknown lineage. He often joked about being a possible descendant of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born about fifty miles away, near Busseto, around the same time as my great-grandfather was.
As we were about to close the folio, I noticed a note in the margin next to my grandfather’s entry. The words were written in a different handwriting and ink, and in Italian, not Latin. Went to America 1913, it read.
That’s when the operatic tears started to flow. In those four words lay a major decision in my grandfather’s life. The path he had chosen had taken me, almost a century later, down the road to this village, this church, and this baptismal notice. It had taken my family to another country and another way of life.
In that overwhelming moment, a half-sentence note in the margin connected me to something much larger than myself.
Peter Nardi is a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitzer College. He previously wrote a column for Pacific Standard on critical thinking and has written numerous academic publications on the role of friendship in men’s lives.Site
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May in Los Angeles is breathtaking. I know this because it’s all people talk about when the city explodes in Technicolor and flowers rip open. Everything is lush and living, or so they say. I live in Los Angeles too, but I don’t see it the same way. Not anymore. The sunshine is harsh. The colors unkind.
When I walk to the corner liquor store with my sunglasses on and hoodie pulled up, hoping to be left alone, neighbors still yell out, “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I smile politely, nod. Always polite.
I stood on this same street four years ago, a few days before Mother’s Day. It was early in the morning, around 3 a.m., and I was on the phone with a steely 911 operator, wondering why she was being so cold to me. I realize now it was probably better that way, but in those moments I hated her. I remember saying, “This doesn’t feel real. This feels like a movie. Is this real?” There was silence on the other end of the line.
As the ambulance turned onto my street, I sucked in air like someone drowning. There were no sirens. No flashing lights. I wanted to see the EMTs rushed and sweaty. I wanted adrenaline. But they were calm and slow-moving.
It was my fault. I’d already told the 911 operator I knew my mom was dead.
During the month of May, I will give myself permission to self-destruct. I will drink more than I should. I will sleep more than I should. I will want to do things I’m not wired to do. Sometimes I will. Mostly I won’t.
I will spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Jumbo’s Clown Room in Hollywood, that dark little strip club that has the power to turn my brain off. I will think about sipping double Crowns and mindlessly throwing crumpled bills onto the stage. I will think about the women and how I want to make eye contact with them in a way I’m usually not capable of. I will think about all the hours of work I need to put in to make a trip to Jumbo’s a reality. It will exhaust me and I will go back to bed.
I broke up more fistfights in my family home than I can count, and I never threw a punch. But this month, there will be days when I wish someone would dare to say something about my dead mom. I will fantasize about how that first punch would feel. And I will think about what my dad said after the EMTs confirmed that my grey-faced mother was dead and probably had been for hours. In front of these men we did not know, he said, “We didn’t even care about her.” It took everything in me not to jump across the bed and murder him.
Mostly, I will search for that hollowed-out feeling I get from Xanax on those days when the anxiety feels like it’s going to burst my heart. That sensation of floating unwittingly through my day, serene and untouchable—not sobbing in a grocery-store bathroom or sitting on the curb in an unfamiliar neighborhood trying like hell to steady my breathing and stop the tears so that I don’t have to deal with a stranger asking, “Are you okay?”
Last May, I lost my mind. Every day, I fought the urge to lie down in the spot where my mother’s body lay for hours before the coroner came. I went on long, meandering walks, listening to the same Perfume Genius album over and over again. (A word of advice: Do not have a soundtrack for your mental collapse. You will never be able to listen to those songs again without being snapped back into that headspace.) I tore apart a pink Bic razor the way I used to in high school. Those flimsy things do an impressive amount of damage. As I watched the blood rise to the surface of my forearm, I thought, “I have no idea why I’m doing this.”
This May, I don’t know what will happen. But I know there will be days when she is all I think about.
Four years ago, I bought my mom a pair of turquoise earrings for Mother’s Day. I had found them at a street fair. My dad and uncle and I had tried to talk my mom into going with us, but at that point she only left the house for doctor’s appointments.
So we left her behind and talked shit about her at the fair. We sat on a green bench on Third Street, the sun beating down on us, the smell of roses everywhere, and talked about forcing her to go on walks, forcing her to quit smoking, forcing her to get it together.
At the fair that day, I took pictures of my dad and uncle beaming, standing in front of glorious restored cars from the 1950s that shined Larkspur Blue and Goddess Gold.
When I look at those photos now, I think about how my mom at that moment had less than twenty-four hours to live. I look at every picture taken before her death the same way. My favorite picture of us smiling with our big, bright eyes? We only had twenty-two years left together. Those pictures from her birthday in 2009, those pictures of her hanging ornaments on the tree, those pictures of her looking dazed in the background as my nieces danced around the living room? She would have less than 365 days left. She didn’t know it. Or maybe she did.
I write this on the anniversary of her death. It’s a beautiful May day. When I walk out my front door, I actually hear birds chirping. The smell of honeysuckle and orange blossoms swirls around. All this afternoon, my dad and uncle have tried to talk me into going to a street fair, the same fair where I bought my mom those Mother’s Day earrings that I would later bury with her.
I was going to give her those earrings. I was going to cook her favorite meal, those bloody steaks she loved so much. I was going to get her pink roses, the kind she bought me on my birthday. I was going to, I was going to, I was going to. But I never got to.
At the height of my teenage apathy, my mom made me squeal with delight by smuggling a kitten into our home in a cardboard box she’d found at work. She burst into my bedroom excitedly and shoved the box toward me. When I saw its tiny, grey nose and bright, yellow eyes, I fell in love just like my mom.
My dad, however, had a strict “no pets” policy. Caring for a cat would cost too much money, he said. He and my mom already struggled to afford food. For days, my parents fought over the kitten while I held out hope I could have this one little, good thing in a house that all too often felt devoid of good things.
Shockingly, my mom won the fight. I was given the task of naming the kitten. I chose “Cindy,” sort of as a joke to make my best friend Cindy laugh. That was the cat’s name until a year later when she gave birth to a litter of kittens in a cupboard in my parents’ house. We kept one of the kittens, Jacky, and gave the rest away. Overnight, Cindy became “Mama.”
When I talk with friends who aren’t “animal people,” it’s difficult to articulate just how big a part of your family a pet becomes. For thirteen years, I knew I could walk into my parents’ living room — no matter how unpleasant that experience could sometimes be — and there Mama would be. She would sit on my lap, rub her face against mine, and purr. If I spoke to her, she’d meow in response to everything I said.
Mama helped my mom to cope, too, during some hard times. Ten years ago, my mom was laid off. She had worked for over two decades as a janitor at a hospital. It was the only job she’d ever known.
After she was let go, my mom’s world became very small. Once a woman who had refused to leave the house without a face full of makeup, long nails painted bright red, and a cloud of perfume around her, my mom stopped caring about her appearance. She stopped leaving the house. She stopped talking. She stopped getting dressed. Her life stopped.
I thought she was horribly depressed — and I’m sure that was part of it, but physically, she was also broken. I made doctor’s appointments for her and refilled her prescriptions. I wrote her doctors pretending to be her, hoping they could tell me what exactly was ailing her. It all fell flat. She’d spend her days sitting on the edge of her bed, watching TV and chain-smoking, seemingly unconcerned about the state of her life.
Mama, who was without a doubt my mom’s cat, sat beside her. Or on top of her. Or somewhere on the bed with her. She was always near.
Three years ago, my mom died. The night before, I cried for hours, knowing in my gut that something was very wrong. I called my older brother and told him I needed help. I didn’t know what to do, I said. I was panicking, and we were losing our mom.
My brother was wrapped up in his own life, battling an addiction I wouldn’t be aware of until later. He offered me no advice and little comfort. Afterward, I sat on my bed and cried even more. Mama sat by my side, rubbing her face against me and intermittently meowing.
When my mom died later that night, she was alone. Not even Mama was in the room with her. The only indication my mom ever existed was in the few things she left behind: a hairbrush, some expired makeup, pajamas, and her cat.
The rest of my family couldn’t pull it together after my mom’s unexpected death. My two brothers left their children in my care in order to go out drinking into the early morning hours. It was even worse when they stayed home and drank themselves into a stupor, crying unabashedly about how my parents didn’t love them enough. My dad sat on the couch, frozen.
As for me, I’ve never felt safe letting myself be vulnerable in front of my family. When you grow up in a house where basic needs — such as knowing you’re loved — go unmet, you learn to make it appear as if you don’t have needs. To do otherwise is setting yourself up for disappointment.
In other words, falling apart after my mom’s death wasn’t an option for me. Instead, I hustled to pay for the funeral, shamelessly hitting up my editors for advances and scouring Craigslist for affordable plots. I sat through excruciating sessions with a Catholic priest who scolded my family for not being Catholic enough — while happily taking $300 to appear at my mother’s funeral. I cared for my nieces and cooked for all of the family that had suddenly come out of the woodwork, showing up at our house bearing sympathy and expecting a meal in return.
I didn’t cry in front of anyone, ever.
I would lose it when no one was around. No one, that is, except Mama. She always seemed to be there. When I howled in pain on the floor, she would look panic-stricken. When I got up and composed myself, she’d settle on my lap, purring.
Animals are so powerful in their love and kindness. Very few people have provided me with the kind of comfort Mama did after my mom’s death.
Eventually, Mama became a free agent, loving everyone and belonging to no one. After a few months, she settled on my great-uncle Willie, then seventy-nine years old, who had been homeless before my mom invited him to live with our family. Fast friends, they soon spent every moment together.
I, of course, had Jacky, Mama’s baby. He’d stuck with me through bad relationships, family blowups, and even a move to the Arizona desert that made us both miserable. He consoled me as I was grieving.
Three years after my mom died, Mama became seriously ill. Last October, I went out of town for two weeks. When I returned, Mama had dwindled away to skin and bones. I had the same gut feeling about her that I’d had about my mom. When I saw the vet the following week, I was blunt: “You need to tell me what I already know.”
It was cancer. The vet gave her a few weeks to live.
I knew it would be rough, but what I didn’t expect was how much my experience caring for Mama would mirror the final months of my mom’s life. In the weeks leading up to her death, my mom had often asked me to sit in bed with her. At the time, I felt that being in such close proximity to my fading, ill mother was too overwhelming. After a few minutes I would come up with an excuse and leave the room. In retrospect, I deeply regret not spending that time with her. It wasn’t really her illness that frightened me; it was my need for her. I needed my mom to return to who she was, to become my mom again — not this sick, depressed person I didn’t even know how to sit next to.
I wanted Mama to feel loved and comforted by my presence, but I couldn’t shake that same selfish need for her to return to normal, to fatten up and follow me around, meowing. I knew it wasn’t a possibility and never would be again, and that sense of loss made me hesitate, just as it had with my mom.
Late at night, when no one was around, I held Mama, crying as I traced her brittle bones with my fingertips. When I spoke to her, she looked up at me, but could no longer respond the way she used to. Her mouth would open, but no sound would come out.
Soon, Mama could barely walk. She ate voraciously, but it was never enough. She rarely moved. She lay on a pile of blankets on the coffee table, a place she was never allowed before. For whatever reason, it was the only place she wanted to be — and so we let her be.
We scheduled her to be put to sleep on December 14. That day, in a rare display of energy, Mama pulled herself up, jumped/fell off the coffee table, and stumbled to the front door. When she was well, she would stand in that same spot meowing, demanding to be let out into the front yard, where she would stretch herself out and slow-blink in the sunshine. I picked her up, and together we lay down on the lawn. She rubbed her face into the grass. The last few days in Los Angeles it had been forty degrees. That day, it was seventy-five, and Mama soaked it up. I sat there in pain, knowing what she didn’t.
One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life is my dad and my uncle Willie crying over Mama, running their hands over her bony back, telling her they loved her just moments before the vet gave her the injection. I had to leave the room. I couldn’t bear to see the men in my life so fragile, couldn’t stand to see Mama die right before me. I walked out of the room without saying a word, walked through the hallway and out past the waiting room, smiling at the receptionist as I passed, only to turn a corner outside the building and burst into tears.
When I got home, I crawled into bed and held Mama’s collar close. I traced its edges with my fingertips, thinking about how little of the physical world we really leave behind. Soon, Jacky jumped into bed with me, purring into my neck. As I drifted off to sleep I thought about how we’d both lost our mothers and how we would find comfort in each other.
Lately, as a result of planning my wedding, there’s been a lot of talk among my buddies about what drives the expensive social conservatism we see during our various social and religious ceremonies in India. There is, of course, the cash-flashing, wealth-waving syndrome that leads to obscene shows of buying power, and the media-spurred my-fairy-tale-wedding delusion, but what spurs people with sensible plans and ideological commitments to chuck it all and take a nosedive into these pro forma spectacles of self-destructive wastage?
In a country like India, where power comes in many forms and from many different sources — age, caste, gender, class, senior social roles, perceived religious devotion, nobleness of profession — I’d say that, apart from the usual suspects, embittered failures in roles of familial power play an enormous role in enforcing socioreligious conservatism. This is not to say that successful people with genuine affection for their families cannot be socially conservative, but in the specific case of bitter underachievers, reverting to traditions crafted for the patriarchal family head in a very different economic era allows them, temporarily, to become directors instead of dependents. The more rules and strictures they reinforce, the more power and control they have.
Rituals and ceremonies are their particular triumphs, since during them, they can reduce their more successful kin to temporary penury (or close) by insisting things be “properly” done at enormous expense, almost none of which they bear themselves. The worst aspect of this entire situation, perhaps, is that we have an automatic pity-flavored weakness for the weak and dependent among us — and for these brief periods, give them free(ish) rein over our lives out of affection or sympathy or adherence to social hierarchy, not realising the undercurrent of malice that such indulgence feeds. Indeed, I would say that most people practicing such malice don’t realize they are being malicious either. They take their socially assigned roles seriously, and quite successfully hide their subconscious jealousy and vengefulness (even from themselves) by dressing them in the righteous garbs of culture, tradition, and propriety.
This is aided in Hindu society by a complete ignorance of what Hinduism accommodates and entails. A very practical set of scriptural directives have been drowned under a collage of folk practices over the centuries, and since firsthand knowledge of Hinduism requires actual scholarship — and a broad, receptive mind — most self-identified Hindus go with the flow of simplistic, homogenized inventions and outright aberrations, firmly convinced they’re treading the path of their ancestors a million times removed.
If today I get married and decide to serve roast beef and fried pork at the wedding feast, it would be an absolute phenomenon. I would find no caterers, people would nervously offer sorry excuses for not attending, and those who attend may think they’re being revolutionaries by breaking stupid “Hindu” rigor. But even for a few centuries after Buddha’s death, roast calves and fried pork were centerpieces of Hindu daily and ceremonial eating, in combination with deer, rabbits, boar, various birds, ghee, rice, barley, and honey-thickened, milk-based sweets. But I digress.
The point is, in a social system where there are competing structures of power, every time you mark a social milestone in your life — unless you have genuinely loving and/or sympathetic kinsfolk in positions of familial power, or people secure enough in themselves to either aid you or allow you the freedom of choice — be prepared to either incur considerable financial damage in the name of maintaining the social fabric or causing breaches in the family, for which you shall bear all the blame after you have spent a smaller — but still considerable — amount in marking the milestone anyway.
It’s called social living. Or the tyranny of the weak.
Priyanka Nandy works on structural inequities in public education and public health in India. She blogs at priyankanandy.com and photo shares everywhere.
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When I was growing up, I knew my father had become an American citizen around the time I was born in 1985. What I didn’t know was that until then he’d been living as an undocumented resident of the United States for more than twenty years. Never anxious to talk about this part of his life, my father simply didn’t volunteer the information.
Like many children of immigrant parents, I was told story upon story that began, “When I came to this country…” But certain details of my father’s journey weren’t shared until I was twenty-six. Even after all these years, the story of how he emigrated from Mexico isn’t one my father likes to tell. He came from a generation where one’s citizenship status was something not to be discussed. I only learned of the specifics because I poked and prodded until he finally gave in, saying, “Tell my story when I’m dead.”
To people like my father, in spite of being an American citizen, these stories remain unsafe to talk about publicly. In the back of his mind is the lingering fear that telling his story will somehow get him deported. If not deported, then he will lose his job, or some other bad thing will happen. Silence and secrecy are my father’s only means of protection.
When I told my dad about the Dream 9, a group of undocumented activists who openly defied US immigration law in an act of civil disobedience last month, he told me a story he had never shared before. After being in the United States for five years, my dad reached a point where he’d had enough. He was always hungry, tired, and on the verge of homelessness. Working under the table without papers resulted in constant exploitation, and all he wanted was to go home to his family.
Without a dollar to his name, my father walked along the Los Angeles highway with his thumb out, hoping someone would give him a lift to San Diego so he could cross the border into Tijuana. Once he arrived, he planned to find a job and save enough money to return to his parents, who lived in the Southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. But, as he puts it, fate intervened.
My dad walked along the interstate for an entire day, and not a single person stopped to give him a ride. Since it was the 1970s and hitchhiking in California was fairly common, my father (ironically) took the drivers’ unwillingness to pick up a poor, brown man as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to return to Mexico, after all. He resigned himself to whatever fate was keeping him in the US, and walked all the way back to LA. For the next fifteen years, my dad worked backbreaking jobs that kept him one paycheck away from homelessness, separated from every family member and friend he’d ever known.
It’s difficult for me to think about what my father’s life was like during those hardscrabble years, but still I ask him to tell me. He explains the ways he was able to scrape out a living in a country he felt didn’t want people like him and made it as hard as possible for them to survive.
When he shares his pain, I see my father differently than the angry, quiet man I associate with my childhood. My dad had every intention of living the American Dream, even after years passed and it remained out of reach. He’d wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, and to give my brothers and me opportunities that were never possible for him. Instead, each day was simply about surviving. My father worked hard as a janitor to support our family, but he and my mom were never able to climb out of poverty. There was no time for dream chasing, so my father acquiesced to a dream deferred.
As the Dream Act is adopted in various states and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows undocumented youth to obtain driver’s licenses and work permits, I think of the adversities undocumented youth won’t face that my father had to overcome. I think of how the Dreamers, as they’ve come to be known, represent the unfulfilled desires of my father’s generation. So many of our parents secretly came to the United States, where they hid and were silent because to do otherwise would mean giving up what little they had for which they’d sacrificed everything. To them, immigration is not just a political issue; it is a life force that is brutal and beautiful, full of pain and of love.
My dad still struggles with using the term “undocumented.” For him, the word “illegal” comes much easier. He spent twenty years in a country where his existence was criminalized, and that feeling of not belonging isn’t something that “papers” can fix. My dad still behaves like that twenty-something kid who wasn’t protected under the law. He fears men in uniforms. He can’t speak out against those who treat him unfairly. He is constantly worried that everything he’s worked so hard for can be taken away in an instant.
When there is no ability for you to speak openly, no politicized community creating safe spaces, and no internet to connect you anonymously, you’re an island that internalizes what you’re told. The Dream 9 is helping my dad connect to his chosen country, to heal the hurts of its past abuse. Perhaps that is too much to ask from nine young people. But as they risk their own livelihoods for the sake of their communities, people like my father, whose lives have been steeped for so long in silence and in fear, are reading about their courage with tears in their eyes, in awe of a generation that refuses to hide in the shadows.
As I wandered around a local craft festival last November, my mind was on my seven-month-old niece. I wanted to give her a Christmas gift that was thoughtful, soft, and sweet. When I’d almost given up hope, I spotted a small stand outfitted with handmade stuffed animals that, upon further inspection, were all velveteen. This, I decided, was the softest, sweetest thing I could give my baby niece.
I picked out a gray rabbit with long, floppy ears. I envisioned the little girl snuggling up to her new sleeping companion, a subtle yet constant reminder of her loving aunt. Unfortunately, this idyllic picture would not come to pass. A few weeks after I bought the bunny, I got a phone call from my brother that irrevocably changed our relationship.
The days leading up to the call had been sleepless and emotional. My brother disappeared for three days, leaving his pregnant girlfriend in a state of panic. She and I were in constant communication, and feared something horrible had happened when my brother didn’t answer his phone and was nowhere to be found. He had left late at night, saying he had an errand to run, and no one had heard from him since. The thing is: this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Actually, it happens all the time because my brother is an addict.
When he re-emerged, my brother called me and acted as if nothing had happened. His girlfriend and I, he insisted, were simply overreacting. I couldn’t pander to his addiction-driven whims anymore, but I didn’t want to turn my back on my family. I didn’t want to give up hope that my brother could get clean.
I tried to set healthy boundaries by telling my brother I was worried about his well being. I tried to make a plea for the safety of my niece. Within moments, our conversation exploded. My brother yelled. I yelled back. He said I was unlovable. I called him a junkie.
Accusing an addict of being an addict is a surefire way to end a conversation. But I was so tired of feeling taken advantage of. I was through with my brother’s lies and enduring his verbal abuse. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from fear-based worry, a specific kind of anxiety that manifests during the hours of wondering when the phone will ring with the news of my brother’s self-imposed death. Desperate to make this misery end, I told my brother never to contact me until he was ready to seek treatment.
I drew a line in the sand, so my brother drew one of his own. He cut me out of his life completely and banned me from contacting his children. He warned that if I sent Christmas presents, he would burn them. And I knew I should believe him.
When my brother hung up on me, my heart broke open and filled with regret. Although I knew I needed to look after my own emotional health, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d made a grave mistake.
Instead of ridding myself of the unhappy relic, I kept the velveteen rabbit in a bag near my bed. The tender toy was a sad reminder of the ways my family was disappearing. Two years before, my mother died suddenly of a heart attack after spending her final years in a state of depression I knew intimately, but didn’t know how to address. In the midst of my grief, my older brother’s alcoholism proved too much for me to handle. One day, we stopped speaking and still haven’t reconnected. I found it excruciating for my intimate world to be shrinking so quickly, but then something happened that changed my perspective.
While writing a magazine article on addiction and rehabilitation, I discovered a program that had been operating discreetly in my hometown in California for almost thirty years. Located on a tree-lined street in Downey, a small Los Angeles suburb, Woman’s Council is an outpatient rehabilitation program for mothers for whom treatment of active addition is a court-ordered condition to regain custody of their children — and it was changing lives.
When I visited Woman’s Council, I had already spent three months observing Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visiting recovery centers around the city, interviewing recovering addicts, and speaking to counselors and medical professionals about the process of getting clean. But my first encounter with this program blew me away.
Sitting around a circular table, women gathered four times a week to share their stories, vent their frustrations, investigate their personal psychological triggers, and purge themselves of their chemical demons. During each woman’s time to speak, she revealed every hardship and heartbreak, every triumph and tragedy she had endured that lead to current circumstance. The group was facilitated by trained counselors who had their own experiences with addiction, and they provided guidance on how they overcame their own challenges early on in recovery. Despite participation being mandated by the judicial system, the women I spoke with all reported that the program was crucial to their well being.
Week after week, I sat silently in that meeting room and took notes on a legal pad. Although I tried to maintain a professional distance, at times I had to excuse myself and run to the bathroom before my sobs broke through. As I gasped for breath in the stall, a series of emotions ran through me: devastation at the horrifying misfortunes these women had endured, anger at the trauma their addictions had brought upon their children, sorrow for my brothers, myself, and my family. But I always returned to the room with as blank a face as I could muster and forced myself to listen more.
I knew something powerful was happening in that room because something powerful was also happening to me. In empathizing with the mothers in Women’s Council, I was learning how to empathize with my brothers as well. I was beginning to understand the stigma of addiction and how cycles of abuse get perpetuated. Having myself abused drugs and flirted with disaster in an abusive relationship, I saw that the biggest thing distinguishing me from these women was that I’d had a little more luck.
When my article was published last December, I gave the velveteen rabbit to a woman named Nicole who I’d met at Women’s Council and had an daughter named Sofia who was the same age as my niece. Despite it being an unceremonious act of giving, I felt extremely moved by the exchange and became the Women’s Council’s first regular volunteer. I jump in where ever I am needed, cooking food for the graduation ceremony or helping with administrative tasks. My hope is that I can make a difference in the lives of these women in a way I wasn’t able to in my own family.
Before I began volunteering, I had to sit with my family experiences as though they were secrets. I still haven’t reconciled with either of my brothers. But now, whenever I enter the Women’s Council building, their lives and mine make a little more sense and are less cruel in equal proportion.
For Hanukkah this year I may have received the most meaningful gift I’ve ever been given. My family isn’t all that big on the gift-giving associated with that time of year. Like many people, it’s more about the time we spend together as a family than the price tags or the presents. We get simple things, like Dutch chocolate letters, an old tradition from my dad; or useful things, like teacups or socks or warm sweaters. And to be honest, this year I didn’t even want a gift. Everyone was happy and healthy, and that’s all that mattered.
However, my mom surprised me this year. When I was in high school she taught me how to knit, and I had spent many years slowly knitting colored squares with the intention of one day creating a quilt. She started making squares as well, and when I went away to university we stored the squares and the yarn in our guest room. Unbeknownst to me, my mom had taken on the task of sewing together not only squares that both she and I had made but added those to squares my dad’s mother had made as well: a three-generation quilt.
I was completely stunned. I knew that my mom must have spent countless hours painstakingly arranging all the squares and sewing them together. Her inclusion of pieces from my oma (“grandmother” in Dutch) gives the quilt an added meaning. My oma passed away when I was fourteen, just as I was beginning to know her. She and her husband, who died when I was three, were both Holocaust survivors. I feel as if I’ve spent the rest of my life searching for pieces of them, tying stories, pictures, and memories together in an attempt to hold on to her.
I know a few people who have their grandparent’s pocket watch or a piece of jewelry belonging to a great-great relative. Or maybe it’s an old photograph that they carry in their wallet. These objects remain almost invincible to time, preserving the memories of their past owners and keeping them alive.
Aside from objects, stories that are passed from generation to generation also keep memories from dying. Also, sometimes people name their children after those who have passed on as a way to give honor to their memory.
As for my grandmother, I try to weave the stories my family has told me about her with my own memories as well as physical objects. Before she died, a Holocaust museum in Florida interviewed my grandmother. I listened to the tapes, searching for answers into who she was. She described her experiences about being in a line that separated the people who will live from the people who will die, and about where they slept, ate, and cried. Her spirit and determination comes through on those tapes so vividly, it’s almost as if she’s next to me and we’re having this intimate conversation. I want and need to keep her memory alive for my children and their children too.
In the meantime, the quilt lays on my bed, protecting me from the unknown secrets in the night and keeping me warm. My squares, which are sometimes slightly misshapen or hampered by mistakes, intertwine with those of my mom, pieces that are uniform, brightly colored, and cheerful. My eyes follow the stitches to my oma’s squares, neat, tightly bound, and of deep, rich shades of brown and orange that were popular in the seventies. And maybe it sounds silly, but I know she’s there with me. It’s as if her soul shines through the yarn. Perhaps physical objects are our most powerful relics after all. Either way, they certainly keep our bodies and our hearts warm.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
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