#21 - I was such an asshole

Sometimes I think about the past and feel like an asshole.

Like there was that one time we went to Big Sur as a family. Per usual, we were arguing loudly in the streets about God knows what. Probably each other’s personalities, which is what my sister and I often argue about. Or a verbal misunderstanding, which it had to have been this has to do with my mother.

Sometimes your parents say things and you take it awful. Because you care so much about what they think. This is especially terrible if there is any sort of language barrier. That isn’t a huge problem with my parents, but weird regressed ideas they’ve held on to sometimes slip through their ungraceful word choices.

We’re all fucking exhausted, you see. Being an immigrant, the child of immigrants…it’s all fucking exhausting. So we’re always on the edge of totally losing it on each other. We’re always flirting with catastrophe in that way.

One time I came back from yoga and my dad said one of my teeth was crooked and I went out into the backyard, smashed part of his greenhouse down, hit his pickup truck with a stick, and broke his computer mouse on purpose. The last bit now seems unusually cruel.

So anyway, we’re walking down some street in Big Sur and I’m yelling at my mom. And this complete stranger, a woman, stops me in the middle of the crosswalk and says to me — “Don’t talk to your mother like that. You’ve only got one mother.” I felt humiliated like a small child, but I was an immature adult. Still angry, still clinging on to my meaningless affront, I scoffed at her with my face and we kept walking.

I will never forget my mother’s face through it all. She was grief stricken, a look she’s had at various times in her life. Whenever we all fought, she looked heartbroken. She always said that her job as a mother was to darn wherever we frayed as a family. Turpai. That’s how we say hemming in Hindi.

Over the years as I’ve realized that I do indeed only have one mother, I’ve felt like an asshole over and over, even for things I did unwittingly as a child before that woman stopped me in the street. She was an older woman, and there was pain in her voice as she scolded me. At the time, I couldn’t believe that somebody — a stranger — would have the audacity to stop me like that. How dare she reprimand me?

Now I hope I become that woman because I realize how much courage and care were woven into her words. How, maybe, she felt my mother’s pain somehow. Maybe one of her children had been insolent. Maybe she hurt her mother and now she regrets it. Maybe she is me.

I was such an asshole, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to forgive myself. Sometimes I randomly apologize to my mother for being a little shit and it makes her emotional, which confirms that I indeed have been, or still am, a little shit. I say, Mom, I’m sorry if I was ever an asshole growing up. And she tells me, a mother always forgives. That is what it means to be a mom. At least a good one, anyway.

When I was graduating college in 2007, our commencement speaker was some big shot TV producer. The chorus line of his speech was, Forgive your parents.

Whatever we argued about, in the backyard, in the kitchen, or on a street in Big Sur…whatever they may have said to pop me off, I have long forgiven them for. I can’t even remember who I was then. But I do remember things I did wrong.

Can I ever forgive myself for being such an asshole? I just don’t know.