I was such an asshole

Sometimes I think about things I've said or done to my parents 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. 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. Somebody could put the milk back in the wrong place in the fridge and "I don't know why I came to this stupid country" comes out. 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.

So 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 because I knew immediately in my bones that she was right, and that this poison would never leave me, and that I'll think about it the day my mom leaves me forever. But still angry, still clinging to my meaningless affront, I scoffed 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 you say darning, the mending of fibers, 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 of knowing in her voice. 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 have indeed 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. He said it over and over again and I never forgot it.

I have forgiven my parents and I hope they will continue to forgive me. Forgiving myself? I don't know about that one. I'm not sure anyone can do that. Only the blessings of my parents can save me.

Whatever my parents and I argued about, in the backyard, in the kitchen, or on a street in Big Sur...whatever they may have ever said to pop me off, I have long forgiven them for.

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