Letting the Oil Run Off
When we sold the food business my parents started in the early 1980s a few years ago, I was deeply concerned it would kill my father.
That’s because it was the truest expression of his undivided self, weaving together his epic journey from India to America as a student of food, animal husbandry, and agriculture, his lifelong desire to be an entrepreneur, and his lucky partnership with my mother, whose loyalty and tenacity made it possible for him to build the life of his dreams.
It was painful for all of us to let the business go because it characterized our relationships with one another more than the milestones that punctuate time for other families.
My sister and I had a single shared birthday party all our lives, immortalized on a VHS tape (that includes footage of me licking a Big Bird cake topper) resting on a shelf somewhere in my parents’ garage.
Not once did the four of us go on a vacation together for longer than two days, or farther away than Las Vegas or San Diego, as to not leave the business unattended.
While time stopped briefly for our graduations, these moments were more about assuming greater responsibility rather than celebrating achievements.
Completing my formal education inched me closer to the business, which I was groomed to take the helm of as the only willing participant.
I internalized this self-eroding devotion to work that my parents modeled as my dharma — that we were uniquely poised as educated immigrants in this generous country, and it was both our privilege and duty to leave nothing in the tank.
With some caveats I have integrated related to sacred rest, I still feel this deeply as an American with progressive values, and I revisit it over and over as an act of reclaiming the narrative on national gratitude that has been hijacked by Republicans.
The oil in the machinery of our family enterprise was thicker than blood, so letting it run off, in my bleakest moments of guilt when I was sure I was abdicating my filial responsibility by selling, felt like I was inviting death to seep into our joints instead.
When I wasn’t cloaked in this fear, my reasons for ejecting myself and my parents into a new life utterly made sense. The arc of our business had reached its peak long ago and we languished as it plateaued into monotony.
It became something to maintain, an inert entity managing to survive in an inhospitable climate for manufacturing real food.
I yearned for a new freedom, and a life with my parents without stacks of invoices, taxes, and the mounting stress of running a food company in California distorting our love for one another.
I also worried about my parents. What if one of them died there, and that triggered a dissolution? I thought it better to preempt this ghastly prospect rather than hang around, waiting for it to happen. I couldn't bear that.
Mom quietly understood my grief better than anyone, just like always.
Convincing my dad to sell was very hard though, especially in the beginning. Where I saw an opportunity for completion, my father saw failure, the demise of something perfectly fine, the central part of his identity being cleaved away by time disguised as me.
It is excruciating to accept that all things have a life-cycle, a finite loop, that their inherent goodness doesn’t enable them to transcend.
Only after my dad hurt himself working in his garden did he yield completely. Being laid up at home while I worked on the sale, and went to school at night to get my teaching credential softened his perspective.
So over the course of a year, we thrashed our way through to a close. It was a good deal financially, and it honored some noble stipulations my father set forth, such as our acquirer giving long-term jobs to all of our employees.
That was eight years ago now, and I’ve done a lot of things since then. Things I love that make a difference in the lives of young people. Creative things. Big, spacious, breathy things compared to sitting in the office late into the night.
But that working life with my parents still permeates the liminal spaces between my projects as a plasmatic binder, a fluid bridge to the meaningfulness of a past when work threw us all together.
The rigor and memory of that experience, of precipitating success in the crucible of family business life, is the most useful training for building and deconstructing work that matters, in a time when it couldn’t matter more.
Reading Notes
Mandy Brown on knowing when to quit.
“To quit is to refuse the dry, narrow path that has been laid out before you; to venture off into the woods where you know there’s water and life.”
Karin McGrath Dunn on the tension between the past and the present in family business.
“Trying to meet the needs of both my family of origin and the family I was building often felt impossible. The guilt of not being fully present for either weighed heavily on me.”
A Narrative Initiative interview Malkia Devich Cyril on reclaiming and transforming grief into meaningful movements.
“[Grief] is one of those cultural phenomena that shapes how and whether we participate, how and whether we respond, and whether we can move from responsive protests to organized engagement. That only happens to the degree that we understand and transform the way grief is working on our communities.”
