My parents loved me in a language I couldn’t read.
It took me twenty-something years to get the translation, and the translation is this. every pressure was a sacrifice, every anger was a worry, every silence was a provision. They loved me wrong and loved me enormously. Both. At the same time. In the same gestures.
The language had rules I only understood later.
Provision instead of presence. my father worked constantly, missed things, showed up to almost nothing, and I read that as absence. It was, in his grammar, the purest sentence he knew how to write. He came from nothing and his entire vocabulary of love was built from the word more: more food than he had, more school than he got, more doors than his father opened for him. He couldn’t say “I’m proud of you.” He could say “did you eat” and “how was school?” and “here’s money you didn’t ask for and will insult him by refusing.”
Worry disguised as anger. my mother’s phone calls. The interrogations. Where are you, who are you with, when are you coming back, do you know what time it is. I read it as surveillance, as a lack of trust. Which translates to the world had already taken things from her, permanently, and her nervous system had concluded that love meant counting heads. Every “where are you” was “you are one of the heads I count.”
Sacrifice disguised as pressure. the relentless expectations, the comparisons, the “your cousin the doctor.” I read it as never being enough. They had spent themselves completely on a bet, and the bet was me, and pressure was just the sound of the bet asking about its odds.
I want to be careful here, because this genre of realization can go too far.
Understanding the language doesn’t mean the grammar never failed. Some of the pressure left marks. Some of the worry taught me to hide things instead of share them. Loving you wrong is still wrong, and the marks are real, and any account that pretends otherwise is just a prettier form of denial.
But here’s what I know now that I didn’t know at seventeen. they were doing translation work too. They were raising a kid in a world they hadn’t been raised in (internet, different country of the mind, a son who reads philosophy and talks back), with a dictionary from a harder century. They got the grammar wrong constantly. They never once got the verb wrong.
They loved wrong and loved enormously. The wrongness was in the conjugation
So now I do the work in reverse. I try to love them back in their own dialect.
The people who loved us wrong are also the people who taught us the alphabet of love at all, even if we had to spend adulthood correcting their spelling.
Forgiveness, I’ve decided, is mostly translation work. Slow, imperfect, ongoing.
Call your mother. Answer the audit. It’s a love letter in a language neither of you chose.
Rest in peace to the big man, I bet he would have been proud.