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When Parenting Allows for Healing the Inner Child
The duality of experiencing loss and gratitude
One of the recurring and dominant memories I have of my growing-up years is having to do things for myself from a young age. If there was a class project, I independently shopped for the supplies and worked on the project. If there was a school play, I worked on my costume. If my father was out of town, there was no audience for my play either.
I became my mother’s errand girl. My mother would give me cash and send me to run errands. I would zip off on my bicycle to the post office, the bank, the supermarket, the coffee mill, the shoe repair store, the framing shop, the doctor’s office, and the pharmacy to name a few.
My mother couldn’t drive. I would travel to school on the public buses, sometimes groped by men; while my friends would get dropped off by their parents or in their chauffeur-driver cars. Later in high school, my father bought me a moped, and I was independent before it was legal to drive a motorcycle or car. (How I got a driver’s license is a story for another day.)
Don’t bring out the violin for me yet.
To put things into context, I grew up in India in the 1980s and 1990s — the pre-internet era. My father was the “provider” who worked as a sailor for prolonged…