Good Life Project - Maya Shanbhag Lang | What We Carry

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Simultaneously parenting her daughter while caring for a mom who was vanishing into dementia, Maya Shanbhag Lang, found herself reexamining nearly every part of her life, and reimagining how she wanted to tell her own story to her daughter. May's writing has been featured in The Washington Post, In Style, The Millions, and The Rumpus, among others. Her book, The Sixteenth of June was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was an Audie Award Finalist for Best Audio Book. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A passionate teacher, she loves working with aspiring writers. Her new memoir is What We Carry.  (https://amzn.to/3fqyo2Q)You can find Maya Shanbhag Lang at:Website : http://www.mayalang.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/mayaslang/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what happens when the passionate pursuit of your own destiny bumps up against raising a child while simultaneously taking care of a parent who is slowly drifting into a form of dementia that requires you to, in effect, parent them as well. That is a big part of what I explore with my guest today, Maya Shanbag-Lang, who's written a beautiful new book, What We Carry, about this experience. Growing up the daughter of immigrants, Maya had created a series of stories about her parents, painted a picture in her mind, especially around her mom and who she thought she was and wasn't, that would come tumbling down and reveal so much, not just about who her mom really was and is, but about who Maya was and is as well. Beyond this deeply moving story, Maya's work has

been regularly featured in the Washington Post, InStyle, The Millions, The Rumpus, so many other places, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. And she teaches aspiring writers. And we dive into all of this, zooming the lens out about the craft, her creative journey, and her relationship with herself and her family, her craft, her devotion, her contribution to the world, and how it has all woven into this beautiful tapestry to leave her where she is at this moment in life. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just

15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. It's kind of funny because where you are now, we came so close to moving, actually. I mean, literally like a heartbeat away from it and fell in love with the town. But I'm on the Upper West Side. You're in Hastings, New York right now. You grew up, I guess, for a heartbeat in Queens, but then really in Long Island.

Yeah. So I lived in Queens until I was four years old, which I barely remember. And then we moved to Long Island. And that I remember quite vividly, even though I was young, it was this very sort of moving on up. You know, it was a big deal in my family. We'd been in a small apartment in Jackson Heights. And to move to the suburbs and have a house, it really was that sort of immigrant dream of homeownership and suburbia and having arrived and all of my parents' hard work paying off. And even at the age of four,

I felt their excitement and their sense of accomplishment. And the Long Island suburb we moved into was, you know, the opposite of Queens. It was a predominantly white suburb with really great schools. And I was, I think, one of two Indian students in my grade. There were no African-American students in the entire school. So it was just a very, very different environment. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious, even at that young age, at four or sort of like the time around there, were you immediately aware of that? Did you sense it and feel it? I did. What's so funny about being a kid is that you don't have words for it. So I never, ever would have talked about it or thought to articulate it, but it came up in weird moments.

Up until then, my relationship with language had been very fluid where I would speak English and my Indian language interchangeably because to me, they were one language. It was just communication. You know, four or five marks a transition point when you start going to school and suddenly you're not just talking to your parents and your sibling. And so I would have these moments in school where I would either say something in Marathi, which is my Indian language, or I would pronounce an English word the Indian way, because I'd only ever heard English spoken by my parents. We didn't have a television. I had no other exposure. My babysitter was Indian. So my world had been very small and suddenly it got much bigger. And so I just suddenly became aware of myself as other with a capital O and different. And I think I did what all kids do, which is to

just realize that and want to immediately sort of put a lid on it and then blend in. I remember having this moment where I came home, I think it was in kindergarten or first grade, I came home and I was really frustrated with my mom. And I said, you know, you guys aren't supposed to pronounce the Z in pizza. You have to stop doing that. And yes, I felt resentful of them for being different. And I just, you know, pretty quickly learned to just adapt to my new environment. I mean, it's interesting.

And this is something I wasn't aware of for a long time. A friend who grew up in Ireland, I remember him sharing with me, you know, when I first came to America, the first question everybody was asking me was, you know, so what do you do? He said, but growing up in Ireland, what everyone would ask you is, where are you from? And in Ireland, it was because they wanted to know how they related to you because everyone largely looked the same. And over the years, I've talked to friends here who don't look the same, who are Indian or Black or Hispanic, who have brown skin, and they experience that question radically differently. I'm curious whether you have a relationship with questions, that question or questions

like that, like where are you from or what are you is the other variation that I've heard is can be tricky. It can be tricky. It's interesting. I mean, on one hand, I appreciate, you know, what can be a very well-intentioned question to place someone and just say, oh, where are you from? What's your background? But it can also be a loaded question. And yeah, I mean, when Indian people, first buy it because I don't look overtly Indian. But when people, you know, when Indian people find out I'm Indian, that question, where are you from, is very, it's very different because it's about, you know, what caste are you, which part of India

are you from? It's a desire to understand my Indian-ness versus from, I think, an American person or a white person. It can be a hard question to receive, especially when it's phrased as, what are you? As the daughter of two scientists, some snarky part of me always wants to say oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, the same stuff that you are. And then, of course, the responses, I mean, people often say things like, oh, India is on my bucket list, or I went there once, and my God, the poverty. And so, you know, all of that can be off-putting. And I think that there's a way to inquire about people's ethnicities or backgrounds in a way that doesn't make you feel different or put on the spot or like you're being placed under a microscope. No, I mean, it's interesting. The way I've had it described to me by friends is like, there's a feeling of being othered. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, often with the, what are you, it feels like a, you know,

I've detected difference in you and I now want to ease my own anxiety about that difference or find the answer to that, you know, what I've detected as opposed to more of like a genuine open interest of, oh, where's your family from? What's your background? Which just the emotions of that come from a very different place, I think. Yeah. I wonder how much tone plays a role in that, right? I'm somebody who's really curious about where people are in the world, what their history is, what their stories are, how they've been shaped. So I'm constantly asking everybody questions like that. But I, and it really is fairly recently where I've kind of become attuned to just the tone in which I inquire and the way that I sort of language the questions. Because for me, it's always like, how beautiful that I get to meet somebody who doesn't, you know, who has a profoundly

different experience in history instead of stories. I mean, I would love to learn more, but yeah, I guess it really, you never know how it's going to land. I think it's, I think it's just important that we're all sort of like maybe increasingly aware of things like that. You are, as you said, your parents are from India. They came here and it sounds like that, you know that when you reflect, especially in the early years, you had this sort of mythological ideal, especially around your mom and her life growing up in India and the choices that she made and her sort of infallibility and her value set. Paint that picture a bit for me.

So imagine that it's the 1980s and We Are the World is the soundtrack. And there's the UNICEF ads depicting starving children and babies in third world countries. And there's this growing perception of places like India as places of profound poverty and leprosy and starvation and terrible conditions. And that was sort of, you know, Reagan was the president. And it felt to me, especially growing up in this very white suburb and feeling very different from my peers, I was very aware of that perception in a background sort of way. And I would come home from school and my school day was, I felt other and I felt like, okay, I'm not the girl with the perfect blonde braids. I'm not the girl who has the really cute My Little Pony lunchbox. I'm just not that girl. And so I would feel acutely aware of my differences,

but in a way that I couldn't articulate. And then my mother would talk to me about India and her India and her childhood and her stories provided such a bomb because she made me feel as though I was from a mythological land of beauty and abundance and ideals and clever ways of doing things that far exceeded America. And all of her stories, you know, it was as though she had left utopia. It was paradise lost, as far as she was concerned. She had been in the perfect place where everything had been provided for her. And so the whole narrative that got imposed on her of coming to America for a better life, she found that incredibly funny. She would always say, are you kidding? My life was so much better in India. Her plan was to go back there, and it just never worked out. But yeah, so she was always, I mean, everything from the education system in India to ways of doing things to, you know, the way children are raised,

the love that they are given, the way schools are run, everything to her was superior there. And I think to have access to that for me, I mean, those stories were such an escape and so wonderful to hear. I could hear, you know, I wanted her to talk endlessly about that India. And that was a real comfort to me. Yeah. It painted such a profoundly different picture of what sort of the US media was showing at that moment in time.

And your mom also, I mean, she ends up going through med school. She ends up becoming a psychiatrist. And it sounds like, especially in the early years, someone whose steadfastness, decision making and brilliance you just, again, admired know, like admired and there was almost nothing, no wrong that could be done. Yeah. So she really painted this picture of her, not only her, you know, her country of origin as being perfect, but also her choices as, you know, there couldn't be any other way. Like all of her choices and all of her decisions were unerring and unwavering and all led her to be this person, which was a brilliant psychiatrist and a wonderful

mother. And the way that she talked about her life, you know, it was sort of as though she had given thought to being a mother and therefore decided to become a psychiatrist so that she would be available to her children and present for them because she would have more flexibility over her schedule. I mean, everything just seemed so perfectly thought out as though she had never had doubts or questions or confusion. And so she just seemed to me almost like a missile of a person with a perfect trajectory and perfect aim into adulthood. She never talked about wanting to do anything else or explore other careers. She became a doctor really early at 24. And so all of that was quite intimidating to me, but also astonishing to

have that kind of clarity of purpose. And of course, later when she came to live with me and had dementia, a lot of those, you know, the walls that sort of erected that story started to crumble and cracks started to appear in them because she could no longer tell stories the same way. She didn't remember how. So I started to see the reality beneath the illusions, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it really does sound like as much as you had this beautiful, deep, super close relationship with your mom, who's rolled with the motto, like everything for my kids and everything intentional and deliberate.

And that she was also setting really almost an impossible standard to eventually meet if you think that this is just like, this is the way, this is the way that you behave, especially when you get into adulthood, which you come to experience. And I want to dive into that. You're also, I mean, your dad was there. He was present when you were a kid. Very different relationship with him. Yeah, my dad was present, but I always forget to mention him because his presence was such a non-presence. He was in our household, and he certainly thought that he was in charge. He saw himself as the head of the household. He really identified as a rigid and controlling patriarch. But on a day-to-day basis, I mean, he would leave the house really early in the morning. He'd come home in the evening. He would expect his meals cooked for him, his laundry folded, everything taken care of. And he was sort of a shadow figure. I mean, a scary shadow figure because he had a temper. He was a difficult person. But in terms of my childhood, you know, I think when you're a

kid, what you really look to is like, you're sort of like a little plant in the earth thinking, okay, where do I get my sun and my water? And that was my mom. So he was there and he was certainly an imposing figure, but he and I rarely spoke. We never really had conversations. And my interactions with him were really just about not upsetting him and sort of tiptoeing around him to not trigger his temper. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like, I know you described, it sounds like there was a phrase that seemed to be uttered fairly regularly, something like worthless girl. And which is so, I mean, it's hurtful, but to sort of balance out as a kid, you have this one mom who is incredibly smart, incredibly accomplished, there the value of girls and women, that had to have created just

a really high level of sort of cognitive dissonance for you. That's exactly right. It's really interesting because my mother wasn't just this accomplished physician. She was someone who had a backbone of steel. I mean, she did not take a word of flack from anyone. She was outspoken. She was the person who would start political arguments at family gatherings. She was no wallflower. And even though she was very petite, people definitely feared my mother because she was so strong and fiery and unapologetic and never backed down from anything. Part of that, I think, was because she was a single child who had been the object of her parents' affection and just raised to believe that she had everything to offer to the world. My father was one of 13 in his family, mostly boys. And I remember one of his

sisters was admitted to medical school and was not allowed to attend. So he grew up in a very different environment. And yeah, there was absolutely a cognitive dissonance in my household in the sense that it was interesting to me that my father chose my mother and that he married her because given his view of the world and his view of women, he was so obviously a misogynist and not a subtle one. I mean, he would say things all the time about men being smarter than women, how the credit for all of the important inventions should go to men and that, you know, women just have no place when it comes to ideas and important decisions. And yet he was unsettling to him. And so part of how he tried to exert control over that or feel like he was her equal and that she didn't intimidate him was to really try and have control over me and my

brother. So I think if he felt like my brother and I obeyed him and were scared of him, then he, you know, that made him more of a man and more powerful in his own regard. Yeah. And I mean, it is interesting when you look back at sort of like how we make decisions and how we see things. I know things got bad enough with your dad at some point where you end up saying, okay, I'm going to end this. But it sounds like not so much because you actually wanted to end it, but it was sort of like, I'm going to show them. It's kind of a cry for help. And also, like, this is, I'm really, really unhappy on this level, which thankfully didn't end anything for you, but also ended up shortly after with you heading off to boarding school, I guess, for the rest of high school. I'm curious what that was like then to sort of like be out from, on the one hand,

be out from under the, you know, the domain of your dad, but also be away from this woman who was your protector, who was, did everything right, who was brilliant, who was the person who you just wanted to talk to all the time and was this legendary figure in your life? Yeah. Well, one thing I want to say just that has occurred to me since all of this is when I was 12 or 13 and I first started really registering my profound discomfort and sort of like at a very deep level, I felt with my father, like we can't both exist in the same house. It's either me or him. And when I attempted suicide, part of what I'm very grateful for in hindsight is that I didn't have access to a better method. So I think, you know, had I

had access to something like a gun, I would have succeeded, which is just to say that I think, you know, and I think this is one of just the tragic parts of adolescence and depression is that on one hand, at a very deep level, I had absolutely no idea what my own goals were or what my motivations were. I just had this feeling, this desperate feeling of I can't keep doing this. But I didn't have the sort of executive function or grown-up thinking to be able to say, okay, well, let me, that's an okay feeling to have. I can't take this anymore, but let me explore my options. Maybe I can do something like apply to boarding school or talk to a guidance counselor or figure out a strategy, as opposed to this very rash feeling of, okay, I can't take this anymore of course, I'm incredibly glad that I was unsuccessful. But this is just to say that it wasn't for lack of intention. It was really because I just didn't know how to, you know,

take a life properly. So ignorance was really, you know, a good thing. And yeah, I mean, going to boarding school, I thought it was going to be this sort of perfect escape. Even though I was scared of leaving home, I also thought, because at that point I was an avid reader, so many of the books I read involved adventure. And the whole idea was that when you, no matter who you were, the minute, you know, whether it was Huck Finn or, but the minute you embarked on that adventure and took up life's challenge of getting yourself out, I thought, okay, this is me making my way in the world. This is going to be really good. And of course, life doesn't let you off the hook that easily in the sense that I got to boarding school and it was

not dead poet society. It was not what I'd envisioned of reading books and being with really academic people. Boarding school was a place of a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol and a very different environment from the sort of nerd paradise that I had hoped for. the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

It's interesting to hear you describe it that way. Flight Risk. sort of like a quiet, studied, very bookish family. Everybody would sit around and constantly just, their idea of like a great social evening was being in the same room, reading books together. And then she went to summer camp and she just thought, oh, we're all going to be reading books together in the bunk. And this is going to be the best thing. And nobody wanted to do that. It was a totally different, everyone's like out, they're running around, they're doing, and it was like a big shock to her system. You end up from there, I guess, then going to grad school or going to school, going to grad school. And it sounds like books and writing really became the central part of a lot of your life eventually, I guess, ending up in grad school for a PhD in comparative lit. Is that right? That's right. Yeah.

And then also fall in love, get married and make make a decision that it was time to go from the East Coast, from the New York area, all the way out to the West Coast, to Seattle. Which a lot of New Yorkers, well, maybe they do to a certain extent, but pretty bold move, especially given how fiercely close you were with your mom. I mean, when you're in school, when you're in college and stuff, it sounds like a type of relationship where you call her up and you're like, my back hurts. And you tell the story of her literally driving to get a chair that you like to your brother and then driving another four hours back to deliver it to you so that you can actually be okay. But something inside of you says I need to be 3000 miles away. Yeah. Well, my mother and I, you know, starting with when I was in boarding school, my mother and I, in a weird way, became closer when she became a voice on the phone. I wonder

if, you know, in this day and age of podcasts and audio books and all of us, you know, listening to things, there's an intimacy when you have a voice in your ear. That enabled us to talk about things that we maybe felt too shy in person to discuss because we didn't have the visual cue of you're my stern Indian mother and I am your American daughter. And she really missed me when I went to boarding school, I think in part because she was suddenly alone in the house with my father. My brother is eight years older. He was already in law school by then. So my mother lost the buffer of having children in the house. And so I looked to her by phone for comfort and reassurance. And because I missed her, she looked to me just to have an escape from her house and her marriage. And her relationship with my father was by then, it had disintegrated into this pretty terrible state. They were living on separate floors of a not very big house and they weren't talking to each other. They would leave notes for

each other just to get through kind of the logistics of sharing a household. But there was no affection between them anymore and not even kind of a, you know a passing friendship. I mean, things were really tense between them. So yeah, she and I started becoming closer and closer through boarding school and then college. And I sort of thought, okay, we have this relationship that can survive distance. And even if I'm in Seattle, she'll still be my voice on the phone. And the part that I didn't factor into that equation was pregnancy and having a child. And the minute I became pregnant, the geographical distance from my mother suddenly became a gulf. It suddenly became a huge issue where I thought, how am I going to become a mother 3,000 miles away from my mom? And I think up until then in my life,

I had been living in a very neck up kind of way where I didn't think about my body. I didn't think about, you know, at that point, everything was sort of computers and online and email and phones and being pregnant forces you into your body in a totally different way. And the idea of my mom not being able to hold my daughter and see her and be with her and be with me, all of that just became very different. Yeah. And I guess it really, it comes to a head after you give birth, your daughter comes and it's really, really hard for you in the days and weeks that follow. It sounds like she's very colically, which is, and that's when you reach out to your mom and say, Hey, I need you and get an answer that you never saw coming. Yeah.

So, you know, until that point, my mom being this intimate confidant on the phone, what she had always said to me is, if you ever need me, I'll be there for you. You're the most important person in the world to me. And after my daughter was born and I suffered from postpartum depression, and it was, I will never forget this afternoon. It was the lowest point of the depression. It was this gray, bleak day in Seattle, as the days often are over there. And I remember standing in my bedroom and looking at the gray sky and calling my mother and saying, I'm really sorry.

I hate to bother you, but I'm at my lowest point and I need you here. Even if it's just for a weekend, I need to see you. And I don't know how to get through this, but seeing you and having you be here will help me. And I was sobbing as I called her. I had never really asked her for anything. I'd always been so self-sufficient. And so it humiliated me to have to ask her to do this. It felt like a huge request. She would still say, of course, and that it would inconvenience her and it would be this imposition, but that she would say yes, of course. And to have her say thinking that it was this, you know, insurance policy that it would save me. All I had to do was tug the cord and I'd be okay. And it sort of felt like this cosmic joke of, no, she's not going to come for you. She's not going to help you. And you are all alone in this.

Yeah. I mean, it's funny. As I was reading some of what you wrote about this in your book, and you describe it again, I had these flashbacks to when our daughter was really young. And just the sense of everyone says these are the best moments. It's the bonding and it's beautiful and it's incredible. And my wife and I just being like, are things ever going to change? We don't even want to say it to each other because we're like, we're not supposed to feel this way, but this is so brutally hard. And we're calling any family member we can to try when does it get better to try and be able to mark the date on our calendar. Yeah. I mean, when you have that call with your mom, it doesn't just signify her saying no.

It signifies a turning point in your, I guess, your understanding of who your mom is and what she is and isn't willing to do. But also at the same time, there's this mythology, well, I was able to do it. She came here. I mean, your understanding then was, I came here, like I had your older brother when I'm doing my residency in med school, and I just figured it out. You'll do it. You'll figure it out. And, and so do it, you know, I've got my life over on the East coast now, which makes you feel even, you know, that again, it's that standard, you know, that, that you hold yourself to in this moment. And it makes you feel like even more of like, well, you know, I can't do it. Then I'm just failing even more because this person so close to me was able

to. That's exactly right. So my mother, I mean, part of why I glorified her and looked up to her was because she had never really let me into her actual choices. And so it's easy to revere someone when all they've given you is the highlight reel and when they've made certain very strategic omissions about how life unfolded. And, you know, when you have a grown child who's, you know, graduating or, you know, high school or whatever, it's easy to say like, yeah, those early days are just the best. And it's because you yourself have probably forgotten how hard those days are. In my mom's case, she left out some of her decisions because she felt incredibly guilty about them and she felt ashamed of the help that she had had, especially when my brother was born. And so she left out not just small details, but she left out whole chapters of her life as a new mother. And because I didn't know what she had actually done, you know, I didn't know the help that she'd had. I didn't know the resources she'd had access to. I just assumed she had done it seamlessly and that it had been easy for her.

So I think part of what's so interesting in terms of like the legacy of stories that we get as children is that we read into the silences and we read into the gaps never to our own benefit. We tend to read into them in a way where we think that we're at fault and we think that we should be stronger and better and that we're failing. So yeah, I held myself to an impossible standard. I wanted to be legendary like she was. And I kept thinking, I'm not doing enough. I'm not strong enough. I'm not as heroic of a mom. Instead of thinking, wait a minute, if this is so hard for me,

maybe she never told me the full story. And maybe what I need to do instead of clamping down and feeling ashamed and not talking, what I should really do is talk more. I mean, I didn't do the thing that you just described of calling everyone up and saying, wait a minute, when does this end? Because I felt like it was too taboo and I felt too self-conscious. So I think this is part of the danger of secrets and the danger of shame is that we turn quiet right when we most need to reach out and hear from others. Yeah. Well, and especially in the context of somebody like a parent who you sort of perceive as your ideal

and that you want to and quote, should be able to follow their lead. And the shame can just be stifling. It can be crushing when you feel like you can't do that. But that conversation ends really badly. You end up struggling and eventually do come to a point where it's really, really hard, but you find your way through. You do actually find your way through. You end up in therapy also, a really good thing for everybody, but you don't really start to learn the truth about the stories quite then. I mean, you find your way back. You have a certain amount of strength for having gotten yourself to that position and said, oh, actually I can do this. Enough so that you then return to the idea of writing, which is a lifelong love of yours, something you studied,

something that brings you to a point where you really start to write again and find yourself back in the world of books and literature. End up with a young daughter then and then husband moving back to New York, where your mom is now your neighbor again. And I guess it's then when you realize that things as you thought they are now are not what you thought they are, but also the entire history, the entire story that you had assumed was your mom's story and your story and relationship to her wasn't as it appeared the entire time too. That's right. So yeah, I mean, one important moment for me was when my daughter was born, I felt that I had a kind of fundamental choice. Even though I didn't know the truth of my mom's history then, I didn't know a lot of what would come to light much later during her dementia. But I did sort of feel that I had this fundamental

choice to either turn myself into a martyr or model a different avenue for my daughter. And I thought I can either kind of be the solo flyer, silent sufferer who, you know, throws herself on her sword and sacrifices everything. Or I can reach out for help because that will show my daughter that getting help is an okay thing to do. And I can pursue things I've always wanted to pursue, even though as a new mom, that's when you feel least equipped to maybe pursue a dream. But yeah, my daughter was three months old when I started writing my first novel. And there were other points in my life before she was born when I would have had more time and resources and energy to try and write a book,

but I didn't have the motivation. And when she was born, I really thought, who do I want to be as a person to her? I don't want to be the person who gave up her dreams. I want to be the person who ran after them and pursued them voraciously. decision-making and my ways of seeing myself shifted because I started looking at myself through my daughter's eyes, which turned out to be a much healthier way of looking at myself as opposed to looking at myself through the prism of my mother's choices and the myth of her, that sort of larger-than-life figure, you look at yourself that way and you're never going to live up. But you look at yourself as you hope your children will see you, and that's more promising. Yeah. I mean, it's the whole idea of modeling behavior too, right? Because as parents, you can say whatever you want to a kid, but if you're modeling a completely different behavior, it doesn't matter at all what you say.

They'll sort of, you know, they'll watch how you navigate the world and those are the lessons that they will take. And if you tell them something different, not only will they not follow it, but they'll see the conflict and then see you as somebody who is not consistent. That's exactly right. And then you lose credit in their eyes. You know, you're not worth listening to or believing. somebody who is not consistent. That's exactly right. And then you lose credit in their eyes. That's right. You're not worth listening to or believing.

It's so interesting that you were moving through this conscious process of, who am I going to choose here? You share and you actually reference it. There is a story that you were told that you come back to a number of times and I guess understand it differently as you do, which I think really reflects this pivot that you're making this moment where you're deciding who, you know, what choices do I want to make? What do I want to model for my daughter? And, and in a weird way, who comes first? And it seems like that's a story that you you've kept coming back to a number of times over the years. Yeah. So this is a story that my mother told me when my daughter was born. It was a story that

her mother had told her of a woman in a river who is holding her baby and she's crossing this river because she needs to get to the other side. And the water starts to rise until she's up to her chest. And she panics. And she realizes that she has a choice, which is that she can either sacrifice her baby and make it to the other side alone. Or she can sacrifice herself and have her child survive. And of course, you know, the story on one level just doesn't make sense, because why would sacrificing yourself guarantee the child's safety? I mean, logically, it doesn't work. But as is so often the case with these fables and tales. It's really about kind of a fundamental decision

of, you know, as a mother, do you sacrifice yourself? How do you make decisions? And when my mom first tells it to me, she says, you know, I say, of course she sacrifices herself. That's how all of these stories go. And my mom says, no, we can't know what she decides. That's the lesson of the story. And until you are in that position, panicked, feeling the water up to your chest, until you're in that woman's shoes, you have no idea what you would do because that moment, we cannot prepare for it. me she chose, I started to see that story differently until I finally realized my grandmother had really invented this story for my mother's benefit. So what seemed like a kind of Hindu myth turned out to be completely just a very personal

and familial story. Yeah, the idea, I guess, originally was the understanding as well. Well, of course, you know, like proper parenting is you sacrifice yourself for the child. And based on the mythology that your mom had created around the way that she made her choices in life and done everything for the kids, that was completely in line with the story, with the fable. And yet before you even knew what the truth of your mom's stories were, you started to choose differently. You're like, no, this is not, which is not just choosing a different ending to the story, but also it's kind of going against a lot of what your mom

in your mind was about, like the way that she made all of her choices. It's like rejecting her and the values. But pretty soon after that, you would learn that in fact, that wasn't the truth either. So when you're home, it doesn't take long before you start to realize that your mom actually is in the early stages of dementia, of Alzheimer's. There's so much that unfolded between you and her, but I'm curious also what it was like for you to realize that this powerful, decisive woman was in this place in her life and how it might change her and also the nature of your relationship with her. Yeah.

I mean, what's so interesting is that even as my brother and I began to see the signs of dementia in her, even after she self-diagnosed as a psychiatrist and said, yes, I have Alzheimer's, I have early Alzheimer's. And she got very specific and very medical about it. You know, what was so interesting is that she continued to hold onto her autonomy and her pride and her independence and her authority, even as she was slipping into this new stage of life. I mean, I think in the same way that my father felt insecure and therefore tried to overcompensate by being very controlling, my mother felt herself start to fade and overcompensated by covering for her symptoms and really becoming even more firm with me and

my brother about her power and her pride and her independence. So there was a period that was longer than you could imagine. I mean, it was several years where my brother and I felt paralyzed because we didn't know what to do. There are no scripts for this. There are baby books and blogs about how to parent your children. There aren't too many resources for how to parent your parents, especially a woman as formidable as my mother. It's really hard to have the playbook for how that should go. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So for this long period of time, we were kind of taking our cues from her. And she was so good. She was like a magician with excellent sleight of hand. I mean, she was so good at misdirecting us and leading us to think and stock her fridge and do everything that we could. But her weight kept dropping in a way that couldn't be explained through tasks or anything else. And that was what led to her coming to live with me was at one of her appointments.

She was suddenly 87 pounds. And it was just very clear that she needed immediate help and could no longer be released to her own care. Yeah. And I guess that's the point also where she's living with you. And while it is a devastating disease and so many of us deal with it in one shape or form, I guess there was a part of, for a window of time, the way that she was changing that opened her up to be more honest with you. And so a lot of the veneer, the way that she was changing that opened her up to be more honest with you. And so a lot of the veneer, the stories that you had grown up with and created dropped away and you began to realize, I guess, the truth of who she really was and the choices that she

made and maybe how it wasn't entirely different than the choices that you decided to really start to create in your own life. Yeah, I always think of, you know, I mean, I think any situation has its own strange gifts. You know, this time period we're in right now, as bizarre and harrowing as it is with the pandemic, I'm sure we've had moments of immense gratitude and taking stock of how lucky we are to have our families, to have our health. And, you know, maybe we've been able to have conversations or make connections with loved ones that we normally wouldn't during daily normal life. So in that sort of way, I mean, Alzheimer's did offer strange gifts between me and my mother, just in the sense that she loosened and opened up to me in a way she

never would have before. You know, people talk about being in the moment and the goal of trying to live in the moment. And Alzheimer's patients have no choice because they have lost their memories. Talking about the past can be such a tricky minefield for them. So they really are in the moment in a way that can be quite instructive. And so my mother, I mean, part of what happened is that we started interacting in just a totally different way where we were no longer confined by our old roles. And that created new possibilities for us. And it was sort of like this moment of the Wizard of Oz finally revealing himself from behind the curtain. And instead of showing me the magical landscape that she had created, she just kind of came out as the very real, not larger than life, but kind of all too human person that she actually was.

And yeah, I got to see that she struggled with exactly what I had struggled with and had so many doubts and questions and she had just never talked about them until that time. like, well, this is the thing that I base my standard of how I should be. One by one, they get checked off as like, oh, that wasn't actually the reality. I mean, she shared something with you about your brother when he was very young. It was a pretty huge secret that even like your brother, eight years older than you, and you're both long into adulthood, you never knew. And maybe we'll just share that for anyone who wants to dive into the book because it's pretty surprising. But just the fact that she's like, all of a sudden, everything starts to become, the facade drops away and you're like, oh, so she struggled just like me. And she asked for help just like me. I have to imagine there was something in you that kind of said, okay, I actually asked for help and didn't get it. And

I found my way through anyway, because I thought I had to do it that way. I wonder if reflecting on that or feeling like that actually became a source of real strength and power for you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of my takeaway from reckoning with my mom's illusions and her myths and frankly her lies, I can tell that part of what she did absolutely was conceal her choices from me. And it was because she felt embarrassed and she felt self-conscious. Part of what I learned is that oftentimes these illusions can serve us quite well. So even though I created this impossible list for myself and this impossible set of goals for myself as a mother, because I didn't know the truth of her choices, you know, the thing my mother used to always say to me was, you'll do this the same way I did.

You'll just, you'll do it. It turned out, of course, she'd had a tremendous amount of help that she'd concealed from me, but that sort of illusion kept me going. In the book, I talk about my relationship to weightlifting, which is sort of my, you know, the thing that gets me through caring for my mother. And I talk about this woman at the gym who I see doing pull-ups. And I think to myself that I'll never be able to do pull-ups. They're impossible for me. But I watch this woman doing them and she inspires me.

And I think, okay, if she can do them, I can do them. And eventually I'm doing them. And one day I'm doing a set of pull-ups and the same woman comes up to me and says, I've always wanted to do pull-ups. And I say, no, you're my inspiration. And she says, no, no, I haven't been doing real ones. I've been using a band to help me this whole time. And the whole time I didn't see the Black resistance band that had been supporting her. So often, I think we see what we want to see. And we don't see things that are before our eyes. I mean, looking back, even though my mom

was not completely truthful with me, I think a less gullible person might have understood that she was hiding certain things from me. And I didn't see those things because I wanted to revere her. I wanted her to be a superhero. I wanted the woman at the gym to be doing real pull-ups. So often I think when we need inspiration and when we need role models, we find them despite reality or despite the evidence before our eyes. And those stories can help us and aid us and inspire us to be better versions of ourselves. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day also, it feels like the more we can strip away illusion, the more we're able to see ourselves in each other,

the more we realize, you know, like they're but for God's grace, go I. And, but it also requires us to dismantle a certain part of our reality that can be kind of painful along the way. And so often I think we would rather live in that illusion and not endure the pain of having to reconfigure it. Not even realizing in the moment that that's what we're doing. But when something really jarring happens, circumstantial, that forces us into that place, it can be brutal and turn our world upside down. But when we then navigate our way into some sort of successful outcome in that new reality, it's so empowering in ways that we

never imagined. That's exactly right. So I think two things. I think on one hand, we always need illusions and stories in some form. And we confront those illusions as such when we're ready to. The other thing I think about is that, you know, I remember when I was in that time period of caring for my mother. She lived in my house when my daughter was seven years old, so I was caring for a young child while caring for my mother. And it was just a brutal time. I mean, I would go through a thousand sort of tantrums a day from my mother who would think everything from, you know, she would accuse me of trying to poison her. She would think that I was spying on her. She would then think that I was doing far too much for her and that I was the best daughter in the world. So I remember when I was in that juncture and I just a piece of coal that has been subjected to time and pressure. And that no piece of coal would choose that.

Like you would never opt in for that much pressure for so long because it feels like too much and it feels like you can't do it. But when you're in it, you endure. Of course you do. What choice do we have? I mean, I think a lot of us right now, again, during this pandemic probably have moments where we think this is so hard. I can't do this. You know, I mean, there's so much uncertainty. There's so much difficulty. There are so many emotions, but we get through it. We, we endure when we think we can't. And to get to the other side of something like that, you know, is to come out stronger and with clarity and with a level of brilliance but to become the diamond is no easy thing metamorphosis like that is just by nature so painful and it involves the stripping away of what you had been you know the the kind of black cloak that had been protecting you and shielding you and all those layers.

So to have to undo them and remove them is uncomfortable. Yeah. A friend of mine once described it to me as the gift of being dropped to her knees. And she was very intentional with the use of the word gift. He was like, it was horrendous, something she went through for a couple of years. And yet because of where she was when she came out the other side, she viewed it as an incredible gift.

But yeah, when you're in it, it's brutal, I think, for all of us, whether you've invited it or whether it's just happened. I mean, you're in this window also where you're simultaneously parenting up and parenting down. And at the same time, trying to write and be fiercely creative and build your career and create this example for your daughter that says, I can do this. It's really hard, but we can do hard things. And at the same time, hold onto the pursuits and the things that we hold dear and make it all happen. There's a moment, I guess, where in a moment of lucidity

with your mom, you revisit that story once again with her and she tells it again. And, um, and you ask her and you say, you know, like, well, well, of course, you're like, there's no end to the story. And she's like, she kind of comes clean, actually. She does. Well, what was so funny also is that, you know, I was writing this memoir as I was living with my mom and taking care of her. And so I was trying to figure out how I was going to end the book. And I thought, oh, well, one thing I could do is come back to this story. So I thought, why don't I just ask her about that story again? Because dementia, you know, I always imagined dementia as like a flooded basement where certain things you can't access and the flood takes out, but other things are on a high shelf and

miraculously they remain untouched. And when I asked my mother about the woman in the river and the story that she had told me years and years ago that her mother had told her, it was like that miraculous photograph that survives the flood. I mean, she remembered it immediately and she kind of stopped and smiled and she mean, she remembered it immediately and she kind of stopped and smiled and she had this wistful expression and she said, I can't believe you remember that story. And I said, yeah, you know, that's the one that has no ending. And she said, of course it has an ending. What are you talking about? And she came clean and supplied the ending and her, you know, the choice she had made with my brother. And

yeah, it was this uncanny moment of suddenly seeing her stripped away and seeing her come give me not a myth, but her actual self, unvarnished and unpolished and just unapologetic. And it was, you know, I felt just as my mother was slipping from me, that I had also finally connected with her as a real human being and as a real person, not as daughter to mother, or maybe just in addition to daughter to mother, person to person, human to human. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be interesting for you just writing a memoir about this entire experience while, because very often memoirs are sort of like in hindsight too. But while sort of like it's all unfolding in real time, while the people you're writing about in the circumstances are all alive, are all still a part of your current experience and almost like learning new things as you're writing that change the course of what you're actually writing. And which, so one of my curiosities is, you know, like sort of like changing the channel a little bit is you as a writer, when you enter something, you know, so you've written fiction in the past, When you decide to say, okay, I'm going to write a memoir, and it's about this memoir. I very much thought of myself as a fiction

writer when my mother came to live with me and it was so incredibly difficult and it put me in such new territory. Part of what I did at the time as a coping mechanism was I started to write these Facebook posts about just sort of the daily experience of caring for my mom and just little anecdotes from the day that would, for me, it would sort of be like taking the lid off of a pot to let a little bit of steam out. You know, I just needed the release of talking about caring for her. And by chance, an editor happened to see my Facebook posts and said, I think there's a memoir here. Would you be willing to write one? I said, no, I'm flattered, but absolutely not. And that same night, I wrote 70 pages about me and my mother. And I thought, oh, I think this

editor is right. I think there is stuff to be written here. And at first I thought, oh, I think this editor is right. I think there is stuff to be written here. And at first I thought, okay, the only way I can write this book is in the hopes that it will help someone out there who is either dealing with Alzheimer's in a loved one or is just caring for an aging parent. And if this book will help them navigate that, then, okay, I will do it for that reason. As I started working on it, my editor would often push back on me and say, okay, we need scenes with your father. We need to know what it's like to be the daughter of immigrants. We need to know more about what your mom left out or how she got away with hiding her choices from you. So she would push me to write about all the things that I was terrified to say. I think what's funny about writing a memoir is that we never have the perfect vantage point.

We're always in it. We're always implicated in the story. There's always that blind spot where you think, okay, 10 years from now, I'm going to look at this differently and appreciate it differently. So we're always implicated. And yeah, the hardest part for me was the ending because I was living it as I wrote it. And so there was this real time element of processing my life as it was happening. But I think ultimately that helped me and it gave me not only an outlet. I mean, it was cathartic to write about. It also kind of gave me a handle on the experience because I think the hardest thing in life is when you're going through something and

don't have the words for it. Yeah. I mean, I was also really fascinated that you write in a lot of detail about this kind of season with your mom living with you as she's progressing pretty quickly into Alzheimer's. Generally, when you write a memoir, you're very, very just honest and open and exposed with people who are alive and a part of your family. A lot of times what happens is, okay, so I'm going to write this pretending it's never going to go out into the public because I just need to be honest. And then when you write it and you realize this really tells a lot of not just my story, but their story, very often there's a compulsion to say, well, I need to show it to them to make sure they're okay with it. I'm curious whether you had that compulsion, but also it's not the same for you because of your mom's state.

And whether you kind of like were thinking, how do I navigate this? Yeah. So what's funny is that I remember calling my brother in a panic and saying, okay, this book is going to go out into the world and I don't know what to tell mom and being terrified. And I look back on that moment now with a bit of wistfulness, because I didn't realize, of course, that she would continue to decline. Yeah, I mean, she won't have the ability to read and process the book, unfortunately. One interesting thing is that I shared the book with my brother well before galleys were printed, you know, really early on in the process. And I said to him, you matter to me more than this book. So if there's anything in it that you're not comfortable

with, I want to know. We had never talked about my father. We had never talked about child abuse. We had never talked about all the things that had transpired in our home. And so, you know, the book enabled us to have conversations that never would have taken place otherwise. And for that alone, I'm incredibly grateful. I mean, that made writing the book so worthwhile. And it's interesting because you hear these things on TV or on the radio, you know, like on Oprah about how children of abuse never discuss it and how you can grow up in the same household and just somehow not connect about it. And yeah, my brother never thought that my father had harmed me. He thought that I was like the lucky, you know, privileged one. And I thought that he was the prodigal son who was the favorite and that my father, you know, that my brother was the perfect one to my father. So we both had these misunderstandings about one another. And so to be able to connect and say, oh my gosh, the whole time you were going through what I went

through was this wonderful bridge and this wonderful connection. Yeah, I would imagine so. I mean, also when you're writing this and really thinking through all of these things, you've got a daughter now too. And I'm curious how the process of writing this while your mom is slipping into this world, while you're also really trying to make conscious choices about how do I want to raise my daughter in the world that we're living in? And what are the messages that I want to share? What are the stories I want to share? And also knowing that your mom was living with you for a window of time and she became really close to your daughter. And how do you want your daughter to sort of like understand the relationship between all three of you?

I wonder if that was just sort of like constantly on your mind and maybe still is constantly on your mind. Oh, yeah. I mean, so, you know, in terms of that whole dynamic of, you know, my daughter is born, I see that I have a choice to either martyr myself or go after my dreams. I mean, that kind of fundamental choice carried through. And when my mom was living with us and her condition was clearly worsening, it was the same fundamental choice where I thought, okay, I can keep caring for my mother and I can

keep her with me, but that would involve self-sacrifice in a way where I had reached a point where I had, you know, I was so burnt out from caregiving that I'd stopped eating. I was really neglecting myself. I'd stopped sleeping. I mean, I was just completely fried. And it was the choice of the woman in the river. I thought, what do I do here? Do I save myself? How do I go about this? And what does that mean for my child? And what suddenly dawned on me was that my daughter and my mother would want me and need me to take care of myself. And that sacrificing myself was not doing either of them any favors. And it certainly wasn't helping me. So, you know, the decision to let go of my mother and have her be in an assisted living facility, which we're fortunate enough

that that was an option. For many people, it isn't. And that's something that we need to talk about in this country. But so that decision, part of what informed that was thinking to myself, I want my daughter to know that sometimes we need to make decisions like that that are so hard and wrenching and that we need to let go. But that when we do, it's not that the world comes crumbling down. So, you know, my mother is now in an assisted living facility where I wish I could go back and tell myself this, but she is happier there than she was when she was living with me. I had no idea that that would be possible, but she's like the queen bee, like mayor of the assisted living facility. So my daughter and I visit her all the time. And yeah, part of what I learned is that we can let go and that doesn't mean failure and we can can let go and that's how people, when you let go of the kid in the river, that's

how they learn to swim. And then you come back to one another stronger for that experience of letting go. Yeah. Not easy. Not easy. But powerful when we're sort of willing to take that step. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out here in this container of good life project, if I offer up this phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

I think to live a good life, there's that moment on the airplane, on the in-flight safety message where they tell you to put your oxygen mask on in the event of an emergency. I think living a good life means putting on your own oxygen mask first at any and all possible moments. And tending to yourself gives you more resources to tend to those around you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes.

And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button

in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.