Last week marked my one year anniversary of moving back home with my parents. I had just turned 31 at the time and I was drowning in dread. I remember sitting in the corner of my empty apartment room in LA, on the phone with a good friend, balling my eyes out because I was resistant of moving back home. I shared a story about being at dinner with my parents earlier that week and how they were bickering non-stop. “They’ve normalized their toxic dynamic” I cried. I hardly made it through those two hours of dinner. Is this what I just signed up to go back and live with?
Growing up, my parents felt like strangers to me. I had always longed to be close to them, but I felt like our generational gap and divergent upbringings made it impossible for us to connect. I was a “spoiled” and privileged first generation American and a latch key kid who was raised by television. My parents were Filipino immigrants who grew up bathing themselves with a tabo1 and receiving corporal punishment by getting struck with a belt. I spent many nights at the dinner table struggling to begin a real conversation. Every time I tried, it led to nowhere. In my teenage years and early adult life, I began to rebel and act out due to the conflicting emotions I was experiencing around my parents—a deep hate, simultaneously intertwined with a deep love, feelings of hopelessness, yet still, an immense longing to understand.
My tita2 once shared a story with me about someone asking her why she got married. She humorously—but I believe also seriously—responded, “To get away from my parents!” A generation later, and while I wouldn’t use marriage as a way to escape my parents, it seems as though most millenials are still looking for every possible way to avoid ever having to live in a multi-generational household. However, as of late, research has been showing that the the cost of living and life crisis are causing many young folks to move back home.
Personally, I knew it was time for me to return for a while when I found out my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer in late July of 2021. While there were many other factors that played into my decision—such as quitting my job in May, earlier that year, and starting a small business the month after—my dad’s news and my concern for his and my mom’s health definitely played a huge role in making my decision final.
I made it almost 11 months living with my parents again. It was one of the hardest and most beautiful years of my life. As daunting and difficult as it was to be there, I don’t regret the decision I made. This chapter taught me that while I feel like I’ve been on this healing path for quite some time now, choosing to move back home was only the beginning.
Below is a How To Guide for anyone who may ever find themselves in the same challenging situation. May you find hope and light in my shared struggles, mistakes and lesson. You are never alone.
A few things before you read:
This guide is long form content. It is not meant to be skimmed through or read with partial presence. This newsletter is about healing, which means that reading it will often require some real, intentional work. I highly suggest reading this during a time when you know you won’t be interrupted.
Do your best to take the time to read and process each point. You don’t have to read all of it at once.
Take what resonates and leave whatever doesn’t. But when it does resonate, do allow yourself the time to connect to how and why. I hope the questions that I provided at the end of each point can help you with this process.
Bookmark this email. It’ll be that much easier to access it for whenever you want to come back and continue your work.
These How To steps are solely invitations. I am not here trying to tell you what to do because I think I know better. I’m simply drawing from my own experiences. In essence, these are notes that I’ve written to myself that I believe may have the potential to help others. The thought of sharing any of this scares me sometimes. This is exactly why I know I must.
This is the first of many long form guides. If you have feedback of any kind, please email me so that I can continue to learn, grow, and artistically serve you.
Guide #001: How To Live With Your Immigrant Parents As An Adult
1. Do not try to save, change, and/or fix your parents.
I had somewhat of a savior complex before moving in with my parents. I still cringe at the thought of this. I went home believing that my mission was in fact, to save them. I confess that it was egotistical of me to think this—to view them as my problem and responsibility, rather than as a potent resource for my entrepreneurial journey.
When I took a trip to the Philippines as an adult for the first time in February of 2020, I discovered a lot about myself. While I was there, I felt completely out of place and like I didn’t belong. It brought up repressed feelings of being confused about my identity as a Filipina, as an American, as a human. Coming back from this trip is what ultimately catapulted me into my journey of healing. Through mentors, healers, and therapy, I remembered the horrifying history of colonization. I grew a razor-sharp awareness to capitalism and patriarchy. I became livid from the gross reality that our ancestors had to endure. And I developed a deep understanding of how important it was to grieve and alchemize the pain of this knowing.
The reconnection to this knowledge transformed me. But I was naive in the beginning, foolishly believing that because doing this work sparked an awakening within me, that it meant everyone around me should experience it too. My parents are asleep, I thought. They were still operating in survival mode and it was my job to, as I mentioned above, save them. Again, cringe.
I recognized later on, when I felt the burden of the pressure I was putting on myself, that this was so far from the truth. I never even asked my parents what they needed before I made every effort to change the way they lived. I behaved in the way that I did convinced that what I was doing was out of love. I can acknowledge now that it was driven by a need to control.
I once heard someone say, “it takes a lot of courage to love someone without trying to change them.” I feel that in my bones every time I remember. Living with them for almost a year allowed me the opportunity to practice this. And when I started to change the way I looked at them—out of love—interestingly enough, they changed.
Empowering and useful questions I learned to ask:
Instead of being fixated on what I believe my parents need to change about themselves, what are some qualities about myself that I still wish to change and work on?
Where does my savior complex come from? What has history taught me about the role I must play as a woman? Is it true?
2. Prepare to feel like you’re moving backwards.
I developed a new kind of love for my dad last year. I specifically learned a lot about the ways in which patriarchy—a system that assigns a violent kind of power to males and insists that males are superior to everyone—not only hurts non-males, but is also a huge detriment to males and their ability to experience wholeness. Patriarchy demands that boys and men mutate and kill off the emotional parts of themselves—forcing them to adopt rigid and dangerous narratives of what it means to be a “man.” Understanding this allowed me to grow more compassion for my dad and bond with him in a way that I never thought I could.
While I did enjoy experiencing more of my dad’s playful and joyous side while living at home, I also began to remember how he would cover up a lot of his pain with humor. He used laughter as a defense mechanism often, and this became clear to me when he would blow up out of nowhere. An anger in me began to resurface upon experiencing this, which caused me to feel as though I was failing at healing because there were times when I would lash out in response to him.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to LUNAS to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.