This I Believe: Life Lessons (13 page)

My Parents as Friends

Bhavani G. Murugesan

I believe in living with my parents. It's been almost two years since I came to live at home. I never meant to stay this long—not after years of boundless freedom at schools, stumbling out of cabs at four in the morning, leaving kitchen sinks filled with week-old dishes.

Coming home was meant to be a short, inexpensive stint until I passed the bar, fixed my broken bank account, and moved to the Big City. Today, at twenty-seven, long after my bank account is softly purring, I continue to live with my parents. I have come to rediscover them in ways that my teenage mind would not allow—as adults and as friends with flaws and oddities very simply their own. And sometimes, even mine.

Growing up, I remember my father as a silent, stern man—not the sort of person around whom one could laugh. As a teenager arriving in America, knowing nothing, I wanted a father who could explain the human journey. In college, when friends called home for advice, I would slump into a deep melancholy for what I did not have.

Then one night after my move back home, I overheard my father on the telephone. There was some trouble. Later, Appa shared the problem with me. Apparently my legal training had earned me some privileges in his eyes. I talked through the problem with Appa, analyzing the motives of the people involved and offering several negotiation strategies.

He listened patiently before finally admitting, “I can't think like that. I am a simple man.”

Appa is a brilliant scientist who can deconstruct the building blocks of nature. Yet
human
nature is a mystery to him. That night I realized that he was simply not skilled at dealing with people, much less the turbulence of a conflicted teenager. It's not in his nature to understand human desires.

And so, there it was—it was no one's fault that my father held no interest in human lives while I placed great importance in them. We are at times born more sensitive, wide-eyed, and dreamy than our parents and become more compassionate, curious, and idealistic than them. Appa perhaps never expected me for a child. And I, who knew Appa as an intelligent man, had never understood that his intelligence did not cover all of my passions.

So what do I believe? I believe that coming home has saved me hours of wrestling with my angst on a shrink's couch. It has saved me years of questioning and confusion. It has saved my friends from carrying my destructive emotional baggage. I now see my parents as people who have other relationships than just Appa and Amma, relationships that shape and define them. I now overlook their many quirks—quirks that once seemed like monumental whims directed at me and me alone. I have forgiven myself for my picked-up habits, my homegrown eccentricities.

Best of all, I now know my parents as friends: people who ask me for advice; people who need my support and understanding. And I've come to see my past clearer. After our move from India, my parents have become my only link to a great part of my heritage. Knowing them makes me secure in where I come from and where I'm going.

A Good Neighborhood

Jeff Nixa

I live in a bad neighborhood.

At least that's what people said about it. “Cottage Grove Avenue,” said a friend. “That's a bad neighborhood.” A co-worker said, “I wouldn't buy there. There's no resale value.” One mother was appalled. “Don't you want your kids to go to a good school?” Even our real estate agent sat me down and said, “Think about your wife's safety.”

Soon the fear began to sink in. I called friends who lived there and asked, “Do you feel safe?” They laughed. “Have you been talking to real estate people again?” They invited us to dinner, in the bad neighborhood.

As we drove up, I scanned the streets as if on a recon mission in Fallujah. But our friends welcomed us in, poured wine, gave thanks, and passed homemade bread. After dessert they brought out crime statistics on a map from local police.

Sure enough, in the blocks surrounding us a vacant house had been vandalized. Drugs confiscated from a woman. A man passed out in a yard. This was as bad as—college.

Then I noticed the same symbols dotting the rest of the city: robberies, rapes, domestic violence. That month burglaries and auto thefts were worse in a wealthy suburb.

That's when I realized that all of those warnings really weren't about crime, real estate values, or schools. They were code words white folks like me use to signal “low-income people of color”—a perfectly concealed racist weapon, hidden deep in the anxious beliefs of my own friends and colleagues.

I believe sometimes the truth does set people free. So we bought the house on Cottage Grove.

That was seven years ago. No one told me that the day we moved in, a pack of joyful kids would run over to meet our kids. That our historic house cost less than a minivan. About Demetrius, raising his nieces while their mother is doing time. About Jose and Maria's burrito place. And Mike, the ponytailed Harley biker who one day stepped out directly in front of a speeding car and yelled “Hey,” to the startled driver, slamming his fist on the hood, “there's kids around here!”

In my “bad” neighborhood, we sit on front porches, hear the neighbor girls' jazz double-dutch jump rope riffs, and buy snow cones on hot days out of an old guy's shopping cart.

Sure, there are nuisances here: litter, alley dogs, clutter in yards. But danger? I've learned that stupid behavior is color blind, and bullets prefer alcohol and drug deals over law-abiding citizens any day.

I love my new neighborhood—it balances my life, shows me real color, and saves me from things far worse than litter or a stolen Subaru—like the blindness and coded racism of privilege.

Believing in People

Rebecca Klott

I believe in the power of children.

As a psychotherapist for children in a small rural county I have watched, for ten years, children overcome some of the worst types of abuse and neglect one can imagine. I have watched children carry Sesame Street–character lunchboxes into my tiny office, sit in a chair twice the size of their tiny bodies, and tell me how they are surviving while their daddies cook meth in the bathtub to make money so they can have electricity the next month. I have sat with teenagers of alcoholic parents as they try to figure out a way to help their parents get better. I have visited homes where the walls appear to move as cockroaches take over the house of a five-year-old boy.

Children can and do survive. Recently, a young woman I had treated in the beginning of my career saw me in a local grocery store. She was an angry, aggressive sixteen-year-old when I first met her. She'd been sexually molested, beaten, abandoned, and placed into foster care before I knew her. She'd seen scores of mental health professionals and had no use for the lot of us. She had scowled at me, called me names, and told me I had no business talking to her. And she'd been right. I was young, inexperienced, and knew nothing that would take away the grief she knew. So, when I saw her ten years later, my stomach lurched with regrets about all of the things I knew then that I couldn't give her when we first met.

I wanted to disappear, to get lost in a shelf full of potato chips. But she came straight to me and shoved a clean, soft hand my way, and a smile spread across her wide lips.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?” It was all I could say, as I knew I had done nothing for this girl-woman.

“For believing in me.”

And she was right, I had believed more in
her
than I had in myself.

She went on to tell me about how much this belief had bothered her, haunted her, angered her, and healed her. And how she couldn't get away from it. She had finished high school, late she told me, but she'd finished. She was working part-time and taking classes to become a massage therapist. She had one child. And this was what she said she felt I'd helped her with the most: believing in this child, her child, as her parents had not believed in her.

I believe that believing in a person can help them believe in themselves. I believe we must,
must
keep believing even when we want to stop, to turn away in disgust and despair. Because, even when we think there is no hope for a child, they might show up next to the Pop-Tarts in a local store and remind you of their power.

Becoming Friends

Larry Chaston

This I believe: when people find their commonalities they can get along and become friends.

In 2002, I was stationed at a firebase in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda had invaded the country a decade before and had imposed their fundamentalist ideas on the local Pashtoon people. We were there to gain back their freedom. I knew we had to win their hearts as well as their minds—but this would not be easy. As Christians (Catholic, Mormon, and Protestant), we were considered infidels.

In January of that year, al-Qaeda destroyed the mosque where the villagers worshiped. Our unit offered to help rebuild the mosque, but our senior interpreter, Abdul Hajji, discouraged the plan. He did not want infidels building their place of worship.

Abdul and I discussed other possibilities, including keeping infidels, us, away from the mosque, especially after it was built. We could accidently desecrate it with thoughtless acts. I told Abdul we were the same: we both believed in strong family, we both honored the laws of Moses, and we both prayed to the same God.

Abdul asked, “Do you pray to Allah?”

I responded, “I pray to the God of Abraham.” Abdul nodded his head. We had found our commonality, and the mosque project began.

We paid a local architect to design the mosque and local laborers to build it. We purchased all of the materials, the bricks and logs, from local suppliers. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne were assigned to provide security and support. By working together, the infidels and the Pashtoons, we replaced the destroyed mosque and repaired the damage al-Qaeda had done to the community.

Several times a week al-Qaeda fired on our unit. Many of their rockets landed in the farmers' fields around us and even crashed through their roofs, landing in their homes—often without exploding.

Our executive officer, “the Captain,” who in real life is a farmer from Idaho, had an idea. He wanted to destroy all of the unexploded rockets in the surrounding fields. So the Captain went from house to house, asking if the family had unexploded bombs or rockets in their homes or fields and offered to destroy the ordnance to keep the children safe.

The Pashtoon people were so pleased they began coming to the firebase gate, asking for the Captain and showing him where rockets were located, allowing us to destroy the explosives. Soon all of the loose ordnance was destroyed. We had worked together to protect their children.

I found commonality with our interpreter, Abdul. The Captain found it with the fathers of the children around our base, allowing us to accomplish our goal of helping the people of Afghanistan.

I believe that God has placed each of us on this earth with a mission, part of which is to get along with our brothers and sisters, no matter what their creed or culture. In working with people and soldiers all over the world, I have seen time and again that when people find their commonalities, they are more likely to come together and become friends, even under the most stressful conditions.