May I be excused from these old family dynamics?
home for the holidays
In a bout of homesickness over the summer, I booked a flight home to spend Thanksgiving with my family solo for the first time in a while. It’d been over a year since I’d been home and all of our family time in recent memory was spent with my husband, Ryan.
When I was younger, I feared bringing home a partner who came from a seemingly functional family. I was ashamed of the ways I interacted with my parents — the fights that broke out, the frustration I felt with them. Back then, I had neither experienced the level of emotional safety with a partner that I feel with Ryan nor had the recognition that our family dynamic was quite ordinary for a Chinese American family. A generational divide mired with cultural nuances that we weren’t equipped to handle.
Turns out, being in a partnership with someone you feel deeply secure with and speaking truth to once embarrassingly shameful experiences makes way for repatterning old dynamics.
Over the years, he’s become my emotional security blanket of sorts, lowering the temperature of our family dynamics — approaching disagreements with openness and a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. I’ve come to treasure his relationship with my parents. Their interactions have served as a reference point for me that things can be different. By not being burdened by our old dynamics, he can cultivate levels of empathy and patience I’ve struggled to do my entire life.
And yet in the safety and comfort of his presence, I’ve found myself avoiding spending too much time with my parents without him — perhaps a subconscious lack of faith that I can trust fall into the arms of all the inner work I’ve done to resource myself.
And so during the cross-country flight home, I contemplated how I wanted to show up for my week at home. After a meaningful family trip to China in April, I knew that it was possible to coexist peacefully. For me, the easefulness of our trip was in large thanks to the clarity I found in what boundaries I needed to set and uphold throughout the two weeks together.
In preparation for the time at home, I meditated on a few similar intentions:
Cultivate morning stillness: in the absence of grounding myself with a meditation and journaling first thing in the morning, I find my days devolve into reactivity
Move my body: get out of my head and into the world every day
Communicate my schedule upfront: I find it’s easier to honor alone time if I’m clear about my intentions for the day and set expectations of when I’m available to spend time together
Reset my body on east coast time and head to bed early: grumpy me tends to arrive after 10pm
It’s taken me years to understand precisely what I need to do to resource myself and create the conditions to show up with my parents in a way I’m most proud.
The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
As is now tradition, I spend the weeks before seeing my family grounding myself into states of presence. Before this trip, I sat a meditation retreat and did boundary work. Before our trip to China in April, I similarly sat a meditation retreat to remind myself the impermanence of it all.
I recognize that I won’t always have the spaciousness to go on a meditation retreat before seeing my parents (as was the case last week when we traveled to Beijing last minute to be with my grandmother who was admitted into the ICU). But with time, I’ll no longer need to prepare myself so intently. So long as I uphold the boundaries I need to feel like myself, I can draw strength from the reference points I’ve created with them of the way things can be, surrendering memories of how things once were.
In Chinese, there's no equivalent term for personal boundaries. Boundaries (分界线 and 边界) are defined as dividing lines and borders. The lack of a notion around relational boundaries makes sense when you understand the history of China — families of four sharing a studio apartment, roommates of eight sharing a dorm room. There was no space for boundaries when you’re trying to survive.
Many of the negative interactions throughout our lifetime together has been the result of boundaries being crossed and misaligned expressions of love. My parents attempting to convey their love for me in a way that’s missed the mark with my love language and vice versa.
It’s only when I’ve been able to bring awareness to what my needs are that I’ve been able to clearly articulate to them what boundaries I need them to respect. Please knock before coming into my room. Please give me space in the morning to meditate. Please allow me to make my own mistakes so I can learn the lesson my own way. Please trust me so I can trust myself.
In a conversation with my mom, she shared that boundaries can be hard when the human in front of you used to be a baby in diapers. These days, I find myself empathizing with my parents in ways I never imagined because I finally have the spaciousness to ask about their lives, their struggles, their dreams. I can’t imagine how challenging it must have been to raise two children, continuously trying your best to meet their needs at every age, particularly when your own needs as a child weren’t met.
Lately, when I part ways with my parents, I’m haunted by Tim Urban’s The Tail End — a sobering reminder that assuming we spend 10 meaningful days with our parents a year in adulthood, by the time we graduate “from high school, [we have] already used up 93% of [our] in-person parent time. [We’re] now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.”
As my parents age and we grapple with the declining health of their parents, I feel a heaviness when I leave them. It’s one last time I’ll see them. This is the reality, tragedy, and joy of growing up and growing old: it becomes increasingly clarifying who and what matter in life as our time on earth together dwindles.
I rest knowing that despite how hard it’s been, all this inner work I’m doing is paving the way for one of my proudest accomplishments: healing my relationship with my parents this lifetime.
As we head into the holiday season, I hope you have a meaningful time with the loved ones you celebrate with and give yourself the grace knowing you’re doing the best you can.
What boundaries are you honoring? What old dynamics are you navigating?
Say hi in the comments or on Twitter / X :)
If this essay resonated with you, you may also like:
Thanks to Ryan for reviewing a draft of this essay.
I learned this framework not too long ago. I find it helpful, and I keep coming back to it in my mind:
• *Expectations* are limits we would like to place on other people’s behavior. (“I need you to knock before entering my room.” “Please don’t call me after 10pm.”)
• *Boundaries* are limits we choose to place on our own behavior. (“If you talk to me like that again, I’m leaving.” “I don’t pick up the phone after 10pm.”)
There’s a lot of moral and cultural confusion because people often talk about “crossed boundaries” when what they really mean is “unmet expectations” (as defined above).
Unmet expectations can pose a serious problem in relationships. They can traumatize. They can constitute major ethical violations and social breaches. They’re not exactly the same thing as “crossed boundaries”, though, because they’re fundamentally a conflict with someone else’s free will.
The meaning of “boundary-crossing” is when you violate your own protective self-limits. Choosing to pick up the phone after 10pm, for example, even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t.
Sometimes we reach for the moral urgency of language about “crossed boundaries” because we find ourselves re-experiencing complex trauma—for instance, when our parents are treating us badly. We want to grab hold of some clout and use it in self-defense and self-advocacy. In those cases, I think natural clout already lies in the importance and validity of the relational rupture itself. The emotional maltreatment of a child is no trivial matter at all, although the people responsible for it will generally stonewall and insist otherwise.
thank you for sharing, this really resonated with me! i’m also home visiting my family, and having experienced a healthy relationship, am unlearning all the usual patterns of behaviour that i’ve grown up with. my relationship with them has actually gotten better after having moved away as an adult, and i think i need to learn how to set better boundaries with them too while i am here.