The Misfit Parent
Last night, my daughter danced while brushing her teeth, toothpaste foam flying as she sang. I felt the familiar urge rise: hush it, fix it, don’t let it slide.
“Can you just—” I started.
Then stopped. She froze. Expecting correction.
What was I about to say? Can you just be quieter? Cleaner? Less?
I hate how familiar it feels. How easy it is to become the parent I swore I wouldn’t be. How those words sit, ready, on my tongue. Why do I still carry ghosts in my mouth?
She’s 11 and forming a distinct sense of self. She’s one of those “good kids”—doesn’t ask for much, eats her veggies, goes to bed by 8:30 p.m., does her homework conscientiously.
She is also loud, curious, messy, alive. She blurts out questions about planets and protests, builds pillow castles for the dog, sings her way off-key through the evening. And some days, I feel my whole body tighten—not because I want her to be different, but because I was raised to be compliant.
A few days ago, we were arguing about something small—socks on the stairs, maybe a math homework sheet floating around the dining room? I don’t remember now. I had raised my voice,
“Why can’t you just do the right thing? It doesn’t take much, you know. Why don’t you get it?”
She had crossed her arms. And as I stood there reeling, seething, at the intersection of rage and regret, she looked up and said:
“I think we’re all broken in some way.”
No drama. No accusation. Just a quiet piece of wisdom. Like she was naming the weather. Guilt washed over me instantly. The instinct to undo the pain I’d just caused. To rush in with reassurance: No, I didn’t mean that, love. You’re not broken!
But she didn’t need fixing. She wasn’t asking for comfort. She was simply stating something she felt while tying her shoelaces.
I knew, in that moment, this wasn’t something to refute. It was something to receive.
At her age, I had no language for brokenness. No space to say what wasn’t working.
My mother bled through all nine months of pregnancy, quietly hoping for a miscarriage. When I finally arrived, she didn’t see me for three days.
Love in our home meant provision, elaborate birthday parties that could’ve easily passed off as mini-weddings, Louis Vitton purses and Pierre Cardin dresses … but not softness.
There were no forehead kisses or wholesome hugs. Just a constant barrage of expectations. A’s were assumed. B+ meant failure. Joy was conditional. Pride was for public display. Shame stitched tightly into everyday life. I didn’t have the kind of childhood where you could be loud, or weird, or right. I learned early to make myself smaller.
The things I loved—elocution, art, poetry—were distractions from real success, I was told. When I didn’t get into business school, when I fainted during a dissection and ruled out medicine, when I struggled with economics but excelled in psychology, I watched my parents’ dreams for me fray.
Their loud sighs and relentless berating were suffocating. So, I kept chasing achievements my entire adult life, hoping one award, one promotion, one more executive title might garner affection, adulation, maybe even respect.
35 years of trying to be good enough. Hoping to be loved. Adopting self-doubt as my middle name.
But when my daughter arrived—wailing, certain—at 10:21 p.m. on a spring night in 2014, something shifted. I became decisive in ways I didn’t know I could be. I trusted myself. I dismissed advice. I started parenting the child I had, not the one the world told me to raise.
Imperfectly. Improperly. Immarcescibly.
Yes, I’m the disciplinarian. But I also stick out my tongue in selfies. I ask her friends about their current obsessions—not just their grades. I burn brownies and then buy ice cream. I let her hear me cry. Watch me paint with my hands. See me undone. I want her to witness all of the ways in which I am unapologetically human.
At dinner one evening, a friend’s three-year-old pushed away the spaghetti her mom had served with theatrical disgust. Without thinking, I slurped a noodle from my plate, exaggerated a repugnant face, stuck my tongue out, and said “bleh!” She giggled. My daughter joined in.
When her mom returned from the buffet area, warm garlic bread in tow, she scanned the scene: red sauce splattered all over the white tablecloth, our faces stuffed, our laughter hearty.
“What on earth are you doing?” she asked her daughter, voice sharp with embarrassment.
“It’s fine,” I said, twirling another noodle. “We just figured out how delicious this spaghetti is.”
My friend stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“You’re supposed to be the adult.”
Aah. The weight of rules, decorum, doing things the way they “ought” to be done. I quietly smiled at my daughter and slurped again.
“Bleh” the little one shouted gleefully.
We’ve started passing a journal back and forth. Tucked under pillows. Slipped into bedside drawers. A space for the things too hard to say out loud. The rules are simple: nothing written will be discussed in person and nothing is out of bounds.
Last week, my daughter wrote: “Did you always want to be a mom?”
And after everything—after all the breaking and rebuilding—I wrote back: “Not always. But I’m grateful you chose me to be yours.”
Later that night, as the dishwasher hummed, porch lights cast a soft glow, the air purifier purred, our pup exhaled in little dream-puffs beside my hip, his ribcage rising and falling like a metronome, my daughter, all knees and elbows, fit against me like she was always meant to be there.
We were wordless, melting into each other’s presence under the red glow of the digital clock. For a few precious minutes, we breathed in a rhythm that felt unintentional, inconspicuous.
Inhale. Exhale. Three bodies. One cadence.
There was an itch on my ankle I didn’t scratch—I didn’t want to break the spell, separate myself from this pulse of belonging. It was so quiet you’d miss it. But in that moment, I felt it: a dissolving of boundaries.
Between child and adult.
Between giving and receiving.
Between who I once was and who I’m still becoming.
XOXO
Mansi.
