Mashuq Mushtaq Deen

Mashuq Mushtaq deen: Liminal Spaces

I believe there is a great and painful gift wrapped up in this experience: We do not choose our families and we do not always agree with them, but we love them, and for the most part, we cannot really choose that either. It happens before we are rational beings, before children know they are separate from their parents; before parents fathom that their children will leave them. Maybe some of us will hate our families, but really, that’s just another facet of our love.

And so, what a place to practice love! (Love being a verb, and not a noun.) However my family treated me, however much their silence and their exile hurt me, I was close enough to see other things: that they were good people, if not always to me, then to others. That they came from a different culture and time. That they sacrificed their own comfort to help their family in India, to quietly donate their money to charity. That they were shy people, still uncertain, uncomfortable to take up space in this country that had been their home for decades. That they were sometimes treated unfairly because they were Brown, and that they sometimes talked about other people in unfair ways because of race or economics. That they were capable of changing these ways of being, that they were capable of shifting their views on politics, on inequality, and eventually, on me.