My parents have never said I love you to me. Not once, in any language.
I used to think this was what made me incomplete. Now I think it means something was simply never built, not from coldness, but from a world that never asked them to build it.
My mom showed love differently. She would cut fruit for me after yelling about insufficient test scores. She would prepare my favorite food when I came home, despite checking my wallet and my bank account before I even walked through the door.
My dad is quieter about it. A lot of unpacked weight, passed down through the family the way these things travel, silently, and at full force. And yet he never once failed to show up at school to pick me up.
Many of us grew up in households where love was a verb, or a karaoke song, but never a sentence. Where care arrived as action — as sacrifice, as presence, as years of quiet labor, but rarely as words. Where "have you eaten yet?" meant "I have been thinking about you all week."
The distance I feel from my parents isn't distance. It is translation lag.
We are fluent in different dialects of the same love. They learned the language of action. I learned the language of expression. Somewhere between their world and mine, we are both standing at the edge of something we don't dare to cross.
What makes it harder is the ocean. When you build a life in another country, you don't just leave home. You leave the context that made you legible. The gestures, the silences, the unspoken codes that said everything without a word. In their absence, you start to wonder if the love was ever there.
It was. It is. It just speaks in a frequency you were never taught to hear.
If you have ever ended a call feeling more alone than before it started, not because anything went wrong, but because nothing went deep, this is for you.
The gap between you and your parents is not a failure of love. It is a failure of inheritance. They were never given the dictionary. And you are still learning how to speak this new language.
And that, too, is a kind of grit. One only our community will fully understand.
-Written by Jay Hanggawan
Born and raised in Indonesia, Jay now lives in Washington, DC, and is interested in the spaces where culture, identity, and care intersect.
