Finding My Way Back to What My Parents Carried Forward
What we leave behind to fit in—and what we spend years trying to reclaim. A powerful reflection on culture, family, and rediscovering home through food.
I learned to cook from my mom. Not formally; there were no recipe cards, no measured tablespoons. I learned by standing in a kitchen full of warmth and smell and sound, watching her work with the quiet confidence of someone doing something she had done a thousand times. I absorbed it without meaning to. And then, for years, I tried hard to forget it.
I wanted pasta. I wanted sandwiches. I wanted the kinds of foods my friends were bringing to lunch, the ones that didn’t require explanation. Indian food was something we ate at home, in a language my friends couldn’t understand. I wasn’t embarrassed exactly, but I was aware. And awareness, at that age, can do the same work as shame.
The distance we put between ourselves and home
There is a particular kind of assimilation that happens quietly, in kitchens, lunchboxes and grocery carts. Nobody tells you to do it. You just notice what the world around you is eating, and you start to want that instead. It feels like a choice. It feels like a preference. It is only later that you understand it was also a kind of erasure—slow, self-administered, entirely understandable and not entirely undoable.
My parents did a version of this too, though theirs was far harder. They came here from India already speaking English, not perfectly, not without the particular self-consciousness of speaking a language learned in a classroom rather than a home, but enough to navigate. They had some of my father’s family nearby, which helped. A thread of the familiar in an unfamiliar place. Still, the gap between who they had been in India and who they needed to become here was wide, and they crossed it deliberately, for us.
The clearest way they showed that was in how they approached my education. There was no ambiguity in our house about what mattered. School was not optional, grades were not negotiable and every opportunity the system offered, every program, every class, every door that was cracked open, was to be walked through. They had given up their lives in India so that my brother and I could have better ones here. The least we could do was take school seriously. That wasn’t said out loud very often. It didn’t need to be.
What I understand now, in a way I couldn’t then, is that their emphasis on education was also a form of love expressed in the only currency that felt secure.
What I understand now, in a way I couldn’t then, is that their emphasis on education was also a form of love expressed in the only currency that felt secure. In a new country, with accents that marked them as outsiders and a culture still learning to hold their kind of difference, education was something solid. A grade, a degree, a credential: These were things that could not be taken away. They pushed us because they were protecting us. They were trying to make sure we would never have to depend on belonging to a room to survive in it.
I turned away from their food. I didn’t fully understand, yet, that I was also turning away from that logic from everything they had built and everything they had let go of, so I could stand where I was standing.
What moving away teaches you about home
And then I moved away. Not to a new country (nothing as dramatic as what they did), but far enough that my mother’s kitchen became something I had to travel to reach. Far enough that the smell of her cooking stopped being the background of my daily life and became, instead, something I had to remember.
The first time I tried to recreate one of her dishes in my own kitchen, I understood something I had been too close to see before: I didn’t know how to do it. Not really. I had the general shape of it, but the specifics, the hand movements, the way she judged doneness by sound rather than time, I had watched all of it and retained almost none of it. Because I had been watching without intending to learn. Without knowing, yet, that I would one day need to.
There is a slow grief in craving something you once had and didn’t value.
My parents didn’t have that luxury. They had to learn everything about this country knowing they needed it, that their children’s futures depended on their fluency, adaptability and willingness to absorb even the parts that didn’t feel like theirs. They couldn’t half-watch. They couldn’t opt out. And so they didn’t.
I am only now beginning to understand the particular hunger that must have lived alongside all of that effort. Not just for the food, but for the version of themselves that existed before they had to become someone new. For the ease of home, the kind of ease you don’t notice until it’s gone.
Craving what you once took for granted
There is a slow grief in craving something you once had and didn’t value. It isn’t sharp. It accumulates on Tuesday nights when you’ve cooked something perfectly fine, and it tastes like nothing, because what you actually wanted was something your mother made, and you can’t quite get it right, and she is hours away.
They built a home here out of memory and necessity and love, and they kept the food alive inside it even as so much else had to change.
I call her more now. I ask questions I should have asked years ago. She answers patiently, as she always has, without making me feel the weight of all the time I wasn’t paying attention. That patience is its own kind of inheritance.
What I am slowly learning (in the kitchen and in my work and in the way I understand my own story) is that home is not a place you leave once and then return to unchanged. It is something you carry, lose pieces of and spend your life trying to reassemble. My parents knew this before I did. They built a home here out of memory and necessity and love, and they kept the food alive inside it even as so much else had to change.
They sacrificed their lives in India for ours. The least I can do is learn to make the dishes they carried here with them.
I turned away from that table once. I won’t make that mistake again.
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Aayushi Doshi is a graduate student in Education Policy Studies at George Washington University, based in the Washington, DC area. She currently serves as an intern at the American Federation of Teachers, where she supports work focused on strengthening the public education workforce. Her... See More
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