As I spend more quality time with my mom, traveling through Tamil Nadu together, having more fun than we have had in ages, as I meet family members of my dad’s who knew different sides of him and have their own projections on him (just as I do), as I take in more of the history of my parents’ relationship, their wayward and devotional love, their story of weaving, unweaving, reweaving, a rage has started to bubble up inside me. 

This is a piece about patriarchy.

I am lucky to have beloved people, friends old and new, who have been able to invite me into their own experience of harm perpetuated by men, perpetuated on behalf of maintaining order, hiding vulnerability, and achieving set outcomes at all costs. Sometimes these conversations are beautiful and lead to a deepening of trust and tenderness that I never had access to in the first quarter century of my life. 

Sometimes, I myself am an instrument of this systemic harm, and I don’t always know it. I have had to learn a lot about repair, because that’s what happens when you hurt people you care about. At times, learning to release the longing to repair so that no one is forced to participate. I love myself more than I did before, and I’m more comfortable with uncertainty and surrender, and I also know that patriarchy is not done with me. 

I don’t think of myself as someone who hides my own vulnerability, but I do it nonetheless. My ego is a sneaky demon, telling me I’m doing everything to stay open to connection while at the same time keeping the truest feelings under wraps. It’s best to assume that I’m never going to fully free myself of this system. How could I? Just one generation ago, my parents were entangled in it, having no vocabulary or cultural frame from which to name or recognize these forces. 

The word “patriarchy” became a symbol between me and my dad, something I invoked when exasperated with his inability or unwillingness to see the ways I was hurting, a word he felt I used to dismiss his experience and steamroll my agenda over his feelings. We were used to talking about patriarchy in patriarchal ways. 

We did get to more tender conversations, eventually, near the end. But not enough, I’m sorry to say. My dad has left me with unfinished business, karmic debt, material and spiritual inheritance. There is yet unrecognized pain, un-felt feelings, unacknowledged patterns of control-seeking and saving face.

Today, I am made aware of rage through my resistance to it. Through the numbness that is felt throughout my body. Through the return to addictive tendencies that I have been entangled in since my childhood. Relapse is tough: there’s shame, guilt, regret, indignance, fear, futility. But I’ve been getting help. I’m learning to ask “what was I feeling that led me to use again?” So, the pattern becomes the portal through which I’m made aware of the rage and the grief. 

I’m aware that there’s a big cry in me, and it hasn’t come out yet; it’s not ready. Instead, I focus on the clamp, on the resistance, on the thing that says your rage is not welcome. Remembering a shut door from my childhood, trying to keep my parents out. They often did something a lot of Indian parents do: pretended to call the police. I think my dad even impersonated an officer one time. Almost a funny scene. Almost. 

As I soften and love the resistance, the emotions behind it get sharper. I realize I have a lot to say to the part of me that’s still carrying patriarchal wounding. I’m mad at you!! You have made me complicit in harm that I had no idea I was entangled in. You have enlisted me in a system of control and domination, and for what? To just perpetuate yourself.

I may not know all the ways to end patriarchy in the world, to stop wars and family conflicts, to end coercion and assimilation. I cannot go back and encourage my parents to actually choose for themselves, to remove the pressure applied by family elders in order to save face or avoid discomfort. I cannot undo the pain that I have caused by my own carelessness or internalized misogyny and denial of harm. But I can promise to root you out of myself. 

I can pause to witness all of the grief you have caused those I love and will cause those I am yet to love. I can surrender to a different way of being, a way that allows life force and the voice of the land to take up space in my body, a way where I am soft and tender regardless of what is thrown at me, and when I cannot be soft and tender I can still be present, I can ask for help, I can be imperfect, I can fail over and over and over again as I, along with my loved ones, strive towards wholeness, not just for me but for all of us children of mother earth.

The tears are flowing now. They are mine and they are also for something much bigger than me. I am one with the ocean, the raging furious ocean as seen on a stormy December evening from a tree-lined outcrop. The waves reach two stories tall, or more, and I just watch in awe at her power.

I remember the last time I took a large dose of mushrooms, sitting alone in ceremony at the shrine I had made for deep ancestral listening. It was here that I had a vision of a coming storm, one that my dad would walk right into. I could never imagine or predict his death but I knew something was changing and I was told in no uncertain terms to LET GO.

In that ceremony I felt myself one with the ocean, as I do now, and I felt myself held, and all around me were the grandmothers, standing together in the ocean, linking arms. An entire mesh network of grandmothers holding together the foundation of invisible support that has carried me and probably you this far and beyond. I call on them again now to hold me as I attempt a surgical extraction of the part of me that continues to embody and express the rigid order of patriarchy.

A voice says not surgical, because maybe the cut of a scalpel, as fine as it is, is too violent a force for this kind of alchemy. Maybe it's more like the growth of a banyan tree, slowly enveloping the wounded part until it's entirely held by vines, moringa stalks, papaya and banana trees, and the resulting overgrowth. Maybe it's a grove I can visit sometimes at night, lying at the base of the tree, listening to the chirping of cicadas and as the stars brighten above. 

Maybe it's not about holding "healing" so tightly as a journey. I remember again the call: LET GO. 

I am a very happy person. I am also a very angry person. In this moment I am both. Perhaps one day I might renounce my anger. I saw my dad do it in the six months before he passed on, in a moment that I still feel in awe of. I saw him, mid argument with me, take a breath and say, slightly under his breath: I have to let go. And just like that, he wasn’t angry anymore. It was the only time he ever let me have my say.

I’m learning, I think, to renounce that rigidity too. Today, though, I let my rage be a gateway into that sacred experience of being held. 

In this lifetime and in this body I will never be a grandmother; I feel them linking arms with me nonetheless. They smile, each of them a different atlas of wrinkles and teeth and piercing eyes. They tell me that I’m home.