#29 - Letting the Oil Run Off
When we sold the food business my parents started in the early 1980s a few years ago, I was deeply concerned it would kill my father.
That’s because it was the truest expression of his undivided self, weaving together his epic journey from India to America as a student of food, chicken, pigs, and agriculture, his lifelong desire to be an entrepreneur, and his lucky partnership with my mother, whose loyalty and tenacity made it possible for him to build the life of his dreams.
It was painful for all of us to let the business go because its constant churning characterized our relationships with one another more than the milestones and celebrations that punctuate time for other families.
My sister and I had a single shared birthday party all our lives, immortalized on a VHS tape (that includes footage of me licking a Big Bird cake topper) resting on a shelf somewhere in my parents’ garage.
Not once did the four of us go on a vacation together for longer than two days, or farther away than Las Vegas or San Diego, as to not leave the business unattended.
While time stopped briefly for our graduations, these moments were more about assuming greater responsibility as opposed to celebrating achievements. Completing my formal education inched me closer to the business, which I was groomed for as the only willing participant.
I internalized this self-eroding devotion to work that my father modeled as my dharma — that we were uniquely poised as educated immigrants in this generous country, and it was both our privilege and duty to leave nothing in the tank.
With some caveats I have integrated related to sacred rest, I still feel this deeply as an American with progressive values, and I revisit it over and over in my stories as an act of reclaiming the narrative on national gratitude that has been hijacked by conservatives.
The oil in the machinery of our family enterprise was thicker than blood, so letting it run off, in my bleakest moments of guilt when I was sure I was abdicating my filial responsibility by selling, felt like I was inviting death to seep into our joints instead.
When I wasn’t cloaked in this fear, my reasons for ejecting myself and my parents into a new life utterly made sense. Even amidst the bustle of the enterprise, we were lonely. The arc of our business had reached its peak long ago and we languished as it plateaued into monotony.
It was profitable, but it had stopped affording us the excitement of its adolescence with its fits and spurts of growth that kept us all scrambling. Instead it became something to maintain, an inert entity managing to survive in an inhospitable climate for manufacturing real food.
My father, like many founding entrepreneurs, struggled to let me take risks that might have pushed us into some new era. At first I thought he didn’t trust me. Years and hundreds of conversations later I realize that perhaps he sensed I was bored. His protection, even if it was partly borne of patriarchal insecurity, was a gift of intuition.
Still, I yearned for creative freedom, and a life with my parents without stacks of invoices, taxes, and the mounting stress of running a food company distorting our love for one another. I also wanted to succeed in a profession I chose for myself rather than one I was born into in order to prove to myself that I could craft a vision.
Selling was a hard sell though, especially in the beginning. Where I saw an opportunity for completion, my father saw failure, the demise of something perfectly fine, the central part of his identity being cleaved away by time disguised as me.
It is excruciating to accept that all things have a life-cycle, a finite loop, that their inherent goodness doesn’t enable them to transcend.
Only after my dad hurt himself working outside did he yield completely. Being laid up at home while I worked on the sale, and went to school at night with food and a chai thermos packed by my mom softened his perspective.
So over the course of a year, we thrashed our way through to a close. It was a decent deal financially, and it honored some noble stipulations my father set forth, such as our acquirer giving long-term jobs to all of our employees.
That was eight years ago, and I’ve done a lot of things since then, but that working life with my parents still permeates the liminal spaces between my projects as a plasmatic binder, a fluid bridge to the meaningfulness of a past when work threw us all together.
The rigor and memory of that experience, of precipitating success in the crucible of family business life, is permanent conditioning for the endurance sport of living today, of building and deconstructing work that matters, in a time when it couldn’t matter more.
Reading Notes
Mandy Brown on knowing when to quit.
“To quit is to refuse the dry, narrow path that has been laid out before you; to venture off into the woods where you know there’s water and life.”
Karin McGrath Dunn on the tension between the past and the present in family business.
“Trying to meet the needs of both my family of origin and the family I was building often felt impossible. The guilt of not being fully present for either weighed heavily on me.”
A Narrative Initiative interview Malkia Devich Cyril on reclaiming and transforming grief into meaningful movements.
“[Grief] is one of those cultural phenomena that shapes how and whether we participate, how and whether we respond, and whether we can move from responsive protests to organized engagement. That only happens to the degree that we understand and transform the way grief is working on our communities.”
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