I sense throbbing, pounding pain. Its antennae extend into and around my brain like nerves alighting with fire — the first subtle, tingling notions of something maleficent and unruly. As I drive home from orchestra rehearsal, the pain delivers a sharp migraine, throttling my head despite the smooth pavement under the car’s wheels. With a migraine this intense, tears leak from my eyes as I greet my parents at the door. I feel as though my insides have turned to stone, and my head swells like a balloon. My parents swiftly whisk me to my room, turn the lights off and feel my head. The warm touch of their hand covers my forehead, and at that moment, I let myself fall into their hold.
—
We are no strangers to pain. I grew up incurring headaches and migraines periodically — their ravenous pain consistently rendered me numb. My parents face numerous back issues, pain that crawls and bites without warning, leaving them paralyzed from its ferocity. In these times, we find ourselves in the arms and hands of one another, along with our binding agent: Tiger Balm. I can’t tell you why Tiger Balm is so popular in my family, but in Asian households, the salve is a tried and true saving grace — a glue that holds us together. Its pliable, yellow paste has a strong, herbal scent. As soon as it is applied, it cools the vast plains of skin that coat the body and warms the capillaries and glands underneath. I am so indebted to Tiger Balm for how often it has rescued me from the trenches of human health that my parents joke it will be their gift to me on my wedding day.
Tiger Balm is the physical manifestation of a core belief in our household: the power of physical touch. The pressure of our hands infuses life into the recipient as we circulate the blood and move the flesh, revving up the body’s internal mechanisms. Specifically, our palm strength kneads and rolls away the pain, turning it docile and limp. My journey with physical touch can be traced back to birth. As an infant, I was plagued by eczema that forcibly coated my dry skin, from my legs to my eyelids. It was so grave that my parents had no choice but to put mittens on my tiny hands to prevent my tiny fingernails from digging into my crusted skin. Desperately looking for a solution, my parents learned from my doctor that sesame oil was the trick to alleviating my skin problems. They diligently kneaded me with sesame oil every night before putting me to bed, and eventually, their efforts relieved my excruciating itchiness. I imagine, during these massages, my limbs would glisten as my eyes digested my parents’ faces and my skin registered their graze, their touch alleviating my pain and reaching my heart.
From then on, I acknowledged the power of my parents’ touch. I grew confident that every flare-up of eczema, growing pains, soreness and headaches would inevitably succumb to a deep, thorough massage by my parents. Under their touch, I knew that my body would finally be able to rest as my parents took my pain into their hands. More importantly, the same way I relied on my parents, they relied on me. Countless times, I stepped and sat on my mother’s back (with her permission, of course) after she had spent a long day sitting in her office chair. With every prod to her lower back, she would sigh, and I would giggle! What seemed like only play to me was actually insurmountable physical relief for my mother. Every massage proved the necessity of our ability to touch and feel. We sustain each other; our heat and weight meld us neatly together.
At my family’s core, body language speaks more fluently than our mouths. As much as I trust their physical presence, I can’t always say the same when it comes to communication. Our different upbringings and philosophies frequently butt heads, resulting in yelling, crying and silence. We couldn’t always agree on where the line fell when it came to how far from home I could go for college or how late I was allowed to stay out or who I could hang out with. When I entered college, our boundaries continued to waver and fluctuate: phone calls that ended hesitantly, urgent texts to call as soon as possible, gaps of silence following stressful conversations. It seemed the words we were using to narrow the gap between us often ended up doing the opposite.
Before I entered college, my childhood room was my respite from my family. My mother joked that like a snake, I would emerge silently and return quickly back to my “nest,” hardly noticed by those who saw me. For all the slithering that I did, it was how I protected myself from difficult conversations with my family. Particularly, when I was applying to college, being able to meet in the middle was painful. On one occasion, I was called downstairs from my safe haven to the family room. My parents were waiting, the lights dim as if signaling the coming of a storm. The reason for the meeting was to discuss my desire to apply to schools in California. I stood in front of my parents, like a defendant testifying to the court, and listed the schools I wanted to attend, desperately trying to respectfully persuade them of my steadfast passion for living on the West Coast. I felt jumpy and nervous as the words trickled out of my mouth because I could read the skepticism and disapproval clear in their faces. The flame inside me dwindled. While I pressed on for the sake of fighting for myself, I wish I hadn’t, so that I could have avoided the emotional wounds incurred. The lack of oxygen was choking the fire I had so timidly stoked.
Sometimes, saving my breath meant saving a piece of my heart, or so I thought. My hope had always been that by hiding my true desires, I could protect myself and my parents from stress and worry. Unfortunately, this implied that the wishes of my heart and mind were innately stressful and worrisome, and for a while, I actually believed that. From experience, speaking my mind in front of my parents meant risking disappointment and being set back into a corner that my parents felt was most suitable for myself per their wishes. This made forging my path incredibly difficult. In college, there came difficult conversations about living in an apartment versus university housing and then whether I could go to Mexico with my friends for spring break. Each time, I feared having to pick up the phone and share the thoughts I had been trying to repress for days, weeks and even months. I braced myself to hear a side I didn’t always want to hear nor comply with. Trying to meet in the middle has blurred my ability to clearly see what is best for me, and I wonder whether I really know what I want or if my family knows better. In my journey toward independence, our separate ideologies have somewhat enacted a boundary between us. Yet, my transition into college has brought on a greater realization like a pinhole of light amidst my churning confusion. I’ve felt resentful, bitter and disappointed, but I sense my gradual movement towards freedom. I see myself hanging onto a cliff, and my hands and fingers are slowly slipping off of what is the realm of my parents’ control. I know with certainty that as I move farther into life there will be no argument that my future ultimately lies in my hands and no one else’s.
To this day, the role I play in my family feels tenuous as we struggle to understand each others’ desires and intentions. Our conversations and interactions have, at times, rocked us away from each other, but our ability to support one another without speech has remained steady. My parents welcome and cherish close physical proximity, from holding hands to sitting together, and one of the reasons for disallowing me to apply to California schools was out of fear of the great distance between home and college. They wanted me close to home, to reduce the number of barriers in our ability to see and spend time with each other. True enough, in college, because we spend so much time apart, I know that going home means cherishing one another’s physical presence. We go out for dinner, go on walks in the evening and watch movies together. As a family, we instinctively let go of harsh words and thoughts, our bodies more yielding than the stubbornness of our minds.
Seeing one another in-person reminds me of how human we are, that our skin is prone to cuts and bruises, our bones to fractures, our nerves to inflammation. We fight interpersonally but also intrapersonally. Our biological systems resist and battle within ourselves, leaving us to suffer with the ramifications of its brawls. For all the pain we willingly and unwillingly inflict on ourselves and others, the least we can do is utilize the gentility of our somatic instruments to ease and let go of our hurt. Yet I acknowledge that as sweet and comforting as it is, physical connection isn’t perfect. This method of bonding does not fully mend the emotional repercussions of my parents’ and my difficulty in seeing eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, we, as a family, persist as a trading ground of compromises. We share everything — our worries, our concerns, our complaints — together we always find a way to move on. At home, solace is transient, yet ever-present, waiting to be found, heard and felt.
—
Per custom, my parents work with the exterior of my skin as my migraine has numbed my ability to think and see clearly. They lay me down on my bed after I’ve changed into my night clothes. From the dim glow of my nightlamp, I sense them dip their fingers into the Tiger Balm and work it into my skin. I feel their thick, dull fingers pulsate in circles. The lines on their hands push the Tiger Balm deeper into the lines on my forehead. My skin perspires Tiger Balm. The room bathes in its scent. Like handprints in wet cement, my parents’ imprints set into my skin. The swirls of their fingerprints form a protective, distinct mosaic, adorning my body. I feel sheltered under the familiar touch of my parents’ hands and the remarkable scent of Tiger Balm.
Finally, the migraine breaks. I wake up in the dark, and my head is clear. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I look around wide-eyed, the Tiger Balm just barely wafting in the air around me. My mother is washing the dishes downstairs. My father is putting away his clothes in his closet. Even after I wash my face, I smell and feel the Tiger Balm, ever so delicately, on me. My parents feel it on their hands, too. We revel in its comfort, apart but together.
MiC Columnist Anushi Varma can be reached at anushiv@umich.edu.
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