Growing up away from their teachers

No one ever taught me how to fry an egg. I watched my mom do it a few hundred times and absorbed the shape of it — oil first, let the pan get hot, wait for the sound it makes when it’s ready.

I still burned a lot of eggs. Pan not hot enough and everything welded itself to the bottom. Oil too hot and it spat at me. Walked away at the wrong moment more than once and came back to something I had to scrape off. But I never had to wonder what I was aiming at. I’d seen it done. The rest was just my turn.

That’s how most of it moves. Not lessons. Not advice. You watch someone older do a thing badly, then less badly, then well, and years later your hands know something nobody ever said out loud.

Which means the whole system depends on having someone to watch.

My parents came to this country before they’d finished being raised. That’s the part I didn’t do the math on for most of my life. I always understood the sacrifice — leaving home, learning a language, working jobs that took something out of them permanently. What I never thought about is that they left in the middle of their own education. Not the school kind. The other kind. The kind that happens by being around people who already did the thing you’re about to do.

Everything they would have picked up by watching, they had to work out alone. In a second language. Without anyone older to watch. No shape to aim at first — just the burning, over and over, with no picture of what it was supposed to look like.

So when I say nobody taught me this, I want to be clear about what I mean, because it isn’t an accusation. My parents gave me everything they had. The chain broke a generation above me, and they handed me exactly what they were handed, which was an education that got interrupted partway through. They weren’t holding anything back. They passed on what made it across.

My grandparents are elderly now, and I’ve been watching something I don’t think anyone in my family expected.

They don’t have a chronic disease. None of the things you brace for. By the numbers, they did well.

Moving is the hard part.

Their bodies are mostly fine. Their strength is what went. And the thing about strength is that it doesn’t leave suddenly — it leaves over decades, quietly, while nothing appears to be wrong.

Here’s what stopped me. They spent their whole lives close to the people who raised them. Whatever chain I’ve been describing, they never left it. They had their teachers the entire time.

Nobody told them to keep their strength anyway.

Not because something got lost on the way over. Not because they were far from home. It’s that no one in that chain had ever watched a person age with strength on purpose. There was nothing to observe, so there was nothing to pass down.

Nobody knew they could keep it.

That’s the part that reorganized this for me. It isn’t only that my parents left. Some of this, nobody knew. The information wasn’t sitting back home waiting to be carried over. It wasn’t there either.

Here’s what I have that they didn’t, and it isn’t intelligence.

I can see people who are ahead of me.

I joined a running club and it rearranged what I thought a body was supposed to do over time. There are people in their fifties, sixties, seventies. Some of them are faster than me. And the ones who can’t run anymore are still out there — walking the route, but out there. I’d never seen older people move like that. Not once.

Now I tell my parents about those runners. I ask them to walk every day. I’ve offered to train with them for a half marathon while they’re still young enough that nothing hurts yet.

None of that makes me smarter than the people who raised me. It makes me able to watch. That’s the entire difference, and most of it is timing.

Which is why I don’t think of any of this as a correction. My parents did step one, and step one was the hard part — they built a place where someone could stand still long enough to learn something. Step two is going and getting the things nobody in our family ever got close enough to find out about, and then not being quiet about them.

I’m not going to figure all of this out and hand my kids a finished version. That’s not how it moves anyway. They’ll get most of it by watching me, including the parts I’d rather they didn’t.

But they’ll have someone to watch. That’s the piece that got skipped, and it’s the piece I can put back.

I’m figuring this out in public.
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