The Immigrant Parent Who Never Said 'I Love You'
They paid for everything. They built everything. They just never said the words. That was the love.
You come home from school with a bad day sitting on you — a fight with a friend, a grade that came back wrong, a teacher who said something that stayed. You walk through the door and your parent looks up from what they are doing.
They do not ask how you are feeling.
They ask whether you have eaten.
If you ate, they return to what they were doing. If you have not eaten, they get up and make you something. That is the entire conversation. That is all you get.
You are twelve years old and you do not understand yet that you just received something. You will not understand it for another fifteen years. When you do, it will arrive all at once, and it will feel like finding a letter that was written to you before you were old enough to read.
## Love as Infrastructure
For many African and Caribbean immigrant parents, love was never a verbal declaration. It was not announced. It was built.
The school fees paid at the beginning of every term. The flight that was booked — one-way, with savings accumulated over years and held back for exactly this purpose. The career left behind in another country because this country, with its better schools and its theoretically better chances, was where you were supposed to thrive. The food on the table at midnight because your parent worked a shift that ended at eleven and came home and cooked anyway because you needed to eat.
These are not gestures toward love. They are love expressed in a different grammar.
The grammar was not performed. It was functional. It was not "I love you, darling" — it was "you have everything you need and I have made certain of this." The announcement would have felt redundant. The infrastructure was already there. What was there to say?
## Why the Words Were Never Said
The generation that raised the diaspora did not say it either. This is not a failure of that generation — it is a transmission of what they received.
In much of the parent cultures that the diaspora comes from — Igbo, Yoruba, Jamaican, Trinidadian, Ghanaian, Haitian — love was demonstrated, not announced. The announcement was seen as unnecessary at best, performative at worst. Demonstrating love was the work. Saying it, in the absence of demonstrating it, meant nothing. And saying it as an addition to demonstrating it was redundant. The evidence was already present. Why would you narrate the evidence?
There is a Yoruba concept that does not translate cleanly: the idea that care expressed through action carries more weight than care expressed through words, because words are cheap and action costs something. If I wake up early to cook for you before you leave for school, I have spent something — time, energy, the extra sleep I could have had. That expenditure is the declaration. It required nothing from me except to say the words. But the cooking cost something. That is why the cooking means more.
"I'm here, aren't I? What do you think that means?" is not deflection. It is an answer.
## The Diaspora Collision
The problem is the context. The children grew up in Western cultures that perform affirmation constantly. Schools that said "good job" for ordinary effort. Friends whose parents said "I love you" as a routine goodbye, three times a day, casual and reflexive. Television families who expressed everything aloud, who processed emotions verbally, who asked each other how they were feeling and expected a real answer.
These children grew up fluent in that grammar. And when they looked at their parents and could not find its equivalent, they made a diagnosis: emotional unavailability. Distance. Withholding.
Sometimes that diagnosis was correct. Some immigrant parents were genuinely cold, or traumatized in ways they never addressed, or present in the house but absent in everything that mattered. That is real and should not be romanticized. The infrastructure love can be genuine and the emotional connection can still be missing. These things coexist.
But sometimes — and this is the thing that takes years to understand — the diagnosis was wrong. Not because the parent was not cold, but because the child was reading a language as silence that was actually full of sentences. They had been taught to read English and were trying to read Yoruba and concluding that the page was blank.
## What Actually Transmitted
Recipes. The specific way a father cut yam — the angle of the knife, the thickness of the slices, something that seemed automatic and turned out to be learned. A smell from a mother's kitchen that reappears in your own kitchen twenty years later as a physical memory you did not know you had stored.
Discipline that felt harsh in the moment and in retrospect was the terror of a parent in a country that did not want you to succeed, doing the only thing they knew to do: make you excellent, make you harder to dismiss, give you no ammunition to be failed with. The harshness was not indifference. It was panic, transformed into action.
Pride expressed to everyone except you. Your parent told the neighbors, told their friends at church, told relatives on the phone back home — told everyone how well you were doing. You only found out years later. They never told you directly. The directness would have felt like something they were not equipped to give. But the pride was real and it traveled to everyone else in the room.
## The Translation Project
At some point in adulthood, if you are lucky, you begin to learn the language.
You cook the food you refused as a child. You make it exactly the way they made it — the same ingredients, the same timing, the same smell filling the kitchen. You are not doing it for them. You are doing it because you finally want it, and the wanting is a form of understanding.
You call them on the phone and the call is mostly silence and you realize partway through that the silence is the point. They called to be present. You called to be present. The words would only clutter it.
You are in the grocery store and you see the yam they always bought and you put it in the basket without thinking, and somewhere between the produce aisle and the checkout you understand that "have you eaten?" was never a question about food.
It was the only way they knew to say: *I think about you. I want you to be alright. I am still here.*
They didn't say it. They built it, cooked it, paid for it, flew across an ocean with it. It was always there. You just had to learn the language.