Letters We Never Send to Our Parents Back Home

You pick up the phone even when you are exhausted. Even when it is late and the week has already taken everything and you have nothing left to give a conversation. You pick it up because missing the call means listening to the voicemail three times, trying to read the silence between the words, trying to calculate if the particular way your mother says "we are managing" this week is different from the way she said it last week, and whether the difference means something.

You pick it up because the voicemail is worse than being tired.

What You Do Not Tell Them

You do not tell them how cold the winter is. You mentioned it once, in the first year — the specific cold, the way it gets into your bones differently than you expected, the way the sky goes grey in November and does not really come back until April. They worried. They sent advice that applied to a different cold, in a different place. You said thank you and you have not mentioned it since.

You do not tell them how lonely the first years were. Lonely in a way that is hard to explain to people who have always been surrounded by people who know them. Lonely not from lack of company but from lack of context — the particular exhaustion of spending every day translating yourself, your references, your humour, your way of being in a room. The relief of coming home to an empty apartment because at least there you do not have to translate.

You do not tell them that sometimes you sit in your car after work. Not because you have anywhere to go before going inside. Because the apartment is too quiet and the quiet feels different from the quiet back home, which was never really quiet — there was always something: a neighbour's television, children somewhere outside, the sounds of a household that was never fully still. Here the quiet is a different material. Heavier. And some evenings you sit in the car for twenty minutes before you are ready to go in.

What Gets Translated and What Does Not

"I'm fine" is doing a tremendous amount of work in every call you have ever made. It covers genuinely fine, which happens. It covers tired-but-manageable. It covers sitting-on-the-bathroom-floor fine, which has also happened. The phrase compresses everything between those poles into two words that land the same way regardless of what is inside them.

Your parents know this. You know they know this. This is something both of you understand without discussing, one of the agreements that makes the calls possible. If you told them the full truth every time, the calls would break them, and you would not be able to bear the weight of having broken them from this distance. So you say "I'm fine" and they say "thank God" and you both keep going, and somehow that is a form of love too.

What does translate: the job news, the small victories, the things that happened that can be explained in five minutes. You have gotten very good at finding these things, at leading with them, at giving the call something it can hold. The promotion. The friend you made. The neighbourhood you now know well enough to navigate without a map. The call needs something to carry, and you have learned to provide it.

The Money

Nobody names it directly. This is the convention and you both observe it without ever agreeing to.

You send money home. It arrives as: "I sent something for the school fees" or "I sorted something for the roof" or just a number in a message that requires no explanation because you both know what it means. It is received as "thank you, we are managing" or "God will reward you" — something that acknowledges without quantifying, that accepts without making the exchange feel transactional.

Neither of you names what it costs you. The calculation you do every month — what you can send and still cover what you need, the things you do not buy and the trips you do not take — is done privately and never reported. Neither of you names what it means to them. The way the money makes certain things possible that were not possible before, the specific dignity of not having to ask other people for help. That remains unsaid too.

What both of you know: this is love expressed through a wire transfer. What both of you know: naming it directly would make it heavier than it already is. So you keep the convention.

The Pride That Cannot Say Itself

Your mother tells the neighbours about your job title. She may not be entirely sure what you do — the specifics of the work, what the title means in practice, the industry it belongs to. But she knows it is something, and she tells people. You found out from your aunt who found out from someone else.

Your father quoted your salary at a church meeting. He got it wrong — he quoted it higher than it is, significantly higher, in a way that would have been embarrassing if it were not so recognisably him. He was not lying exactly. He was translating the fact of your success into a number that felt correct to his pride, and he announced it to people whose respect matters to him.

The love that cannot say itself directly announces itself through other people. Through the neighbourhood and the church and the aunties who already know things about you that you have not told them. Your parents are broadcasting you. They are pointing at you from the distance and saying: this one is ours. We sent this one out and look what came back.

You will never tell them that you know. That is part of the deal too.

The Distance That Is Not Geographic

There was a moment — not a single moment, but a slow accumulation that felt like a moment — when you realised you could not explain your life over the phone. Not fully. Not in the way that would make them actually understand what a day here is like, what the texture of the life you have built feels like from the inside.

The distance is not the kilometres. It is the experience that cannot be transferred. You live in a city they have mostly seen in photographs. You have friendships they have never observed. You have a version of yourself — capable, navigating, adult in ways that were not required at home — that they have never met. And you have a version of yourself that is only for calls home, that remembers itself as younger, that returns to certain rhythms and tones that do not belong to the rest of the week.

Both versions are real. Neither one is the whole person. And the phone cannot hold the whole person, so you send the version that the call can carry.

The Letter

You have started it. In your head, mostly, though sometimes on paper or on a screen — late at night, when the quiet is the particular quiet that makes honesty possible. The letter that says everything the calls cannot say.

If you could say it all, what would the first sentence be? Perhaps: *I am more okay than I let on, and also less okay than I let on, and both of those things are true at the same time and I do not know how to put them on a phone.* Perhaps: *There are things I have needed that I did not know how to ask for, from you or from anyone.* Perhaps just: *I miss you in ways that have changed shape over the years and I do not know how to describe what the current shape is.*

You do not send the letter. You never send the letter. It would cost too much — cost them too much, sitting with it at that distance, unable to do anything with what it says.

So you call instead.

They pick up on the second ring. You say "I'm fine." They say "we are managing." And somewhere inside those six words is the whole letter — every version of it you have ever started, compressed into the frequency of two voices that know each other well enough to hear what is not being said.

Somehow it lands.

More writing from the diaspora at Resilience House: [resilience-house.madethis.app](https://resilience-house.madethis.app).