I’ve been estranged from my parents for five years, and this is not the first time I have been estranged from them. In movies it is often a single event, a concrete conflict, addiction, or an unfortunate event that leads to estrangement. In my case, and I suspect in many cases, the problem is not so much what happened but what didn’t happen. This is harder to talk about and harder still to show, so it doesn’t become the stuff of narrative, even for a writer of nonfiction such as myself.

I’ve been in therapy on and off for half my life now, so I know there is a cost to this untelling of untellable stories. With my current therapist, Sylvia, I’ve been talking a lot about my parents because I’m worried about passing on this dysfunction to my own children. I say talking about my parents, but a lot of the talking is not talking. I can’t answer her questions, and I have no feelings to speak of.

“I feel nothing,” I said to her when I mentioned that my father was dying.

“You say that,” she said, “but then you also use words like despair and emptiness. That is not nothing.”

Another reason I was (not) talking a lot about my parents was that our childhood home had become an urgent issue. My parents still owned our childhood home in Skokie, Illinois, as well as a home in Tokyo. They left the Skokie house at the end of 2019 to spend the New Year in Japan. They were still there when COVID happened so they couldn’t come back. Then my father’s health deteriorated in a significant way. In December 2020 the dialysis he’d been resisting became a necessity. My mother communicated this to us in a group email, which was the only way she communicated with me at all. At this point my parents had been away from the Skokie house for a year already, and they realized that my father would never return to that house again.

“Throw everything in the house away and sell it,” my mother said to my brother who lives in California. I saw the depth of my mother’s grief in this statement. Still, it’s hurtful to hear.

“Selfish as always,” my brother lamented on the phone to me. “She considers nobody else’s feelings, needs, or burden. How does she even expect me to do that?”

All true but I saw an opportunity. There are five of us left of our parents’ children, and I am the only one who lives locally.

“I can take care of the house,” I said to my brother.

“That’s a lot to ask of you,” he said.

“I want to.”

I did want to. I blame this on my Japanese upbringing. It’s in my DNA to want to serve my parents, even when I feel they treat me poorly. The other explanation also has roots in my being Japanese: the Japanese believe that non-sentient objects have souls, and I have inherited this belief, so I felt sorry for the house. Our house had sheltered my family for over forty years, never gave us much trouble, and had amiably tolerated neglect. It was a good, solid house that did its job well. I wanted to take care of it.

Still, for me to take care of the house, I needed access to it, which, as I’d anticipated, was not easily granted to me. For many months my mother claimed she wanted me to get the keys to the house. She repeatedly told my brother this, who would relay it to me, since she was still not speaking to me directly. Meanwhile, the keys were not forthcoming. Apparently there was a woman by the name of Elida who was going over to my parents’ house every week to feed my parents’ cat (who was now the sole inhabitant of the house), and Elida had a set of keys. Elida was to send the keys to me. Yet, week after week, I did not receive the keys. This was hurting my feelings and I told Silvia so.

“But it’s obviously important for you to have a relationship with your parents,” she said.

“Is it? I don’t think I care.”

“Mika, that’s all you talk about every time we meet.”

I laughed because it was true. What to do with the truth? The truth was that I couldn’t pretend my parents didn’t matter to me because they did. But I didn’t see a road to repair or even resolution and therein was my problem.

Suddenly I understood something.

“This is a creative problem.”

“Yes!” Silvia was pleased with me, which pleased me.

“Okay,” I said. “I can do this because I know how to tackle a creative problem.” 

A creative problem has no clear answer and requires one to be curious, comfortable with the unknown, have faith in the process, and be committed to the desire. Writers know how to do that.

“What I have to do is find space for my parents in my life somehow, and because the relationship is not traditional, that space will also have to be unique and specific to me.” 

Sylvia was so pleased, she even smiled.

“Maybe,” I said, “I will even find a way to call my father.”

“Maybe,” Silvia said.

“But not this week,” I said quickly. 

“No, we can talk about that possibility at our next session,” Silvia said.

Even though I had been the one to suggest it, the thought of calling my father filled me with such dread, I fervently hoped he would be dead before our next session.

It is magical to me, how energy moves—how connected we are. That very day I received an email from Elida saying the keys were in the mail. The next day I received the keys. I took a picture and sent it to my mother. The phone rang. 

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Mika Yamamoto has been published in Nelle, Noon, Writer’s Chronicle, Nimrod International, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Lake Effect, among others. In collaboration with award-winning artist Craig Whitten, she published Come and Sleep, a limited-edition artist book that’s a feminist retelling of a Japanese folktale. She’s also attended numerous writing conferences and residencies, including the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center Residency. She has an MA in English with an emphasis on fiction writing. She teaches sixth and seventh grade at The Children’s School, a progressive independent school in Oak Park, Illinois, and lecture at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago.