When dad left to go live with a Ruby Tuesday’s waitress, the house felt dank and cavernous—like an empty dragon’s lair where helpless worms wriggled about, wondering what to do now that their beast was dead. Mom filled the void with reality television, volume set to MAX. She sat on the brown plaid couch in an unlit living room from morning to night and hunched forward until her glasses were two feet from the screen. The more sexual the show the closer mom’s face was pulled into it.

The rest of us crawled around her, ignoring the salacity, waiting for instruction.

Mom took neither bathroom nor meal breaks as she watched, absorbed as she was in both the commercials and the programming, but when she peed straight through her cotton saree, we figured we should start looking after her. She was tiny and frail and we were her four healthy American children—it seemed an honorable duty (if not something to do) to keep her alive. So we rotated, leaving sandwiches and water on a little table by her chair and—with rumblings of panic—watched her largely ignore them. She ate every fourth day at most. We didn’t know what to do after that. We didn’t actually know mom, truth be told. Our childhood had mostly consisted of dodging a volcanic dad. Mom was just there, like the carpet. (read the rest here!)