Learning to Stay: A daughter’s journey through survival, sacrifice, and intergenerational healing by Kris Rodriguez

Always Running

I wasn’t raised by immigrants.
But I was raised by people who carried the weight and the urgency of immigration. People who knew how quickly stability could vanish. Who treated rest as a risk, and content as a luxury they couldn’t afford.

My mother is from Puerto Rico, a place that has long lived in the shadows of America’s promises. She came to the mainland fleeing hardship, chasing the hope of a better life. There were no green cards to apply for or citizenship tests to pass—but still, she found herself in limbo, caught between being American on paper and foreign in the eyes of the country she now called home.

We lived in the Bronx, where the streets were loud with pride, resistance, and survival. There was music, yes—culture, resilience, beauty—but under all of it ran a quiet current of fear…

From a young age, I was taught to run.
Sometimes from danger—but more often toward something better.
Run toward good grades. Toward the right schools.
Toward college. Toward scholarship letters and job interviews.
Toward a future bright enough to justify every sacrifice that came before it.

My mother believed in that future with everything she had. She worked through sickness, shouldered asthma attacks in silence, and whispered the same words like a mantra:
“You have chances I never had. Don’t waste them. Make all of the sacrifices worth it.”

So I ran.
Because I thought love looked like effort.
And effort meant never stopping.
And my worth—as a daughter, as a sister, as a person—was tied to it all.

Running Toward the Dream

Private school became my stage. I learned early how to package our story into scholarship essays—grit, determination, gratitude. I knew how to smile while selling chocolate bars to cover tuition, how to act unfazed in school when we were homeless, how to show up polished even when I hadn’t eaten. I learned how to disappear into excellence.

At home, I translated medical instructions, bargained with utility companies, wrote thank-you notes with the poise of someone twice my age. I became fluent in adult. I didn’t know how to cry in front of people, but I could write an email that sounded like hope.

I didn’t just carry expectations—I became them.
My mother was doing her best to build a life she never had.
I was doing my best to make sure she never regretted it.

When it came time to apply to college, I thought I should stay near home—to help, to hold things together, to keep being what I had always been. But a counselor looked me in the eye one day and said, “You were never meant to shoulder it all.” And for the first time, I believed them. So I took the acceptance letter that had the farthest location and considered it permission—not just to leave, but to run.

I graduated from high school with honors, as valedictorian, and with a full ride. And when it was finally time to leave for college, I ran again—this time away from home.

I told myself I was chasing independence. Freedom. Space to finally be. But even there, I kept running. Toward internships. Honors. Jobs. Titles. Because slowing down meant facing everything I had buried while keeping my eyes on the prize. It meant feeling what I’d spent years outrunning. So I kept performing, kept achieving, hoping that if I accomplished enough, I’d finally become truly happy—being a good student, a loyal friend, a person who mattered.

When Running Became Escape

I graduated from college early with savings, experience, and a full-time job lined up. On paper, I had made it.
But inside, something felt…missing.
Not just exhaustion, but hollowness.

I had all this success—why wasn’t I fulfilled and happy?

And then, I realized that I had spent so long sprinting toward safety and success that I had no idea how to feel stillness.
Every time I tried to slow down, I felt guilt creeping in. As if stopping was betrayal. As if resting meant letting it all go to waste.

Eventually, my body made the choice for me. I burned out.
The panic attacks, the numbness, the quiet disassociation—it all caught up.

And I realized:
Running is still running, even if you're headed toward something good.
And escape—even in the name of achievement— without rest is simply exile, and I was tired of being exiled from my own life.

Learning to Stay

I made the choice to go back home and stop running.

I began peeling back the layers of who I was and who I had been asked to become.

I looked at Maslow’s hierarchy and saw my family’s story mapped out:

From bottom to top, the levels are:

Physiological Needs: Food, water, shelter, rest, and basic physical survival. These are the foundation. If these needs aren’t met, everything else becomes secondary.

Safety Needs: Security, stability, housing, health, and safety from harm. This includes physical safety and financial security.

Love and Belonging Needs: Friendship, family, community, and connection. Once we are safe, we begin to seek love, acceptance, and a sense of belonging.

Esteem Needs: Self-respect, achievement, recognition, and respect from others. This is the need to feel valued, capable, and seen for who we are.

Self-Actualization: Reaching our full potential, creativity, authenticity, and growth. At this level, we pursue purpose, meaning, and alignment with our values.

My grandparents fought for food.
My mother fought for safety.
And now it was my turn.
To fight—not to escape—but to belong. To feel. To heal.

But I couldn’t climb those last rungs alone.
Because healing, I was learning, isn’t individual.
It’s relational. It’s collective. It’s messy.

I didn’t just want to heal from my upbringing—I wanted to heal with my mom.
I wanted her next to me, not behind me.
I wanted us to stop running.
To sit in the discomfort.
To stay.

Relearning Each Other

So I reached out.
I started the conversations we’d both avoided for years.

I told her about the pressure. The loneliness. The fear of disappointing her. The way my body still tightened every time I opened a bill, the way success never felt like mine—only borrowed, to be returned if I ever stopped performing.

She didn’t always know what to say. At first, she got defensive. Then quiet.
But one night, something broke open. She told me the truth:
She had been scared every day.
Scared that her accent would cost her a job.
Scared that if I stumbled, no one would catch me.
Scared that the world wouldn’t be kind to a girl like me.

I had always known. But hearing her say it changed everything.
It made her human—not just the woman who raised me, but a woman who carried her own child-self through the storm.

That night, we cried. And for the first time, it wasn’t just over what had happened—but what had never happened. The safety. The softness. The pauses we never knew we could take.

So we began practicing.

We created “reset” words—little phrases we could say when we needed space or when one of us felt overwhelmed.
We talked about boundaries—not as rejection, but as protection.
We acknowledged the anxiety we both carried, the perfectionism we had mistaken for love.

Some days we slipped. Some days we got it wrong.
But some days, we sat in the kitchen, poured coffee, and actually talked. About her childhood. About my panic. About the way we’d both been taught to keep going until something broke.

The Hard Work of Staying

Let me be honest: staying is harder than running.

Running comes with adrenaline. Praise. A clear goal.
Staying asks for something else:
Stillness. Vulnerability. Mutual repair.

It asks you to sit across from someone you love and say,
“I need you to know what it felt like.”
And then to stay in the room when they say,
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I was trying.”

My mother and I are still learning.
Sometimes, we catch ourselves falling back into old roles—me, the fixer; her, the worrier.
But we’re catching it now.
We’re naming it.
We’re staying.

Why MAP Matters

That’s what The Modern Asian Parent (MAP) is for.

MAP puts words to what so many of us inherited without language:
The pressure to be the dream.
The fear of vulnerability.
The deep ache of trying to love our families while healing from the ways we were shaped by them.

MAP reminds us that love can look like effort—but it can also look like softness.
It gives us tools to begin again—with each other, with our children, with ourselves.

It reminds us that we don’t have to choose between our culture and our well-being.
We can honor our lineage without reenacting its pain.

We can run—but we can also return.

The Bravery of Coming Home

This is the work now—not success, not perfection, but presence.
Building a relationship with my mother where we both feel safe enough to stay.
Not because we have to.
But because we want to.

We are learning to be tender with each other.
To speak plainly. To say “I’m scared,” “I’m tired,” “I’m trying.”

We are learning that the world may not always be soft with us—but we can be soft with each other.
That our home doesn’t have to be built on fear—it can be built on trust.
That love is not only duty. It is attention. It is trying again.

Some days it’s hard. Some days we fail.
But more and more, we stay.

And that, I think, is the bravest thing either of us has ever done.

A Note to Parents

I want to be clear: this isn’t about blame.
It’s not about fault-finding or rehashing the past with resentment.

For myself, and likely many other children out there, it’s about naming our truth with tenderness.
About honoring what was hard without denying what was beautiful.
About holding space for the sacrifices my family made—while also grieving the connection we sometimes lost in the process.

We were all doing our best.
My mother. My grandparents. Me.

We were surviving—and for a long time, survival was enough.
But now that we are safer, I believe we deserve more than just “enough.”
We deserve ease. We deserve joy. We deserve love that isn’t measured by achievement or effort alone.

I’m not trying to rewrite the past—I’m trying to unlearn the parts of it that still live in my body.
To ask, gently, what if we didn’t have to live this way anymore?
What if we could build something softer now—not because we failed, but because we’ve finally made it far enough to try?

And still, I am deeply grateful for the way I was raised.
For the values of grit, responsibility, care for others, and perseverance that were woven into me from the very beginning.
Those values helped me become the adult I am today—driven, self-assured, capable.
But in between all that strength, I had to wade through confusion, grief, and disconnection to find myself again.
To reconnect to my culture—not just through expectation, but through pride, curiosity, and belonging.

Now, I want to live a life with my parents that is still rooted in achievement—but also in fulfillment. In softness. In connection.
There can be both.

And one day, if I have children, I know I’ll carry so many of the things my mother gave me: her resilience, her protectiveness, her unwavering belief in my potential.
And I will do my best to pair those gifts with what we learned later, what we are learning now—emotional openness, gentleness, the freedom to pause.
So that love doesn’t have to be proven first—it’s just felt.