Communication, the key to navigating familial relationships

I was incredibly nervous when I started last semester in Santiago because I was required to live with a host family and I had not lived with any form of parents whatsoever in over four years. I like to think of myself as an easygoing person who can live with most people in most situations, but I was afraid that I’d be the difficult one to live with. I was afraid that they’d be expecting a sweet, wholesome all-American girl only to be given an introverted Asian kid with a semi-vegan diet.

We were told early on that it was normal for Chileans to live with their parents until they’re like 26 or married. This living-with-parents situation was apparently why we were seeing a lot of young people getting really handsy in the public parks of Santiago. So I understood that frequently interacting with other people’s parents would be a part of my cultural learning, but living with parents — this part I was still anxious about.

We all received letters from our host families introducing themselves the day before we actually met them. Mine sent me a family photo with three people in it and used the confusingly worded phrase matrimonio abierto (literally meaning “open marriage”) to describe themselves, which made me think that I was about to move in with a polyamorous family. I think I was relieved because I thought maybe there would be less attention on me if there were more people in the family.

Well, it turned out that my host parents weren’t in an open marriage. But like people in open marriages, they were really big on constant communication, which, in addition to already not being that fluent in Spanish, I’m really bad at.

I was raised on silence, and it’s a language I can speak better than any other. My own parents and I, maybe because of the language barrier between us, understood each other not with spoken words — since often we did not understand the same words in the same way — but with habits and rituals. We didn’t always completely understand each other though, but this kind of silence too became a normal part of our co-existence.

But I think my silence worried my host parents, who, at one point, might have suspected that I was stealing their spoons.

So, while I avoided answering a surprisingly frank question at the dinner table about the status of my virginity during the second week I lived with them, I did make an effort to more intentionally cultivate certain communication habits that I had never before, like training myself to remember to tell them where I was going and when I expected to be back or asking for help even though my fiercely independent self prefers to figure things out on my own.

I’m not sure if I entirely succeeded, to be honest. I might have still appeared closed off and private in the end. But trying to better communicate with my host family has really pushed me to rethink the various ways in which I can more sustainably relate to my own parents.