An Octopus, an Eagle, and an Exploration of Identity

Blending Eastern and Western philosophies in my clinical work always felt, in some strange way, like the easy part - theory has a way of behaving itself on paper, and when it applies to other people’s lives.

That fluency didn’t happen overnight, but once it clicked, it became the thing that set my work apart: clients got the best of both worlds, and I got to watch two philosophies do together what neither could do on its own.

But applying that same blend to my own daughter, in my own home, was a far richer, far messier, and far more human undertaking.

When she was younger, my daughter would ask me sometimes, half-serious, half-curious:
“Mom, what am I?”

There was the straight-forward answer I gave her, one that our passports and ID cards spelled out in stamped black letters. But doesn’t that always feel so limiting? To me, those documents never tell the whole story, or capture the depth of experience that built up my family, so along with the cookie-cutter reply,

I’d tell her: “You’re a citizen of the world - you get to choose what parts make you, and what don’t. It’s your choice - so why not have fun with it? You can even say you’re an octopus from the ocean, an eagle in the sky-”

“Or a lizard that can jump on them in the dark!” she’d interject, which always made us laugh.

I’d tell her the truth as I understood it: that she was every place she came from and, at the same time, bound to none of them.

And I’d tell her that belonging wasn’t a box to check, it was something she got to build for herself. Unbound by religion or cultural identity, free to DIY her own as she saw fit. She usually turned it into a joke before I could get too philosophical about it, which, looking back, might have been its own kind of wisdom.

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There were seasons where my choices felt harder to defend than others. Christmas, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Hanukkah, Eid. Sometimes it felt like with every month came a new invitation for me to ask myself about the cultural identity I was building with my daughter.

We lived somewhere where many of her friends were lighting candles their grandparents had lit, celebrating holidays with a full, unbroken lineage behind them, while our home held a little bit of everything and nothing all the way through. I won’t pretend I never doubted myself in those moments - I definitely did. But I kept coming back to the same belief: that what I was giving her wasn’t an absence but a choice, and one day she’d understand the difference.

That question of belonging didn’t stay simple for long, though. As she got older, I started noticing a tension in myself that I hadn’t fully named before: one that went beyond culture and into something more structural about how I was raising her overall.

Eastern philosophy had taught me to think of family as something closer to a single organism than a collection of individuals, one where the elders are the compass, where the “we” comes before the “I,” and where a child’s job is to stay woven into that fabric for life. The West had taught me something almost opposite: that a child’s real psychological task is individuation, the slow, sometimes painful work of becoming someone separate from the family that raised her.

For years I treated these as competing instructions; it took me a long time to realize they were both right, and that the danger was never in either philosophy, but in choosing only one.

Too much “we,” and a child loses herself inside the family, too much “I,” and she loses the family altogether. What she actually needed was both: a “we” steady enough to belong to, and enough room inside it to become somebody entirely her own.

I found the same tension waiting for me in how I loved her, not just in how I raised her.

On one hand I had learned the language of non-attachment, this idea that real love means loosening your grip on who someone becomes, that you’re not supposed to hold your child’s future so tightly in your hands. But Western ideology had introduced me to attachment theory, which insists on something that sounds almost opposite: that a child needs to feel completely and securely held in order to grow into herself at all. For a long time I thought I had to pick one of these to believe in.

It took me becoming a mother (and getting it wrong a lot more than a few times) to understand that they were never actually in conflict.

Non-attachment without security doesn’t feel peaceful to a child, it feels like distance, like a mother who’s decided she’s too evolved to fully show up. And attachment without healthy freedom has a way of curdling into something else entirely, a kind of control that likes to dress itself up as love. I couldn’t let go of who she’d become until I was sure, in my bones, that she never once doubted I was there.

That same lesson kept finding me in smaller, quieter corners of our life together, too.

My own upbringing had taught me to trust ritual, the candles lit at the same hour every year, the meals cooked the same way my mother cooked them and her mother before her, the sense that repeating something faithfully was itself a form of love.

But the world I was raising my daughter in kept whispering something different into her ear, that her voice mattered more than any inherited script, that the whole point of growing up was to become someone nobody had been before her. I used to worry these two instincts would cancel each other out, that either she’d end up rootless or she’d end up so busy becoming her own person that she’d never feel tethered to anything at all.

What I didn’t expect was how naturally they’d end up working together.

I imagine some of you reading this are already asking the question I used to ask myself at two in the morning. Didn’t she need one thing to hold onto? Wasn’t I asking a child to build an identity out of thin air, when what she actually needed was a little more solid ground under her feet?

I don’t think that question ever fully goes away, and I’m not going to pretend I have some tidy answer that makes it disappear.

But I will tell you what I noticed, watching her grow up. She was never short on ground - she just wasn’t standing on the ground I inherited, or the ground her friends stood on - she was standing on us.

On our table set the same way every night, on a joke about a lizard that outlived a hundred more serious conversations, on knowing, without ever having to test it, that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Maybe you’re a parent right now wondering if the thing you’re choosing not to hand your child, a religion, a nationality, a single unbroken tradition, is a gift or a gap. I can’t answer that for your family; the most precious thing about this conversation is that it’s so unique to each child, each country they find themselves in, each culture they grow up learning about.

What I can tell you is what I’ve come to believe about mine: the ground was never the tradition, the ground was our relationship.

Everything else, she got to build herself.

My daughter is 23 now, living a life that looks nothing like mine did at her age, and everything like what I hoped for. Last year she called me from a country I’d never even mentioned to her growing up, laughing, telling me she’d just spent the afternoon at a stranger’s family dinner because they’d invited her and her friends in after a party. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to say when they asked where I was from,” she told me, “so I just told them all of it.” I didn’t teach her that answer - she built it herself, out of every room she ever sat in.

I used to think my job was to hand her a blend of two philosophies, mine to give, hers to inherit; I know now that was never quite right.

What I actually gave her was the freedom to keep blending, long after I stopped being the one doing it for her.

Theory behaved itself on paper. My daughter never did, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to.