Surreal butterflies and alternative kinship futures: revisiting dreams and histories of home through My So-Called Life 

In late 2017, I began writing down my dreams. In the second dream I recorded, my two older sisters and I were attending a cockfight because our mother apparently had an unspecified role in it. We arrived at the dirt-floored arena and uncomfortably watched from the stands as two handlers sharpened the talons of the competing birds in their respective corners. As they were released into the center, cartoon music began to blare loudly from surround-sound speakers. Out of nowhere appeared my mother. She was wearing the white sleeveless nightdress with blue violets that she used to wear when we were children.  

Music filled my ears as she ran in double time after both birds. It was an obviously uneven match. In Tamil, she began pleading with the bird fighting more fiercely to stop, while shielding the other with her body and encouraging him to fight back. As the spectacle unfolded, my sisters and I began to laugh uncontrollably, reminded of my mother intervening when we fought with one another as children. Hearing us, she turned and began telling us to stop, half-smiling between her words. Tears of laughter began streaming from my eyes as if rising in a pool, filling the inside rims of my glasses. I took them off, the collected tears falling onto my lap.  

"In dreams begins responsibilities" 

I first watched My So-Called Life (MSCL) as the series aired in late August 1994 and watched the last episode on the night the finale aired, the day before my fourteenth birthday in January 1995.  

The summer before, I had seen the first concert of my choice: the Indigo Girls on their Swamp Ophelia tour in New York City. My sixteen-year-old sister and I were not allowed to go alone, so our father accompanied us. The smell of cannabis filtered through the air as Amy Ray sang the first lines of "Touch Me Fall": "I'm waking from a dream." My sister and I hoped desperately that our father's pulmonologist nose, trained thirty years earlier in Sri Lanka, would not recognize its scent.  

In a February 1994 interview, when asked of the meaning of the album's title, Swamp Ophelia, a phrase which features only once on the album in "Touch Me Fall," Amy Ray remarked that she had seen a plant on a nature walk in Florida by the same name; but then she looked it up and could not find it anywhere, saying "it might be a dream."2 

Like the MSCL's main character, Angela Chase, and her high-school classmate friends Rayanne Graff, Rickie Vasquez, and Brian Krakow, I dreamt of having a relationship with my parents and living in a household that felt different from mine. It was not because I did not love my parents and sisters or the home we shared. It was because I did not know a childhood untouched by the trauma of civil war in their homeland, Sri Lanka. And I had yet to understand how and why the violence of this war had come to live with us in our home in New England. 

In the early 1970s, my Lankan Tamil parents left Sri Lanka for a safer, more secure life but carried with them the guilt and pain of leaving their parents and families behind in what would become a twenty-six year long civil war between the Government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Tamil militant group that was fighting for a separate state. As they established their lives in a white, liberal middle-class outskirts of city in Connecticut, my relatives in Northern Sri Lanka lived as civilians in a milieu of militant violence—surviving everyday realities of no electricity for months or years at a time, indiscriminate air strikes, displacements from their homes, and hiding in homemade bunkers in their gardens.  

Anthropologist Mary Douglas writes, "home starts by bringing some space under control."3 My parents, perpetually feeling out of place as first-generation migrants against a backdrop of white aspiration, built their home in New England on such survivalist principles of order. They invested in their kin, earning enough to support their families' back home and giving us children the life of possibility and security they never had. To provide such a life was both a dream and responsibility. 

In MSCL, I found accompaniment in show creator Winnie Holzman's treatment of the messiness of parental dreams and responsibilities. Hitting closest to home for me was the character of Angela's mother, Patty Chase, and her constant need to manage her family's potential risks and collective aspirations. Angela's contempt for her mother's longing for order in a world of chaos closely mirrored my own frustrations when being disciplined as a teenager. I could hear my mother's white nightgown-coated envy as Patty sat up in bed with her husband, Graham, reading about Chelsea Clinton's life as a child of the White House in the newspaper: "no freedom, no privacy, constant surveillance, Secret Service men . . . that's what we need" ("The Pilot"). If I left my bed unmade, my mother would storm into the room I shared with my sister, and on sight of the disorder under her roof, chant her weekly chorus: "Do you think I have nothing else better to do?"  It was a line that led sonically to Patty's bridge: "Do you think I ever dreamed I would sound like this?" ("The Pilot"). I often wondered: what would my mother dream of doing if she was not keeping our house clean? 

"Strangers in the house" 

I now know that my mother, like Patty, kept our floors so clean that you could eat off them because she could not remove the stigma and shame of the violence around her. She dreamt of the fabled "little cottage" of gingerbread and candy that Angela writes of in Episode 6 ("The Substitute"), where her children would sleep in clean sheets and walk along pristine vacuum lines in the carpet.  

Like Patty, my mother picked her battles. And like Angela, I inevitably had to face uncomfortable and often disturbing realities of the world that my mother could not shield me from. When I was six years old, my sister and I curled up on the basement couch with our cat between us and watched as my father's friend, who had fled Sri Lanka during the 1983 anti-Tamil riots, showed him a stack of 3 x 5 matte, colored photographs of badly injured cadres from the LTTE in his home village: amputated legs, shrapnel embedded in flesh, and bloodied sheets. The cadres lay on soiled mattresses in tents surrounded by scantily scattered medical equipment. For at least a decade more, the photographs sat nestled within a pile of papers and pamphlets on a shelf in my father's cabinet, which held the evolving horrors of the war's atrocities.  

My parents never compromised to censor the violence of Sri Lanka's war for us children. As a child, I often sat on the floor in front of his cabinet sifting through the stack of two-dimensional bloody images that would soon shapeshift into more intimate scenes of violence within our home. In 1987, my father's brother came to live with us to complete his medical studies as the war escalated back home. Days after his arrival, my sister and I sat in the kitchen together as he recounted how the Sri Lankan army had pointed their guns at him and his friends on the road. Wrapping both of his hands around an imaginary automatic rifle, he fired off fantastical rounds of bullets into the kitchen's air.  

Thinking marriage would heal my uncle's trauma, my grandparents arranged for him to get married to a woman from Sri Lanka a year later. They came to live near us as husband and wife, and soon after, he began physically abusing her. One night, my father answered her frantic call that he was trying to choke her. He drove to their home and had to physically remove her to safety. She lived with us for the next few months and with the help of my parents, re-established her life through their separation and divorce. At the same time, my fifteen-year-old cousin from Sri Lanka came to live with us to avoid being forcibly conscripted into the LTTE. On the night my father drove to his brother's home to help my aunt, it was my cousin who accompanied him for protection. 

In 1994, I watched Episode 3 ("Guns and Gossip") of MSCL, in which Angela's friend, Rickie Vasquez, faces bullying and physical abuse and is compelled to bring a gun to school for self-protection, After the gun goes off in the halls of their high school, Patty says to her husband and Angela's father, Graham: 

In Rickie, I saw my cousin, who, at fifteen, had also become intimately familiar with the structural and embodied forms of racialized and cultural risks too soon as they traveled with him from Sri Lanka and were now living in sharp contrast to the white, middle-class seemingly idyllic war-free world he had been thrown into. Patty's plea to Graham brushing up against Rickie's lived experience with violence brought back the shrapnel and missing limbs hiding in my father's bookcase, the round of air bullets my uncle had fired into our kitchen, and my cousin's lanky yet ready-to-defend teenage frame returning home with my aunt that terrifying night. I knew that Patty's desire to protect her daughters from harm was futile; but I also knew our home's wartime-turned-intimate violence was neither new nor exotic. My immigrant parents were facing particularly racialized and cultural pressures to care for their kin in the face of war while surviving New England's white world of success and perfection. They could and would never say no to their obligations to kin. They also could and would never let anyone on the outside fully know the traumas they were facing.  

My mother often wore a shield of self-protection as sturdy as the wall of Patty's teeth in her widest of smiles for strangers. My father exuded Graham's sensitivity and jokes, warming the room with his joviality and inability to say no, while quietly grieving the slow destruction of all he knew of his home country. Yet, in our family albums and home videos, it is hard to find traces of the strains on their marriage from taking on years of alloparental4, or extra-parental, care and accommodating its violences. 

Other people's daughters  

Taking in MSCL as a teenager was like watching a therapist-turned-artist uncover and assemble my own parents' subconscious fears and desires. The show's complex treatment of parenting and kinship possibilities provided a kind of surreal time-space for me to process my own parents' imperfections, stranger socialites, and kinship investments over the previous six years. When the father of Angela's former best friend and classmate, Sharon, has a heart attack, it made perfect sense to me that she would stay at the Chase's home even though she and Angela had grown apart because, like Patty and Graham, my family always chose to honor the obligation of care, even at the expense of their own comforts and desires. I also knew why Patty could not say no to her own mother's boundary-crossing party demands and why it took her an entire episode to eventually confront and break through her father's rough and stubborn patriarchal exterior. When Graham's younger brother, Neil, pleads with him not to divorce Patty after he confesses his all-but-physical affair with a younger woman, I understood the Chase home's reality of porousness and fragility and the fantasy to maintain a household's perfectly controlled contents because the stakes of keeping up appearances of stability as a family unit were all too familiar. 

In her study of Caribbean families navigating transnational global markets of labor and economic exchange, anthropologist Robin Nelson encourages seeing beyond the bounded household as a dominant unit of analysis in contexts of alloparental care and to acknowledge the resource-sharing and variability of care under conditions of constraint and inequity.5 In MSCL, I found comfort in witnessing that my parents were not alone in their imperfect handling of alloparental care and its challenges. When Rickie's uncle beats and kicks him out of their home, and he has no place to go in Episode 15 ("So-Called Angels"), Patty and Graham eventually take him in. But the categorically racialized and gendered standards of what constitutes a proper household for them and his purported "stranger" position pressure them to question and re-negotiate the boundaries of care they can provide him. In the end, it is Rickie's teacher Mr. Katimski and his partner, who, as queer elders, know too well the rigid constraints of what Sara Ahmed calls society's "straightening devices" in defining what constitutes a safe household.6 Risking their reputations and futures in a time of bigotry and homophobia, they take Rickie into their home, building divergent kinship arrangements that finally give him a sense of safety and acceptance. 

The series' specters of parental absence and perceived negligence felt all too familiar as stern warnings my parents offered to secure my sisters' and my collective futures, but not without departures and distinctions. They vowed to never be as aloof as Brian's absentee parents who remained disembodied voices throughout all nineteen episodes out of fear of judgment. But they also did not shy from exposing us to the violence of the outside world. They were never as candid and transparent as Rayanne's mother, Amber Vallone, who routinely tested and troubled the boundaries of friend, mother, and confidante. But they were never capable of fully embodying the openness of Patty and Graham in acknowledging their errors as partners and parents. My mother never sat with any of our teenage crushes over milk in our kitchen or helped my friends when they had too much to drink. My father never took the time to take a ballroom dance class to reignite the spark in their marriage. And if my mother, like Patty, ever dreamed of another man besides my father, she never told us daughters. 

Perhaps that was why, years later, as I approached my 40s, I dreamt of my 40-something mother pleading for the two cocks to stop fighting in her white and pastel nightgown. Perhaps, MSCL was now entering my subconscious, showing me how to accept the incapacity to control violence from entering the arena—assuring me that it would never be too late to dream of alternatives to survive. As Angela remarks of Patty's own search for her biological parents in the Pilot, "I guess that's what everyone's looking for." 

"I'm waking from a dream"  

The beauty of parental responsibilities and imperfections in MSCL affirmed my belief that both childhood and parenting have the potential to hold what Ella Shohat calls "taboo memories"7: those fragments of familial upheaval that, upon accreting over time and across dispersed bodies, have the capacity to carve out dreams for forging alternative kinship futures that disrupt cycles of inter-generational violence and shame. The series entered my teenage life at the perfect moment and provided me an uncanny accompaniment to understand the complexities of responsibilities that my parents had taken on and could never share with me as a child.  

On surrealism, Alyce Mahon writes how the movement was a  

Would our home have been any different if my parents had taken up the plea of the now century-old surreal butterflies and told us children their dreams? Would we, as daughters, have better understood their decisions to invest and care for their kin beyond what they knew was ensured and safe and hold a bit more compassion to cling to their responsibilities to avert danger for those they held dear? Like Patty, Graham and MSCL other parental figures, would they ever accept that they would stumble and find peace with their imperfections, fears, and "everything in-between"? 

In December 2024, I flew home to visit my parents in their home in New England. It had snowed overnight, and we stayed in the whole next day. Now in his early 80s, my father was napping on the couch while I watched the final episode of the series, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" in their living room. My mother, now in her late 70s, had been napping in their bedroom and came into the room. My father opened his eyes and, with a small and serene smile on his face, told us: "I was dreaming of playing cricket in Jaffna (his birthplace in Northern Sri Lanka) as a boy. I was ten, fifteen years old and bowling the ball in a field with my friends near my home." My mother laughed incredulously. Bearing the weight of our familial histories as did Delmore Schwartz awakening in the final moments of his short story by the same name9 — and before him, W.B. Yeats10 — I paused on his ludic dream. I realized that I had waited for it since MSCL ended on January 26, 1995.  

With a faraway look, my father sighed nostalgically: "Those days, there was nothing to worry about." My mother agreed. Our evening continued as the last episode played in the background. In dreams begin responsibilities. In dreams live the possibility of repair.  

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Mythri Jegathesan (X: @MythriJega, Bluesky: @mythrijega.bsky.social, Instagram: @jegathem) is an associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University. Her book, Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka, was published by University of Washington Press (2019) and was awarded the 2020 Diana Forsythe Prize and 2021 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Book Prize. She is currently writing a series of essays on the shooting of Hollywood films, including Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, on Sri Lanka's plantations and is conducting ethnographic research on land attachment, debt, and life after war Northern Sri Lanka. Her writing and research can be found at mythri-jegathesan.com.

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