I don’t remember when I realized that my father wasn’t like other fathers. I don’t have a specific moment to point to. The feeling was simply there, like a skin. Soap, sneaker, suitcase: everyday. As a child, I snuck into his shrine room, turned the objects I found there around in my hands, guessed at their names. The little bell, the little scepter, the peacock fan. No other father I knew of had any of these. At school, I told my classmates that I was a Buddhist—how my mother would have raged, had she known—but I couldn’t tell them exactly what that meant. But what do you actually do? they asked, obedient churchgoers all. We meditate, I said. So it’s just sitting around, they said. No, I said, no, but I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t explain.

Here’s something you may not know about Buddhism, something Serena explained to me that my father never did: contrary to popular American mythology, Buddhism is not actually about gentleness, or kindness—though the Buddha did promote compassion for all creatures, and though basic goodness, which means exactly what you think and also more, is something many Buddhists cultivate. “Wisdom is the primary concern of a Buddhist,” Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche wrote. “Morals and ethics are secondary.” The ultimate aim of Buddhist practice is not inner peace (om, namaste, etc.) but rather to end human suffering. Turns out that the way to do this is not to be kind to your neighbor, but instead to become fully awake to the truth of the universe. Well, sure. Why not?

My mother dragged me out of my father’s shrine room whenever she found me in there alone. She forbade him from talking to me about religion. “Some things you can’t help but pass on to your children,” she told me once. “But I want you to have every possible choice about this.”

“I choose Dad’s religion,” I said. “You don’t even have one.”

“Your brain isn’t fully developed yet,” she said. “You can’t pick anything as important as religion until it is.” When I asked her when my brain would be developed, she seemed to consider it, staring hard at the place between my eyes. “Not until you’re married,” she said at last, and laughed at her own joke, and tucked her long black hair behind her ears like a girl, which I see only now that she still so essentially was.

My mother was too kinetic for meditation, of course. She was too loud for church, too large for any temple. My mother found the idea of basic goodness unsavory, if not downright insane. My mother believed in nothing.