The Empty Bowls

The Empty Bowls is Sugar’s image for the enduring absence of parents in an adult child’s life: they remain an origin and an inner presence, even when they are gone, estranged, or unable to offer care. The metaphor gives shape to a paradox running through her advice and memoir: a person may have to fill the emotional space left by a parent alone, yet that space does not erase love or determine the life that follows. Its meaning develops through both the loss of Sugar’s mother and her difficult, later reckoning with Sugar’s father.

The Image and Its Meaning

Sugar describes her parents as two empty bowls she has repeatedly had to fill herself. The bowls are not literal keepsakes but a figure for the relationship that continues after the parent can no longer provide what a child needs. Their emptiness acknowledges a deprivation that cannot simply be repaired; their persistence acknowledges that parents remain part of a person’s inner life. The image therefore resists both easy closure and the idea that adulthood requires pretending one’s origins no longer matter.

The metaphor also makes room for agency. Sugar tells a correspondent estranged from an abusive father that parents remain bound up with the beginnings of a person’s story, but that the adult child still makes a life. Ending contact can be a revolution: it establishes that mistreatment will not be accepted. What follows is not an automatic cure or a clean escape, but the harder work of deciding how to live with the history that remains. In this sense, filling the bowls is not a demand to restore the relationship. It is the ongoing task of responding to the absence without surrendering one’s own life to it.

Childhood, Love, and Separation

The image is grounded in Sugar’s childhood. Her mother married Sugar’s father after becoming pregnant at nineteen; over the next nine years they had three children. Sugar recalls her father as destructive and often violent, but insists that her love for him as a child was immense and inseparable from her fear and sorrow. When her mother finally divorced him, when Sugar was six, Sugar begged her to return. She understood that the marriage ending could also mean losing her father, and, as she later put it, that fear proved true in practice.

After the divorce, Sugar saw her father only three times, in brief visits marked by sadness and discomfort. For much of her childhood there was little contact. A few times a year, letters addressed to Sugar and her siblings in their father’s handwriting arrived while their mother was at work. The children opened them with intense excitement, a feeling Sugar says still returns to her as she remembers it. The letters did not amount to a steady parental presence, but their arrival made the missing relationship palpable: the bowl was not empty because the bond had never existed, but because a bond she had loved could no longer provide the ordinary presence she longed for.

Bereavement and the Things That Remain

The same image reaches beyond estrangement into bereavement. After Sugar’s mother died, Sugar found the Mother’s jar of stones while clearing the house she had thought of as home. Her siblings and she had collected the stones as children and given them to their mother. Holding the jar briefly felt like holding her mother, but the objects could not restore the person. That distinction is central to the metaphor: a remnant can make love tangible without undoing death.

Sugar’s account does not present grief as something that becomes acceptable simply because time passes. More than twenty years after her mother’s death, she recalls a friend who had also lost her mother young, and their shared recognition that a parent’s death never becomes all right. Both women had children, fulfilling careers, and happy relationships; none of those good things meant that their mothers were present at graduations, weddings, book publications, or the births of their children. Grief persists alongside joy, shaping how life is experienced rather than cancelling its pleasures.

The relationship also changes form through ordinary objects and gestures. The stones once given to Sugar’s mother have been replaced by stones Sugar’s children give to her. She keeps the best ones in her pockets and sometimes carries one for weeks, finding it with her hand. The movement across generations does not fill the original absence as though it had never existed. Instead, it shows love continuing through a changed family relationship and a small, repeated practice. Sugar’s mother remains absent, while the stones become part of how Sugar carries that absence and the love attached to it.

Boundaries and the Work of Differentiation

The empty-bowls image belongs to a broader account of family boundaries. In another letter, Sugar urges a mother to ask her adult sons to move out so they can learn to live independently. She recalls learning to swim after her own mother finally let go, and uses that memory to argue that parental care can include releasing children to manage their own lives. The point is not that separation erases attachment. It is that love cannot require one person to absorb another person’s needs indefinitely, or prevent either from becoming a separate adult.

Sugar applies the same distinction to an adult child whose brother is harming the family. She advises the correspondent to cut ties with the brother while continuing to love the parents, who remain caught in their own response to their son. The correspondent need not participate in the parents’ self-destruction to prove affection. Elsewhere, Sugar describes partners who are both unemployed and burdened by financial strain, yet whose appeals to one another have produced compassionate inaction rather than change. Across these situations, the recurring limit is clear: one person cannot make another take responsibility for a life. Care may involve support, but it cannot substitute for another adult’s agency.

Return, Release, and Continuing Connection

Sugar’s own contact with her father resumes after a long period of distance. When his name appears on her telephone, she first assumes that his wife is calling to tell her he has died. She does not answer, but listens to the message later: her father identifies himself and asks her to call. Sugar waits a week. By then, she feels she has filled his empty bowl over and over and no longer loves him as she once did; what remains is the memory that she did love him.

When she calls, her father answers in a voice she recognizes. Sugar identifies herself as his daughter, giving her full name. The exchange is a small, deliberate acknowledgment rather than evidence that the past has been repaired. The following week, just before she turns thirty-nine, she sits on a bench and understands the complicated mixture of feeling that follows: sadness, gratitude, anger, acceptance, and more. She thinks of having filled her father’s bowl one last time, then imagines him finally free of her. The ending does not resolve their history into reconciliation or simple estrangement. It shows Sugar recognizing that her relationship with her father has shaped her, while no longer requiring her to keep reaching toward him in the same way.

The metaphor’s force lies in holding these conditions together. Parents can remain an origin and an enduring inner presence; loss and mistreatment can still require boundaries; and a life made after those experiences can contain both grief and gratitude. The bowls do not disappear, but Sugar describes herself as having the capacity to fill them. That capacity is not a substitute for the parents she lacked. It is a form of adulthood built in the space their absence left.