The day I watched my mother go quiet in her own kitchen.
OUR STORY | AAP IN-HOME CARE
WHY I BUILT A DIFFERENT KIND OF IN-HOME CARE AGENCY FOR CHICAGO'S IMMIGRANT FAMILIES
My parents are brilliant, highly educated people. They’re also immigrants — and as they got older, English became a wall. I became their lifeline: the appointments, the insurance calls, the endless phone trees, the translating of not just words but everything underneath them.
The hardest part came when we brought a caregiver into their home.
I’ll never forget standing in the kitchen doorway, watching my mother try to explain — to someone who didn’t share her language or her faith — that one pan couldn’t be used, that our home is vegetarian, that this wasn’t a preference but something sacred. The message didn’t land. She got flustered. And then she just smiled politely, shook her head, and took over the cooking herself. The whole reason we’d hired help, undone in a moment.
That was the day my heart broke. My parents were becoming guests in their own home — hiding their needs, their language, their values, just to avoid the awkwardness. And when I looked around, I saw the same thing happening to nearly every immigrant family near me.
So I built the agency I couldn’t find.
AAP IS NAMED FOR MY TWO CHILDREN, ARTH AND AADHYA.
It isn’t an acronym. It’s a promise: everyone in our care is treated the way I’d want my own parents treated. That’s the standard. That’s why the name is on the door.
If you’ve been carrying this — the guilt, the exhaustion, the feeling that no one quite gets your family — you’ve found people who do. Serving families across Cook, DuPage, and Will counties, wherever you are in the Chicago suburbs, we come to you.