Scattered around the desk were the colored crayons which started to stub as they became worn from relentless usage, their paper covers chipping on the sides. Classmates beside me frantically filled in the lines of their drawings with yellow for the bundles of dandelion flowers growing on top of the green stripes which represented the grass. I looked across at my desk buddy, whose hands became all dirty from the passionate rubbing and intermixing of colors. He took a black crayon to outline two figures: a woman and a child. The finishing touch came from the chunky block letters which spelled out, “Happy Mother’s Day,” drawn in a soft pink to symbolize her favorite color.
I stared down at my embarrassingly empty white sheet of paper, unable to craft anything I felt could surprise or make Mom happy. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to concentrate, as if it would bring some groundbreaking revelation that could catalyze itself into the artistic masterpieces my classmates were creating. It was fifth grade and our teacher asked us to write cards for Mother’s Day and suggested we put in everything our Moms loved to show our appreciation for them, but the only problem was I knew nothing about my mom
I. The Dandelion Field
I’ve only seen two pictures of my Mom as a teenager, both of them taken on an old black and white camera with grainy film which makes the characteristics of the photo hard to decipher. The first one is of her sitting in a dandelion field, hands intertwined with the earth beneath her, short hair blown across her face, her eyes squinting from the bright sun shining in her face. The second is a family portrait, but maybe that word is too fancy to describe the actual depiction. In reality, it’s just my Mom and her siblings standing at awkward lengths from one another, with Grandma and Grandpa on broken wooden stools, wearing faded tank tops and dirt-caked sandals in the intense summer heat. She’s frowning, probably from the lack of air conditioning, but a part of me can’t help but assume it’s because she was miserable as a teenager. Maybe that’s why she never talks about those years.
These photos are a part of the puzzle pieces I fail to piece together to understand the woman who raised me. It always feels like I was given a faulty pack with missing pieces.
Growing up dirt poor in the countryside would have made any normal person succumb to the cold hard truth that they’ll eventually be pulled back into the cycle of hard labor assigned to their parents and their grandparents. But my Mom isn’t normal, she’s the most resilient woman I know. She was the exception. The stories of her being the only person in her village to attend college and become a doctor have been stories beaten into my brain since I was old enough to understand Mandarin. But still, I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know her favorite color, her favorite TV show, or what her favorite things to do in her free time are.
And despite admiring her and claiming to be each other’s best companions in life, I still feel a piece of her that holds the most about her is still buried deep inside her, unable to be excavated.
The Mom I know has only ever been the one prioritizing everything but herself. Maybe the reason I feel so disconnected from her is because of her selflessness. She’s given so much of herself to make my life better. Left her native country to someplace that took away everything from her, her family, her medical degree, all her memories. All the years of pressure
spent drowning in the anatomy textbooks in the quiet of a library all for the sake of finding a way out of the cycle. She’s spent so much time promising herself she won’t make the same mistakes our ancestors did only for her to make the mistake of losing herself.
II. The Phone Call
I sometimes get glimpses of the Mom I want to know more, the vulnerable side of her I never get to see. It’s like I’m meeting a new person all over again. Like the time she said as if it were nothing that if she didn’t marry my Dad, she would probably be happier. Her words stung a bit because obviously I wouldn’t have been born, but I couldn’t help but also take part in an alternate reality we never knew existed. Maybe then she would find an outlet to pursue her dreams without the burden of taking care of me.
When my anger builds up and explodes into us fighting and going back and forth, I slip out a snarky remark which always falls under the lines of how I don’t want her in my life anymore. While I never mean it, I see how it hurts her, because the fight ends and I can see small flickers reflecting from her glasses, almost as if her eyes were welling up with tears. I know my words hurt, but sometimes I think if I continue pushing, then maybe it’ll be a breakthrough of understanding her.
Mom’s anger reminds me of my own; maybe I inherited it. When I hear her pure and raw frustration after arguing through the poorly connected phone call with Grandma, I see my Mom as if she were myself. These phone calls are frequent, but they always spiral into Mom taking out
all her previous woes and shouting them loud enough to traverse the Pacific. The anger of feeling like she’s yelling into an echo chamber all alone, her pleas to be understood only clear to herself. The indestructible shield of her tenacity cracks, and she transforms herself into a teenager again, her desperation painting her face with youth.
She hides her fears and pain by putting on an indifferent face, assuring me she’s just tired, but I know it’s all lies. I want to grab her shoulders and shake awake the part of her hiding just beneath the surface, the girl who’s been forced to suppress her feelings, and tell her I’m there and I want to know her.
III. Locked Knees
A broken screech is released as my coarse violin bow contacts the rustic gray string. My right hand holding the bow is unable to match the pace the fingers of my left hand flail across the fingerboard. The notes start to jumble together until even the rhythm loses itself in the mess. I can feel my Mom’s eyes burn into my back, her silence a warning for me to focus on the notes and rests painted on the paper. My arm goes limp and I begin to slouch, my head going to implode from frustration.
Mom signed me up for violin lessons at age six. No matter how much I disliked its high-pitched sounds and the way it made my chin cramp up, Mom persisted, taking me week after week to lesson after lesson. She tells me I should get the opportunity to learn something she never had the chance to. In reality, she wanted me to live out a dream she always wanted. Each week, she would make me play the new folk song I learned, listening intently, face beaming when the notes began to shape themselves into a tune, turning itself into a new language which could be understood solely from the way the notes stacked on top of each other perfectly.
Once, Mom told me she continued to go to school because she doesn’t like to leave things unfinished. Despite being the oldest in her class, she continued to push through, telling me to follow her lead. But recently, I’ve noticed her movements become slower. It takes longer for her to walk up the stairs, her arthritis taking hold of her knees after years of biking in the winter as a child to make it to class. The magnetic mirror sticking on the refrigerator frequently in her hand to pluck out the pesky gray hairs which find a way out of the strands of red dye. I’ve always thought of Mom as invincible, her pure desire to fight on serving as an infinite fuel source. Though, now she’s reached the wire with how much more she can handle, leaving everything to me. Her closet filled with backlogged dreams left for me to clean out and sort through, an obligation for me to make her happy. As I reach deeper within the closet, I realize I’m reaching out to a teenager staring right back at me, the person my Mom used to be. Hiding all alone, scared of her future, I realize we truly are the same.
I don’t need to understand my Mom because she’s always been with me, her desires living alongside mine
