mother?
mother?
My hands remember holding a pen. My ears remember the clink of a glass and my nose and mouth remember the acrid smell of alcohol, the one I could never quite get a taste for, but my eyes remember nothing at all. Perhaps this is because I know my mother not by the way she looks or the things she does, but by the things she says.
Before and after that one night, my mother never drank no matter how bad her mood was or how terrible her day had been. Jugs of strange poisonous drinks glimmered on the counter, arranged too many in a row – the glass got dusty as the colorful bottles piled up, but the stuff inside stayed as it was. The collection was only a collection. I still don’t know what made her change her mind and break her habit. Maybe just that it was a habit, and she was tired of those. Whatever it was, the yellow stuff was the first to go, and I noticed it because the rainbow on my kitchen counter had been broken.
At that time I was a smaller person with a huge interest in the workings of dysfunctional families, not quite knowing what kind of family I had but wishing all the same that I would some day be able to write about my oppressive mother and all the ways she screwed me up. Steadily, as I learned how to write and how to not use big words and how to express myself in a way that was almost almost like the kind of writing I saw in the Joy Luck Club, I felt underwhelmed that the world as I perceived it was not nearly as interesting as Amy Tan’s. For a long time, I wanted an insane Chinese mother whose unintentional purpose was to completely destroy my values and make me a maladjusted lunatic. For a long time, I thought I had one.
Natural stresses had been building up for a few years now, triggered by school, life, habits. Seeing my mother take up a glass filled with some kind of golden swill was like a moment of triumph, and I sat down at the table and got a pencil to write down what she said. It took a while, but eventually she got there. My dad was present as well, which made for some interesting conversation.
“This is great,” I said, and I wrote, thinking somewhere shallow that drunk parents loudly pointing out each other’s flaws would certainly get me some kind of a book deal, and thinking somewhere much deeper and much more uneasy that something was gestating under those little quips, something you could never say out loud. I only realized after a few months that I had learned more things about my mother in that single three-hour period than I’d learned after more than a decade living in her house.
Later, in the cozy corner of my now ex-room, where sat an old iMac that seemed to function by miracle, I sat down and wrote down things that made me queasy to read. The reasons I did not know my mother as I wanted to. The reason I can feel closer to her than I do to anyone else, and then realize one night that I know nothing about her.
I was staggered the first time she told me that to my face. I’d gone through my life thinking we were best friends. She’d turned me into a stranger in the blink of an eye.
I don’t know what happened to me between then and now, but the distress is gone, and I can hardly imagine how maddening and mind-consuming it was to a girl who wanted nothing more than to share something deep and special with her mother. Thinking about the day I learned that we were not as close as I’d thought, I realize that knowing things in the head is different from knowing things in the heart. I don’t know about my mother’s life, and I don’t know about the things she did or the things she believes. What I do know is that I will tell her anything, and that we have reached such a familiarity that hiding from her what I feel is next to useless. And this cruelty, this hard way of teaching me – this is not trauma. This is not deep dramatic conflict, not a terrible secret I need to make known in order to gain peace with myself. This is a mother, and this is her daughter. There is nothing terrible to their name – they hurt each other and then love to make up for it; they deceive each other and, sometimes, forgive.
I used to look for something sinister, a mental manipulation that lurked beneath everything she did, but the Amy Tan in me is feeble and toothless. Every so often, when the pressure builds into an inescapable event horizon, I’ll try to commune with my inner oppressed child, but I won’t get far. You will never see my mother immortalized in the pages of a book, all of her dirty secrets and all of her wicked ways of ruining me revealed. You will never see her listed among the tyrannical Chinese mothers of the literary world. Years and years of painstaking planning not withstanding, she doesn’t belong there.