I don’t want to tell you how hard my mom worked — the hours spent standing in the hair salon, stooped over some stranger’s head, the blood pooling in her feet, the fluorescent buzz above. I don’t want to tell you about the pain of a split self — the separate countries, separate tongues, separate families, but also the more fundamental split self, the one where the “I” is no longer an “I,” but just “mother,” “wife,” and then some years later, “divorced.” I don’t want to tell you about her life, flying in the in-between, the woman struggling, living, and ensuring her brood flies farther and faster. I don’t want to tell you how I could never write or express any of this in a language that she would understand, and how this fact will haunt me to my grave.
I don’t want to tell you any of this.
But what I do want to tell you about is the woman who spent her teenage years on the backs of motorcycles, sleeping overnight on the beach with her friends before getting caught and kicked out at dawn. You can hear it right? The giggles echoing across the sand, dazzling sunlight melting into the velvet dark. I want to tell you about the smirk she has in a photo taken when she was in early high school. Her eyes bright, even in the black and white. There is a rebellion brewing in her. An itching of her shoulder blades, ready to expand, take flight. You can see it, can’t you? I want to tell you about the woman who knows loneliness like it’s sewn into her bones, knows how to find companionship in the first welcoming face, knows how to seek out temples, churches, altars, and holy books for answers that are not there. And I want to tell you how at 20, she decided she wanted more, and leapt across the ocean to find something new. I want to tell you how just last week she was in Thailand, and soon she’ll be in Alaska.
This woman whose laugh, by the way, sounds just like mine — no, I know it’s the other way around, but I’m not sure how else to explain that, in a way, my mother and I are twin souls. And how while that is true, I want to tell you about this woman who is hers and hers alone.
Happy Mother’s Day.
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