One afternoon when I was young, in my last year of middle school or first year of high school, I heard my mother on the phone. She sat on the white carpet of the living room, clutching the receiver in one hand and her skull in the other. “Hi, yes, I threw up,” I heard her say in a weak voice. “My head hurts, too. I must have fallen off the sofa while I was sleeping, and hit it on the side of the coffee table.”
I listened as my mother described her urine flow and whether there was blood in her stool. I heard her shout weakly upstairs, past me, past the banister, to my middle sister. “I need you to drive me to the hospital. After I take a shower.”
By the time my mother had finished her shower, my middle sister had conveniently “fallen asleep,” her response to my mother’s urgent request for help. She’d shut her bedroom door, which my mother and I both knew meant we could not disturb her for fear of inciting her violence. Even as my mother continued pleading for help, she continued pretending she’d fallen so solidly asleep that she couldn’t hear a thing. So my mother took me with her to the hospital, instead, in a cab. I spent all day waiting at the hospital, and then into the night. Nurses took my mother away to run tests on her. She didn’t say anything as they led her away, and there was nothing to do but to wait and worry. I had brought my geometry textbook with me, tried to study for school, but failed to concentrate. I began hating hospitals at that point in my life, the cold feel of them, big, pale, overly lit shells of buildings. During that time my only comfort was the hot chocolate vending machine, putting in coins, pressing buttons, and watching the machine spurt out two streams of liquid into a paper cup.
When my mother finally emerged, after we transferred to another hospital and then got in a cab to go home, she still didn’t tell me anything of what had happened. The cabdriver looked at her and asked if she was going to get sick on the drive home, if she needed a plastic bag, to which she shook her head. I felt as though I were sitting next to a child.
Only when my mother called my oldest sister, her own sister, and my father, did I learn what had happened. “It was a mini-seizure, they think. Or maybe a mini-stroke. They’re not sure. But they say I’m fine now.”
At home my sister stared straight past us. My middle sister and I lived in different worlds when it came to my mother. For my middle sister, my mother was responsible for her happiness. I, on the other hand, felt I had to look out for my mother’s happiness, because clearly no one else was doing it, and my mother was not happy.
* * *
Mothers have historically been cultural transmitters. We look to our mothers to teach us how to be.
“Mothers will do anything for their children,” someone once told me. My ex-boyfriend’s mother, I think. I wanted to argue, but what was the point? If there’s anything people assume to be universal, it’s a mother’s love. That hadn’t been my experience. Culpability is one thing—erased, in the delayed recognition of illness. Aftereffect is another.
When you’re young, you look to your mother for future possibilities, and in her case, I saw decline. I hungered for the accumulation of memories, because I saw my mother gradually stripped of it. I imagined myself following the same trajectory as her. I wanted to fill myself up to the brim with experience first. I learned later that, as with water from a cup, experiences spill over, displaced by more recent and more vivid moments. I’ve already forgotten so much.
My parents seemed to believe in the myth of education—that armed with one of sufficient quality, somehow one will arrive at having utility to society. They gave little advice on how to be a good person, or how to move through the world. They were confident that with good enough schooling, we would all figure out the rest. It’s hard to overcome the effect of one’s socialization at home, though, which is more primal and more fundamental than any lessons learned in the outside world.
7 BUBBLE WRAPS
Money existed in an odd orbit in our household. On the one hand, there was money for things we didn’t necessarily want, like private music lessons, and always for school necessities, like AP exams or college application fees. On the other hand, I was always hungry at home, from our lack of food. We didn’t buy clothes, forever wearing the same baggy, ill-fitting attire. In retrospect I recognize the sorts of neglect my middle sister and I grew up with as a sign of my mother’s illness, more than an element of class. Whether we had money was a different question than whether there was an adult able to spend it as a parent might usually.
There was no constancy or logic to how money was handled in my household. We had it for pet projects of my parents’, the random tennis lesson or the music lessons my mother insisted on for us. Education costs were always seen as essential, not optional, regardless of subject matter. But we often didn’t have money for basics that others readily spent money on, such as stocking the kitchen with food, buying clothes, eating out, or entertainment.
* * *
I brought my girlfriend a present once: leftover packaging material from a box I received in the mail, carried with me on the Greyhound to Chicago.
“So relaxing, don’t you think?” she asked the first time I saw her fingers kneading air sacs, elbows out at her sides, rat-tats issuing forth, busy as she was massaging the guts of a small padded manila envelope. “Ooh!” she said with glee.
In my childhood household, fixated as we were on conserving, both for the environment’s sake, and financially, such things would be saved for reuse, but never enjoyed. In hers bursting bubbles was a special, and rare, form of pleasure.
“Thank you for bringing me bubble wraps,” she said. “Thank you.”
And she means it—that’s the best part of all. She is that innocent. She is that unmaterialistic. She is, in that way, completely different from those I’ve loved before.
“It’s fancy,” I tell her, because it’s sticky on one side, so she can wrap herself in it, if she wants to, and it will adhere. Later we find the fancier: a clear double-sided pouch we can grab and pinch with both hands, four layers of bubbles rubbing up, twice the rat-tats issuing at once.
“There’s something childlike about her,” my friend says. My friend means this in a disapproving way. But I like that things are still simple, unspoiled. That life’s logic is clear. She is, somehow, undamaged.
* * *
For my mother, safety came in the form of toilet rolls and office supplies. She stuffed the closets and the basements with paper goods, as though such things would ward off danger.
I cleaned the house periodically, filling our driveway with black bags of projector slides and permanent markers and other office supplies she’d hoarded from work, leaving them for Goodwill to pick up. It felt cyclic, where she brought in goods, and I cleaned up after her. She, too, had her own cycle of purging the house—oftentimes throwing away things that I valued, breaking them. Nothing was stable, with her.
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Joy came in small forms, too. One of these was coupons. During one stretch of time, she got stacks of coupons for free greeting cards from King Soopers. I accompanied her to the store a bit farther from our house, where the greeting card selection was better. We could only redeem a certain number of coupons each day, so we made repeated trips to peruse and gather. We stockpiled greeting cards, white envelopes and cards cascading from one of the drawers of the wooden chest in our living room. These cards weren’t meant to be used, and in fact we never did use them—it was the act of collecting them that my mother enjoyed so much, simply because it was a luxury she could afford.
It was an early lesson that commerce can mean happiness, and that when money concerns loom, there are always ways to while away hours buying things for free. I learned, young, the joys of clipping free coupons from the weekend flier, creating shopping lists based on these free coupons, sometimes filling an entire basket and paying only tax. It was from my mother and her extreme worries about money, worries I couldn’t calm by showing her figures or facts. Coupons allowed me to feel as though I, too young to work, could still contribute.
* * *
My family was similar to other immigrant families in that daily life wasn’t about pleasure or the pursuit of happiness but, more simply, survival. This feeling of survival was separate from practical realities, such as figures on bank statements. It was more of an overriding principle about how to make decisions, day to day, and it changed, over time.