Between The Squiggles

I grew up resenting my mother. (And father too).

It’s funny how my mind went for the word “resent,” as I’d usually say I grew up hating my mother. I guess… this is how it goes, doesn’t it? With age, you really come to understand that your mother really was never the villain.

I often reminded my mother that words carry power, that they can shape reality. Still, she’d say she hoped I’d return to where I came from once I finished my graduate degree. Now before we get into this, please know: I grew up believing that a better life, a freer life, existed somewhere out West. It was etched into me early on, sometimes by the very people who feared losing me to it. So it’s no surprise I didn’t want to come back; I was still chasing the mirage of a foreign freedom.

Leaving aside the fact that I’ve finally shed my illusions about the West, it might surprise many, friends included, that one of the reasons I’m ready to return home is my parents. You probably don’t realize how strange it is for me to even say that.

Just a few years back when my mom broke down in front of my friend, saying that once I leave, she’d be left “childless,” since my sister had already settled in the States ago, I remember making a cursory comment, being borderline dismissive, telling her not to cry. Anyone who saw me at that moment would’ve easily understood I was probably not the… closest with my parents/mother.

However, over the years — as life keeps slipping you quiet realizations in the middle of otherwise ordinary days — you realize your parents were never the “bad” people you thought they were (not that this was a thought you ever necessarily disagreed with internally), that while you were growing up, they were too, and that if it were anyone else, you’d have been kicked out long ago, and then it hits you that if you lived far away and only saw them once a year, and they had twenty years left, you’d only see them twenty more times in your life???! How does that make sense? Like what? I thought there’d be time??? To sort things out, to do what I needed to do, and to then somehow, still have everything fall into place, after which I’d finally get to enjoy being with them???? Like hello??

This thought is not the one I grapple with the most, however. It’s something far simpler.

Growing up, my mom made sure we always had something to snack on in the evenings. I suppose I’d always been conscious of it — hard not to be, since I was the one eating them. But it’s strange how you can be conscious of something your whole life and still never really see it. I had, like most kids, taken it so completely for granted that when on a random Friday I finally realized what my mother had actually been doing all those years, the memory didn’t feel like a memory — it felt like something new, happening right then, for the first time.

But that’s not even the worst bit…

Because right after that, another memory surfaced — this memory of her warming up dinner every single night, again without fail, and calling us to eat. This one startled me even more, because I didn’t remember it until that moment. It was as if the memory had never existed.

I was suddenly hit with a sense of urgency. It felt as if all my memories with my parents were suddenly vanishing, like the lights in a long corridor, flickering out one by one.

So I’m here thinking that….

If our minds can forget so many acts of love — small or big but things that not only happened daily but that shaped us — then maybe it’s fair to assume our parents did far more for us than we remember? Maybe remembering that — or even just admitting how much we’ve forgotten — is reason enough to forgive them, or to love them again, a little differently?

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