I just recently decided it would be okay to start listening to my mother again. She had given me pretty good advice up until 1988 but after that it all went downhill. Since I was an irritatingly boring and well-behaved child, I have to say she had it easy. I didn’t hang out with a rough crowd, practiced the piano, suffered no unexpected pregnancies...
She wasn’t your stereotypical Asian mother. She didn’t really pressure me to do well in school (I already did, thank you very much). Curfews? ‘Eh...never broke them because I never stayed out late. Drug problem? Please! The hardest drug I did came dipped in hard-candy shell. She wasn’t the strict, oppressive Asian immigrant mother who felt her children’s success reflected her own success as a parent. Her own mother died when she was a young girl and she was raised by her aunt. Despite her aunt's best efforts, (and by my mother's own account) she was one baaad little kid. I saw a snapshot of her and my uncle once when they were young. My mom looked to be about twelve or thirteen and skinny as a Lucky Strike. Nine out of ten people polled would agree that she wore an afro. She stared stone-faced, her eyes looking straight into the camera and smiled the same no-teeth smile she uses today. She’s not giving anything away, that one.
As I saw it, my mother’s main child-rearing objectives were to feed, house and educate us. And keep us relatively happy. In 1979, we made the move from San Francisco to Vallejo, a suburb thirty miles north of the City. Since my sister AD was just too damn smart, she moved up a year, ending up in the same grade as my sister, AM. They were about to enter the eigth grade and rather than have them miss the chance to "graduate" with their class, my mother let them live on their own in small room, in a converted garage in someone’s house. Those kinds of studio conversions or "in-laws" were very popular in houses in the Sunset. My sisters, ages thirteen and fourteen, were living by themselves in the City, with nothing but the threat of my mother’s wrath to keep them in check.
So what if Social Services may have called that neglect? The Sunset neighborhood in 1979 was a different world back them and lucky for all of us, my sisters were big fish in their little pond, remarkably trustworthy and responsible kids. The sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus Elementary school stayed blissfully ignorant.
Over the years, she did the best she could, making decisions that would make today's parents mouths drop open. Oh, we suffered as we discovered Ponds cold cream had no sun-protective protective properties whatsoever and probably encouraged extra-wicked sunburns. And a prune or two would have helped things along, rather than ingesting those deceptively chocolaty-Ex-lax candies, my mother would feed us after a particularly heavy meal. When it came to my mother’s advice, I quickly developed a filter to sift away the sludge from the gold bits.
I suspect the hardest part my mother had to do was live apart from us, often finding work that took her to neighboring cities for weeks at a time. I stopped living with my mother at around fourteen. She was my "mother inabsentia". There, but not there.
She’s got her own way of doing things and while her methodology may seem crazy to some, the proof is in the proverbial pudding. My sisters and I didn’t grow up completely damage-free; between the five of us, we have a rack full of issues just waiting for us to leaf through. But, we grew up well-fed, with a roof over our heads, and college under our belts. And at the end of the day, I’d say that’s a job well-done.
