Potty-talk and Other Regressions

I stood across the lawn from them, squinting in the sun. I was four, which means he would have been two. I only know this because I remember the house that we lived in then. We moved so often that I’ve learned to tell time by the house that we occupied at any given moment. Those houses stand like markers, points of identification around which three or four year clusters of particular experiences, people and places gather in my mind. Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. I watched as my grandmother squatted beside my brother, a faded yellow margarine tub in her hand, and began coaxing him to pee with a rhythmically hissing, “shee, shee, shee.” Potty training the Korean way. As he began to urinate, preening with a kind of princely privilege and pride, I yelled, “ewwwwwww!” My grandmother didn’t look in my direction, but her retort, “YA!” came cracking across the yard like a swat on my retreating rear. I turned my head to stick out my tongue at them before running away.

My relationship with my grandmother wasn’t complicated. I won’t elaborate now on all my conjectures about her projections of self-hate, but with me she was almost always harsh and dismissive. Without a second thought, she sent me back into the night to search for the extra pair of underwear I’d dropped along the way when I returned from my first sleepover, terrified and crying. I was five. She frequently wiped her thumb across my cheeks, voicing her displeasure at the unfortunate emergence of my freckles. For years I wore them, ugly and ashamed. My skin screamed as she scrubbed too hard at bathtime. “Owwww! You’re hurting me!” I once exclaimed. “YA!” she said, “gamanhi anj-a!”* Sit still. Cut it out. And she commenced the scrubbing with increased vigor. It was clear from the time that she came to live with us that she saw me as an inconvenience to and an intruder on her time with my brother. Sometimes I was permitted to sit up with them at night while M*A*S*H or the The Jeffersons flickered soundlessly in the background. Most times, though, theirs was a private club of two that I observed from afar, my face pressed up against the screen of their indifference.

*Last Thanksgiving, as we sat around the table for the first time without my mother, we listened to my son jabbering away. Somewhere along the way, he’d adopted the name “Aunt Da-da” for my sister, Rebecca. None of us know why that’s the name he’s settled on, but we reflected on the fact that it had an uncanny resemblance to my brother’s childhood name for me. When we were young, my brother called me “ya-ya” for the first five or six years of his life. Again, we never really understood why. But as we sat there, my sister remarked: “You know what? Tim probably called you that because grandma called you ‘Ya!’ so often.” It was one of those moments when life’s little mysteries suddenly give way right before one’s eyes and become glaringly obvious. How had we never considered that before? We cracked up as we realized that for all of those years, my brother had more or less thought my name was “hey you!”

For a long time, I thought of my grandmother with bitterness and then, eventually, with little more feeling than I might have for a passing acquaintance. The last time we were all together, we were visiting my parents in Korea. My grandmother was planning to move back to LA to live with my uncle, so my mother asked the three of us to perform a small traditional bowing ceremony (Sebae) for my grandmother. It included, as does every other occasion in Korea, presenting her with money in white envelopes. Out of respect for my mother, I obliged. As we concluded and made our way out of her room, my grandmother summoned my brother back in, and when he emerged, he smugly held all of our money in his hands. He relented, of course, when he came up against our seething wall of sisterhood and redistributed the money appropriately. We weren’t really angry, though. We were simply playing our roles; by then, we’d accepted the order of things.

Last month, we all met in California at my maternal uncle’s house to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday. In Korean culture, turning sixty is a significant milestone, and it’s usually observed with a kind of ceremonial importance. While we were there, however, my uncle wanted us to go visit my grandmother who is now in her eighties and who, he told us, probably only has a year or two left. As we drove to the assisted living center, he reminded us, again, of the story we were supposed to relay if she asked where my mother was. Because of my grandmother’s declining health and dementia, my uncle and my mother decided that they wouldn’t tell my grandmother when my mother finally did pass away. Yup. Already feeling some anxiety about this charade, I was a bit on edge when my uncle began talking about my grandmother’s deteriorated state. Because she had fallen several times recently, they agreed that she would no longer attempt to walk around and would, instead, only use a wheelchair. Switching back and forth between Korean and English, we moved from one awkward conversation to the next until, somehow, he was explaining things that we already knew about the way one loses muscle tone and control over bodily functions when wheel-chair bound. I sort of tuned out for a minute, and then I heard him say, “so…doo-doo and shee-shee, sometimes just fall out.” Just like that. And I couldn’t help it, I was four years old all over again. The laughter erupted out of me and I couldn’t stop it. The strain of the week, the hundreds of little white lies, the secrets and the absolute absurdities about our lives that my mother’s illness and death had exposed just burst out of me—rudely, unexpectedly and uncontrollably. My uncle looked at me in the rearview mirror, bewildered, and my sister looked at me, eyebrows raised, with the look I’m usually shooting her: “WTF? Get it together!” Finally, I bit my cheek and managed to get myself under control, though my body trembled for several minutes more with laughter that begged not to be contained.

We sat with my grandmother for about an hour in the courtyard, surrounded by pale pink stucco walls and other residents (all Korean) shuffling aimlessly around. Despite the warnings, I was still a little surprised to find her so vacant, to watch as our presence dawned on her more than once. It felt like a scene out a movie. It definitely didn’t feel like real life. One resident sat in the sun where she’d been wheeled. She was complaining loudly about the sun being too bright. Her eyelids drooped so deeply that we wondered how she could see anything at all, but my brother got up and moved her to a shadier spot. “Hey!” she yelled, “who was that? There’s a man around here just coming and going!” We all giggled a little under our breath and my grandmother, looking confused, joined in. My sister explained what had happened, and my grandmother began yelling at the woman, “that’s not a strange man; that’s my grandson!” “EH?!” yelled the woman, “WHAT?!” And my grandmother, probably forgetting already what had happened, yelled back, “EH?! WHAT?!” Back and forth they went, the call and response of dementia, until one or the other forgot their part and they lapsed into silence.

In the time that followed, my sister and I watched, mostly in silence, as my grandmother lovingly caressed my brother’s face and exclaimed over and over how strange it was that he was so grown up and marveled at how handsome he’d become. I was unprepared for the flood of sadness and tenderness that washed away the laughter in me and nearly made me weep. I was sad for my grandmother, for all that she’s lost to the progression of time and, in the face of so much regression, for all that she doesn’t know she’s lost. I was sad for my mother, who would never be old and for her grandchildren, who would never know her, soft, in old age. And I was sad for myself, not old at all, but suddenly, the oldest in this line of women. 

However, I was also grateful for the opportunity to go back. We don’t get the chance very often to return to those moments in life that shape us, to rewrite our narratives. There we were, children again. My brother and my grandmother were wrapped up in their intimacy, and I sat across from them in the courtyard. This time, though, I wasn’t angry or jealous or hurt. I thought of my son, who is the same age, now, as my brother was when we stood in the yard all those years ago. Time flies so quickly and we are promised so little. It’s up to us to find those small splashes of love and beauty where we can, to discover those moments that originate in us or around us and rock us gently or wildly to our core. And when we can’t, perhaps we can trace the ripples that began elsewhere back to their sources. Maybe I couldn’t love my grandmother, but I can love the woman who has loved my brother with such tenderness. And that is enough.

A New Season

I’ve been reading/watching The Joy Luck Club with one of my classes. For all of the obvious and clichéd reasons, it has always resonated with me. But watching it today, on the heels of my mother’s death, it shook all of the remaining reserve and detachment right out of me. It’s not that it’s an especially powerful film; in fact, I think the acting’s really bad for the most part. But stereotypes or not, it manages to capture enough truth about mothers and daughters, particularly, about cross-cultural mother/daughter relationships. As I watched today, I felt those gaps and misunderstandings between those mothers and daughters in newly painful ways. Before, even though I’d kind of sympathized with the mothers in the film, I was pretty firmly entrenched in the daughters’ perspectives, feeling the hurt, rejection, embarrassment, etc. that came with having an Asian mom in “American” culture. Today, however, I felt those mothers’ stories more acutely. I found myself explaining, rationalizing, and excusing their behavior to my students who were appalled and aghast at the way they treated their children. “Can’t you see,” I asked my students, “how their expectations and reactions are informed by all of those secret sorrows, forgotten loves, deep regrets and alternate lives that their daughters never fully know or understand?” “No,” they answered, “that lady’s just cold!”

I suppose that on an intellectual level I’d understood how these women had become the looming matriarchs that they appeared to be to their daughters. I hadn’t, however, really understood just how much we are shaped by those unexpected currents of life that sweep us up without our permission. Some people never make it back to the bank; they never get that opportunity to take a breath, to lie in the sun for a moment, assess the damages and chart a new course. They simply get swept further downstream, pummeled here and there by debris, barely managing to stay above water. Perhaps because I’m a mother myself, now, I have a bit more understanding and empathy for the way we get carried away from ourselves without realizing it.

In many ways, this was my mother’s story…and mine.  As we sat together in those last minutes together, she looked at me and said, “I have been so stupid…” She trailed off, lost in her regret and sadness. I understood all that would have followed if we’d had time enough; we’d both been stupid. We’d used up all the time we had caught up in things that, perhaps, should have mattered less than just loving one another.  Why do so many things get in the way of just loving one another? She cupped my cheek with her hand and with all the love, with all the affection, with all the things between a mother and child that there are not words enough to express, she said, “goodbye, baby girl.” In an instant, I was filled up, emptied out, destroyed and put back together again. It was, without a doubt, the most profound and sacred moment that I’ve experienced in my life thus far. I could try to explain, try to talk around it, but I don’t think I can yet articulate why or how that moment has changed me so completely; I only know that it has. It tossed me onto the banks of that river that carried me downstream, and now it’s up to me to find the way back to myself.

But today, I found myself missing my mother, truly mourning her for the first time. Before now, I’ve been in some kind of denial. It’s not that I deny her death, but somehow I’ve found a way to deny her absence. It’s fairly easy because she wasn’t a daily presence in my life. We texted every few days and skyped once every week or two, but there were long stretches of time between our face-to-face visits.  It helps that I’ve been so incredibly busy and bogged down in the day-to day, but the tension has been building over the past few weeks as the leaves have started to turn. Every time I drive beneath the brilliant canopy of trees, I think about how much she would have loved this fall. I took a picture of my son recently pulling his wagon on a walk: the trees behind him are golden, the leaves on the ground are raspy oranges and reds—you can almost hear them crackling beneath his feet.  I took that picture for her. I knew how much she would have loved it.

After we buried my mother’s ashes, my brother asked me whose idea it had been to bury them beneath a tree. I told him that one of the pastors had actually suggested interring my mother’s ashes there. And then he told me a story I’d never heard before. When he was in his language school for the military, my mom visited his Korean class on what happened to be Arbor Day. She told my brother that when she left Korea with my father in the 70s, she looked down at her country from the airplane and all she could see was brown; the countryside was still razed and ravaged from the wars.* But upon her return many years later, she told him, she’d cried with joy when she looked down on her country again and discovered the lush green landscape below.

*For many years in Korea (until just recently, I think), Arbor Day was actually a public holiday and the government launched national campaigns to support reforestation; it was done with a kind of fervor for a long time.

Hearing that story undid me a little. Not because of the story itself, though I’m glad it’s one that I have now, but because I was struck by the fact that I’d never heard it. I realize that there’s so much about my mother and her life that I don’t know. She didn’t talk about her childhood or her life before my father very often. Some things she shared. Some things I cobbled together on my own. Other things I overheard. And then there were things that I stumbled across here and there that I’m sure I was never meant to know. But it’s easy to forget, with the familiarity of the everyday, that my mother was, in so many ways, an unknown entity. When my brother told me his story, I was consumed with sadness for all the ways in which I’ll never know her now. If we’d had more time, more than those last few moments on the couch, what would she have told me? Sure, it’s easy to romanticize now, to imagine that things might have been different. Honestly, though, I don’t know. I don’t know that we would have found a way to meet one another in some sort of truth. But I like to imagine that we might have.