Moms, and a Tree She Climbed Once

There is a current of basic pragmatism coursing through my mother that I struggled to see past when I was younger, especially in the days when when it was forbidding me from going out with friends or insisting I pursue another insufferable educational endeavor. My mother liked to dispense advice as fact, often following up with, "You should listen to the wise woman." This closing sentiment (toxic to a teenager's ears) was, of course, itself a piece of advice, and also presented as fact -- there was going to be little choice, only obedience.

If my mother was often right, my brothers and I never let her know it. To some degree, we didn't have to -- she knew, as she had all along, that a mother is very seldom wrong. In any case, she had lived a longer and better-traveled life than any of us could have claimed as teenagers, had in fact given us the very life we now cried as our own, and no matter how far our childhood was from her own, there were certain realities even a new era an ocean away could not change. And so, after numerous blustery arguments followed inevitably by our reluctant obedience, we usually found ourselves exactly where our mother had predicted us to be -- smarter, better, fuller from whatever experience we had initially fought so hard against.

But more and more, I've come to see that my mother has the habits of a romantic. Behind the intransigent pragmatism, she cultures a small garden of poetry and flights of fancy. At the dinner table, when we attempted to turn away vegetables, she would trot out idioms to chastise our finicky, juvenile tastes. In the midst of shipping three unwilling boys off to Chinese school or after-school enrichment academies, my mother would soliloquize about knowledge and its value as both weapon and armor in the lives we had ahead of us. She would dream about taking trips to China and quote Chinese poems written centuries ago about those faraway, jeweled cities, then turn to us with a smile, asking, "Don't you want to go?" More often than not, we rolled our eyes and asked,"When?", worried about potential conflicts with our social calendars.

My mother insists, even today, that my brothers and I all pursue graduate degrees. She believes, with a fervent mix of maternal arrogance and protectiveness, that it will ensure us a steadier and more secure future. But she also does not complain when each of her children abandons traditional careers to pursue their ideas of success on their own terms, in fields she did not understand but made a point to take a more active interest in. She, too, has dreams. She had them when she first came to this country, and then she wiped them away for new ones almost three decades ago, when she had the first of her three sons. She dreamed of happy and fulfilling lives for them, and that dream hasn't changed, even if her idea of how they would get there has slowly become only her idea, and not a blueprint for theirs.

But my mother understands because she understands the impulse for beauty, for spontaneity, for a kind of unbridled idealism. On her first date with my father, they spent time walking around the campus of UT Austin, where they were both graduate students. She saw a tree with low, thick branches, perfect for climbing, like the ones she and her brothers and cousins used to scramble up in her youth, half a world away. And perhaps, she may have thought, not unlike the ones from the youth of the man she had just met. She veered off the path and walked straight for the tree. She put one hand on the lowest branch, pulled herself up, and didn't look back. A few branches up, she called down to the man she would one day marry, marveling at the view. My father, the kind, gentle, decidedly un-romantic man who had grown up on a farm, was shocked. Who was this woman, this climber of trees? He could not help but marvel back.

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My parents grew up in a place I don't know, with a different value system, a different language. Though I've learned about many of these things from them, they are still nevertheless foreign things. For a boy heavily steeped in his own evolving idea of what it means to be American, these foreign things of his parents are stored separately, in the attic of his mind. They are a part of his story, but only figure into the preamble. This creates a divide that I've struggled to get past as I've gotten older, as I finally came to the realization that my parents had entire lives of their own before I was ever an idea. Hearing their stories now, it helps. It helps me grasp at a somewhat clearer notion of who my parents are as people, and why they raised me the way they did.

When I think of my mother, I think of a Gustave Flaubert quote I read somewhere once that has unexpectedly stayed with me:

There isn't a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn't thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits...in a corner of every notary's heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

I don't know to what extent my mother, working in medical academia, is fulfilled. We cannot all chase the smoky substance of our hopes in the way we wanted. But I would be ungrateful if I sought to argue that my mother, with her heart of moldy poets, did not birth a fervent (if inconsistent) romantic in my soul, and provide a foundation for my own try at marvel.