I Don't Want My Parents To Read This.com

Yesterday, I sat down to dinner with my mom in a quiet, hole-in-the-wall Thai food restaurant. We ate alone in the empty restaurant, conversing over curry and snickering over steamed rice. And as it tends to in an empty Thai restaurant, the conversation bounced from topic to topic, and at some point, landed on the tender uncertainties of death. In this, my mother said to me, “I’ve been fortunate enough to have never lost someone truly close to me”. From there, conversation, like a bored and restless child, soon moved on to other excitements.

But what my mother had said that night stuck with me. Because in saying it, I knew that she was lying. She had lost someone close to her. And I know this because I watched her grieve that person. I watched her stumble through all five stages. I saw her initial, staggering disbelief. I observed her violent anger. I listened to her boundless bargaining. I watched as she battled the relentlessness of depression. And finally, I watched as acceptance trickled into her soul, the way the world settles after a storm.    

I know this because I watched her grieve her own daughter. I watched her grieve me. 

My mother always had dreams of the person I would grow up to be. The life I would grow up to live, and the people I would grow up to love. But like most daughters are to mothers, I wasn’t exactly who she had pictured. 

When I was small, there was room for my mother’s big dreams in the bubble of my life. But as I’ve grown, my mother’s dreams have begun to suffocate from their lack of real estate, and my lack of attentiveness to them. The vision of who, or what, I would be wilted with every discrepancy in our desires for my life. When my mother pictured pink, I pictured blue. When my mother saw a dress, I saw a suit. And when my mother dreamt of my wedding day, she dreamt of a boy; I dreamt of a girl. 

At first, there was denial: “It’s a phase. Nothing permanent, just some confusion is all.” Then there was anger: “Damn it, why can’t you just be normal?!” To follow was the bargaining: “Dear God, please help her to understand this isn’t right. I’ll do anything.” And lastly came the depression: One final, desperate plea for me to take pity, fight what was inside, and suppress the forces threatening the final scraps of her dreams.  

My mother still loves me, but the reality is that I am not the daughter she envisioned for herself. 

She wanted someone who would dress classy and giggle at boys. Someone who would have an easy life, free of prejudice or violence and uncertainty. And for that, she wanted- needed- a daughter who would be straight. 

Instead, she got someone with questionable style, and who gets queasy at the thought of kissing a man.   

With the loss of the person my mother wanted me to be, she also lost all of the dreams she’d had of my future and the role she would play in it. I ripped from opinions that she felt were fact, and maybeies that she felt were set into stone. I forced her to shift perspectives and re-outline every vision she had once had. And I know that what I asked her to do was complex and challenging, and I know she struggled through it. I know that she grieved who she thought I would be, and every vision of our shared future. But I also know that she loves me. And I know so because she chose to grieve me, and because she allowed me to challenge her idea of me. 

The bottom line is that my mother lost someone she loved the most. But in doing so, she met and learned to love someone new. Someone who may not always be exactly what she expected, but who will always be true to themselves and will always love her. In the end, in her acceptance, my mother met me.