Original Illustration by Daphne Zheng
I
Dear fantasy mother, thank you / for taking my coming out as calmly / as a pond accepts a stone / found into its depths.
So begins Mary Jane Chan’s poem Conversation with Fantasy Mother. Haven’t we all imagined such conversations? Where acceptance and love is doled out free and easily by a parental figure. No pause or shudder, just an unwavering, soothing embrace. Like Billy Elliot dancing his little heart out, we all just want to be understood. To see our father sitting out in the crowd, eyes wet with admiration, finally making all these misunderstandings worth it.
Coming out to my mother was hard because I felt like a child. I felt like a child because I could only articulate myself with the broken, fragmentary vocabulary of a child, my Cantonese full of stutters. I knocked on her bedroom door, and crept in with the hesitation of someone knowing there was no reward awaiting my courage. I’ve always admired the characters in stories that leap into the midst of battle knowing full well the odds are stacked against them. For me, coming out wasn’t in hope of some reward. No, to me it was a foregone conclusion. It was simply something I had to do.
The life I lead seems so directly at odds with what my mother would approve of, so I have become an expert at compartmentalising, segmenting sections of myself neatly into different boxes. The only son. The struggling artist. The night owl. The successful artist. The lonely soul. The homosexual. The party animal. The book nerd. Switching codes comes easy to me. So much of me remains invisible to her.
Soon after my coming out, we implicitly agreed never to speak of it again. And we have kept to this unspoken promise since. Our family has long mastered the art of sweeping things under the rug. My brain tells me that it is easier this way; my heart aches for closure.
I am neither the child that they may have dreamed of, and they are not the parents that I would have wished for. I don’t believe we love each other any less, but it’s a love tinged with a yearning for what might have been. Of what will never be. Grief over the childhood I never had. To know I will never have it. I try not to dwell on it as much as possible, these dangerous what ifs.
For all the unspoken tensions and unresolved conversations, our relationship functions. Is there not a beauty in accepting this simply is what it is? I am only now discovering the profound sense of dignity that comes with accepting some things cannot be changed.
II
One of the pleasures of returning home as an adult and slipping into the grooves of my adolescence has been learning to love my mother again. To be taken care of by her. To feel the maternal warmth of a cooked meal. These small gestures offer a glimpse of hope that I thought I had long squashed. If the future of our relationship doesn’t look likely to change, I can at least appreciate the nostalgia contained in these present acts. Perhaps change is so incremental it cannot be measured in real time, only in retrospect.
On the other hand, it’s also a frightening thing to return to the nest. Not because it is difficult - no, because it’s so shockingly easy. One seamlessly reverts and regresses to a childlike state. To think you have come so far, only to be proven wrong, as your mother picks up your dirty laundry and changes your sheets. As you leave dirty dishes in the sink and borrow the family car. As you are asked if you’re coming home for dinner or where you were last night.
I am reminded of how much I owe them. Sometimes this thought fills me with an immense sense of gratitude, but in my lowest moments this gratitude has twisted into contempt. Hasn’t every angry child attempted to calculate the debt owed to one’s parents? To tally up the score and crunch the numbers in an attempt to one day wipe one’s slate clean and loudly exclaim to one’s mother or father that there is nothing tying us to each other any longer.
There is the myth that familial love is unconditional. But it’s our very choice to love despite the repeated breaching of these conditions that makes family so tangled and fraught. We want to believe it is unconditional, so we perform unconditionally and expect unconditionally and tolerate unconditionally. We bend and we bend for each other, all to maintain this beautiful lie: that nothing you do will stop me from loving you. Few others can hurt us like family does only for the bond to remain intact. Sometimes I fear the day I stop believing this lie because I fear that is the only thing keeping us together.
III
I was always compared to my mother growing up. The most grating being the way I looked. It should come of no shock that taking after her wasn’t really a point of pride for me. My sister, on the other hand, was compared to our father. Sharper features compared to my softer ones. It’s a comparison that I, as a young Chinese-Kiwi male, resisted in an attempt to cling on to what little masculinity I had.
But, the truth is, I am my mother’s child. We are the readers of the family. We are the dreamers. She has often made note of this. Again, this is a comparison I had resisted in my head time and time again, seeing it as a reduction of my own characteristics as simply an offshoot of hers - my attributes a mere postscript to her breeding.
Where I once thought her need to situate her existence around her children to be an act of desperation - weakness, even - now I see it as an act of optimistic pride. An attempt to connect in a household with many crossed wires. Real cruelty would be to judge her for this. Real cruelty would be to continue building walls around my heart so she has no hope of reaching it. Walls she has no idea that even exist.
There’s a risk that in coming to her defense I come across sounding like a hostage who has suddenly developed Stockhold syndrome, masochistically praising his captor. You see, the Asian child loves to complain about his parents, but as soon as others agree with him, he will quickly backpedal and denounce all such criticisms. The Asian child is full of contradictions.
Better than becoming the callous essayist though, too enticed by self-importance. He who risks twisting the act of confession into an act of revenge. I initially thought to write honestly of one’s parents as a sort of tribute, warts and all, because to paint them as anything less than human would be nothing short of a lie. That now seems like a greater lie I told myself to justify the sharp edges of my sentences. Sentences that would cut my mother to tiny pieces if she were to read them. If she were able to read them.