She looked across at me. “So you think I should stay at work?”
I was beginning to think that maybe she should. “I’m saying sacrifice isn’t always this big generous gift that people think it is.” I couldn’t explain why I was feeling that so profoundly, at least not straight away.
Sarah tried to help. “Because it will make me unhappy?”
“Yes,” I said, but that wasn’t it, exactly. I mean, it was awful for her to be unhappy, but was that what I meant? Maybe it was...
Piece by piece, the jigsaw fit together in my head as I tried to figure out what I meant and what I wanted to say. It was when I thought about constantly hearing Mum telling me over and over what she gave up for me, and when I remembered her constantly buying me all these new clothes, and toys, and books that I didn’t really need while she stayed up late at night and mended her old dresses that it began to make sense. I remembered how that felt, how it felt when she pushed me through the gate of an expensive Catholic school with a brand new haircut while she used cheap store-bought dye that turned her hair blue. I remembered how it felt watching her struggle and suffer while I didn't, and finally I got it. That feeling in my chest. That guilt. How gross it made me feel, how selfish it made me feel, knowing that the reason she couldn’t buy herself nice things was because of me.
The words formed on my lips even before I’d figured out how to articulate them. “If you quit, you think your kid won’t know you’re miserable?” I asked her; it was a genuine question. “You think they won't grow up knowing you’re miserable because you quit doing what you love for them? Because that’s not going to happen, I promise you. They’ll know. They’ll know, and they’ll know it’s their fault.”
A look of recognition passed across her face. She knew who I was talking about. “It’s not your fault, Min.”
I shrugged. “I’m still always going to know she did it because of me. She left everything for me. She left the country she knew, the career she loved, all supposedly for my own good. She went without all the things she needed to give me the things I needed. And she hated it,” I told Sarah. “She hated it. And I knew.”
As I spoke, everything just fell into place. Everything made sense. I understood what had gone wrong for Mum and why she was so completely obsessed with my life. I understood why I felt so fucking awful every time she mentioned it, and the words just came tumbling out.
“I’ve spent my whole fucking life trying to compensate her, Sarah. Trying to compensate her for what she gave up by doing everything she wants, but it’s never enough. No matter what I do, it’s never enough. She’s never happy with me, and of course she fucking isn't: she's unhappy, herself. She's not doing things she loves or living the life she wanted, because all her attention is focused on me. Her entire identity is me! And let me tell you what that does to a kid,” I told Sarah. “Let me tell you: I’ve been feeling fucking guilty since the day I was born. Guilty, and like I have to do every tiny little thing she wants. I feel like I’ve had this enormous fucking debt that I will never repay hanging over my head every day of my life, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger every time she does something for me. Every time I watched her give me something brand new while she went without, it grew. Every time she gave something up so I didn’t have to, it grew. Let me tell you: that type of sacrifice isn’t a gift. You’re not doing something kind when you give up something that’s important to you for someone else. It’s pressure that never goes away for them. They’ll always know what you lost. It’s a fucking trap that haunts them forever.”
I gathered Sarah’s hands up in mine, my jaw tight. “Please, don’t do that to your kid, please. Stay at work. I mean, obviously eat more and get enough sleep, but stay there. Stay there and finish your amazing project and collect the accolades you deserve. Get promoted. Work, travel, live the life you imagined, don’t let having a kid stop you from doing that. Maybe you won’t be constantly around for your kid 24/7, but when you are, you’ll be happy. Your kid will get to see their mum happy and doing something that she loves, and that’s worth so much. That’s worth so much, Sarah. Your kid will see how to be happy, and you’ll never have to regret the amazing life you didn’t lead for them.”
A silence stretched between us as my words hung in the air. I swallowed. “That's what I think you should do.”
There were tears in Sarah’s eyes when she finally spoke. “Thank you,” she said with feeling. “Thank you. I think that’s exactly what I needed to hear.”
She pulled me into a firm hug with her arms wrapped tightly around my neck. She didn’t let me go for a long time, but when she did, her eyes were red. “You’re incredible, you know that?” she murmured, squeezing my hand.
I smiled in appreciation of her compliment, but I didn’t feel particularly incredible. My head was a big jumble of what I’d just realised about Mum, and I couldn’t think straight.
Sarah was already feeling around on her bedside table for her mobile, so I handed it to her and she went straight to her phone book. “They’re discharging me from here after lunch if I keep my food down and my blood pressure is back within range,” she told me. “I’m going to call work and tell them I’ll be back this afternoon, and I’ll make it to the planning meeting tonight. And then I think I probably need to have a long chat with Rob before I go.”
I nodded. I think that was my cue to give her some space; I didn’t mind, really. I needed some space for myself because my head was spinning.
The ward was full of people on my way out of it. So many big swollen bellies and women holding their new tiny babies with looks of total wonderment and adoration in their eyes. And in amongst all this joy and new life, all I could do was ask myself how many of these women were leaving their lives for their children, and how many of their children would end up like me.
How many of them were being told right now to focus all their energy and attention on their children, like ‘good’ mothers should? Were they being pressured by their partners, or by work, or by TV or whatever to leave work when they really didn’t want to? And how many of these children would become the complete focus, the hobby, and the life’s work of these mums to fill the void opened up in their lives as a result?
At least there’s one baby who won’t, I thought, thinking of Sarah. At least there’s one baby who’s going to watch their mum doing her thing, living her own life, and being happy.
I stopped in place. That was the answer, wasn’t it?
It hit me square in the chest what was missing from Mum’s life: her own life. Her own job, her own dreams, her own future. While she was sending me all those texts and emails, all the beautiful dreams for ‘our’ wedding to Henry, she was missing out on her having her own beautiful white wedding, the one she’d always dreamed of. It had been 26 years since she’d had a boyfriend, and the way she talked about Henry, she must have missed having one so much.
But it wasn’t too late. It wasn’t too late for her, was it? She could still have those things. She could have them even if her daughter turned out to be a son, and even if he didn’t marry her ideal man with a big white wedding after all. She could have them even if her kid was a poor artist and not a marketing clerk for a Fortune 500 company. She could still have the wedding, the marriage, and the future she dreamt of for herself, and it wouldn’t matter at all if I never put on another dress again.
It all seemed so simple. It was all so simple, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. But it made sense. This was what was missing. This was the answer, and I had to tell her. I was bursting to tell her, now that I understood what was wrong. I had to tell her now.
I stepped into the lift and pressed the ‘G’ button, ‘Emergency’. If she was still down there, I was going to find her.
THIRTY-FIVE
The ER was so full that I was lost in a sea of parents cradling fevered babies and people holding bandaged limbs as soon as I stepped out of the lift. There were nurses buzzing around and there was probably a security guar
d somewhere, but everyone was busy and preoccupied.
And since I seriously had nothing to lose—they weren’t going to let me see Mum if I did it the proper way, were they?—I took a deep breath, straightened my back, and just walked through the double-doors into the ER like I was meant to be there.
Absolutely no one stopped me. They didn’t stop me walking through the ER past some of the recent-arrival patient beds, or when I stepped around nurses, and they didn’t stop me when I went right up to a big patient information board to read it. In fact, one of the ER nurses who’d been making some adjustments to the board glanced at me. “Sorry,” she said, and moved aside so I could see it better.
I didn’t understand why she didn’t immediately guess I was an imposter and chuck me out until I saw another guy in a suit talking to a patient; he had a stethoscope around his neck. He also had a lab coat on, too; I probably should leave before anyone noticed I didn’t have either of those.
Mum’s name was easy to spot on the list, and since there was an emergency evacuation map just beside it, I leant in to match Mum’s room unit and room number with the areas on the map, and then left to find it.
The map led me out of the main ER—a relief, given that arguing with Mum surrounded by patients, nurses and doctors would definitely have gotten me kicked out—and down the hall in a suite of small private rooms. Most of the rooms had big observation windows, and as I walked down the hallway, I passed people attached to a dozen machines and sleeping, as well as the odd person having blood drawn or consulting with the doctors.
I began to worry about what I’d find in Mum’s room. What if she was attached to machines, too? Should I really be having the type of conversation I needed to have with her now? Maybe I should wait until she was better to show up looking like this. Maybe it was selfish.
I was still having that internal debate with myself when I found her room. Before I walked up to the observation window, I braced myself for what I might be about to see. I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with seeing her really sick, especially given that it was the truth about me which had given her a heart attack. I couldn’t put it off, though. I had to face it at some point, didn’t I? Holding my breath, I looked in.
She was sitting upright in bed with her hands folded in her lap, relaxed and watching TV. None of the machines next to her were on; she didn’t even have a drip running into her. Her hair was brushed, and she was wearing her own clothes. While I was watching her, she chuckled at the program that was on.
I gaped.
You had to be fucking kidding me. She was completely fine? All this time?
I burst through the doors into her room, pulling the curtain across the window behind me.
She jumped, a hand on her heart and her eyes wide when she saw who it was. Then she took a big, angry breath and puffed all up. “What are you doing here! I specifically told the nurses that—”
I talked right over her. “How could you let me believe you were really sick, Mum? That I’d made you really sick? How could you do that to your own child?”
I could practically see the moralising on her face. “You don’t understand what—”
I put my hands up in a ‘yield’ motion. “You know what? I don’t care. I don’t care what your twisted reasoning was, because nothing that you could say would make it alright.” And here I was thinking I was being selfish... “Ugh! I was so worried about you! Don't you get how messed up that is?”
She folded her hands in her lap. “You need to understand how much it affects me to see you like this, Min.”
That was irrelevant. “How does that have anything to do with me not being allowed to even know you’re okay? Because from what I can see, you were trying to blackmail me into dressing like a woman by making me feel bad about something that didn’t even happen!”
“It did happen, Min. Seeing you like this did make me sick.” She reached for where her pearls normally were on her neck. “And seeing it all again, with you yelling at me and dressed like this—”
She was not going to make me feel guilty about this. “So I should go home and change, should I?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Into what, Mum?” I asked. “What were you planning I’d change into? You know I gave away my clothes and I have no money.”
She opened her mouth, but wavered on that point.
“So yeah, we’re going to talk with me dressed like this,” I finished, watching her purse her lips and clamp shut like a pressure cooker. “I realised something about us in a conversation I had today. My friend just got promoted, which is really bad timing because she’s pregnant. She asked me if she should quit her job to focus on taking care of herself and her baby. I told her she shouldn’t because she’d be miserable, and then I realised what went wrong with us,” I said. “You’re miserable because you left Korea and gave up being an accountant for me. You thought you had to give all that up and it was the only way for me to have a good life, but you don’t have to, and you shouldn’t have. You should have stayed the person you were, doing the things you love, and then maybe you wouldn’t resent me so much. Because you do, Mum. You’re miserable and you do horrible stuff like this whole ‘don’t tell Min she didn’t kill me’ thing. You’re unhappy you don’t have your own life so you constantly pick at mine and tell me what to do, and I hate it. Go back to the job you knew you were good at. Go back to doing all the things you love and have your own life. Because it’s not fair for you to be hounding me about mine.”
When I finished, I stood there, letting the words hang in the air as I took a few deep, slow breaths.
It was silent.
I wasn’t sure what I expected; not this, though. Not silence. Instead of shouting at me, Mum was watching me with a very stiff, very stony expression.
Eventually, she took a small breath. Her tone of voice made me feel uneasy. “So I should just go back to work?”
I realised how I might have sounded. “Well, I know that won’t solve everything, but—”
“You’re right. I’m sure it will be easy for me to find an accounting firm that wants my two decades of cleaning experience to back up a degree I finished nearly 30 years ago.”
I—I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“And I should have stayed in Korea and kept working as an accountant when I had you, should I?” she asked. “Do you know how single mothers were treated in Korea in the 80s, Min? Do you?” She paused, and when I didn’t answer, she told me. “You were a liability to the company—they fired you on the spot. No one wanted a woman who’d be gone all the time, and no one wanted to be associated with you, no one, let alone your children.”
She’d mentioned something like that before, but… I half-heartedly began, “Well, couldn’t you have arranged some sort of childcare here, and kept working as—”
“I didn’t speak English, Min! I didn’t have a single cent of money! I stayed in a refuge with twenty other women and took food packages from the Church—God knows where we’d both be without them. They got me a job cleaning high schools at night while you slept in a sling on my back. After months and months of working night after night, I finally had enough to move out into our two-bedroom flat and start standing on my own two feet. I did all of that for you, Min. I did all of that so you wouldn’t be spat on in the playground in Korea for being the child of a single mother.”
That floored me. She’d never told it to me quite like that before.
“And now,” she began calmly. “Now you complain about needing to answer my text messages. Now you complain that you don’t feel like working in marketing anymore, when every year of your first-class education that led to your first-class job was paid for with my sweat and blood. Now you complain I’m too interested in you finally getting married, and finally having a complete family and a happy future. I’m not going to apologise for doing those things or for wanting that for you. That’s being a mother. As soon as I held you in my arms and looked at your tiny face for the first
time, all those things were a given.” She watched me for a few seconds. “You tell me I should be happy, Min? Is that what you’re telling me? Well, I can’t be. Not while you’re doing this,” she gestured at my clothes, “intentionally choosing such a difficult life for yourself, hell-bent on destroying the bright future I worked day and night for two decades to hand to you on a silver platter. You want to know why I’m unhappy? Why I’ll try anything to fix it? That’s it. It’s because my selfish daughter has taken everything I’ve built for her and has thrown it away like it’s nothing. She doesn’t appreciate the sacrifices I’ve made for her, and she doesn’t appreciate how lucky she is.”
Each one of those words struck home; I felt the familiar guilt seeping into my chest. I sounded stupid when she said it like that. Stupid, and selfish. Was I being selfish? Was I?
It was easy to feel guilty over all the memories I had of her going without so I didn’t have to, so easy. It was such a familiar feeling I almost sank into it. The self-loathing was familiar, the feeling of knowing I was a bad daughter was so familiar. I was a bad, bad daughter.
It was only when I looked around me and remembered where we were and what had brought us here, that things began to not add up. The light began to peek through the holes in her perfect story about what a bad, selfish daughter I was and what a good, selfless mother she was.
And when it peeked through, a flood of memories of the awful things she’d said and done to me followed. When I’d finally mustered the courage to tell her how badly I was being bullied at school, and she’d brushed it off and told me I needed to try harder to make friends. When I finally made a friend, and she’d taken my phone off me, read all his messages and then forced me to type one out to him saying we couldn’t be friends anymore because she thought I was secretly sleeping with him. When she took my drawing tablet from me and sold it because she’d once caught me ‘wasting my time’ and painting instead of doing my homework. She didn’t even understand why I was so upset.
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