by Laura Lee
I remember him driving in the late night, clutching the wheel, drinking McDonald’s coffee to stay awake, grouped together with other cars, following their taillights. From those trips I remember my father trying, and failing, to start fires with cardboard boxes and empty soda packs. I remember him making chicken soup, made with so many jalapeños that the watery broth choked us and seared our throats. The only ingredients? Chicken breast, water, and jalapeños.
Other memories float through—the odd, empty saloon we stopped in during the day in Wyoming, crowned with animals’ heads on the walls. A man having a heart attack on a hike in Devils Tower national monument, his wife calling for help, my sister and father running back toward the visitor center.
I remember the lectures, as we rounded hairpin turns snaking up craggy mountains. I suffered motion sickness from the whiplash effect of our car swinging from one side to the other. “You need to eat more vegetables,” he would tell me, blaming me for my motion sickness. I would argue back, “It has to do with the inner ear, there’s nothing I can do about it!” I would cite studies that I’d read, trying to appeal to his background as a scientist, but it proved no more effective than later in life, when I cited psychology studies documenting that abuse and trauma had tangible aftereffects, that mental illness was real.
* * *
As a child I shared a thin plaster wall with my parents, my bedroom next to theirs. In the years before my father moved back to South Korea, I often heard them arguing in Korean late into the night, my father’s deep rumbling mingling with my mother’s plaintive tones.
My middle sister told me later that we had, at times, put our own small bodies between them, as a way of calming down their arguments, but this I didn’t remember. I do remember the quiet that struck, after much shouting, on the evening when their marriage seemed to split apart.
I was young then, perhaps ten years old. My mother took over my bedroom upstairs. My father sat outside on the wooden stairs, resigned, it seemed. He had fought hard and lost. “Sook, Sook,” he called over and over, in a sad lament. My mother ignored his repetition of her abbreviated name. The door stayed closed, and he didn’t invade.
Late that night, when she emerged and they spoke without their usual explosiveness, I heard him ask, in English, “What will we tell Imo?”
Imo was my mother’s closest family. She was my mother’s sister who lived in Canada, the only of our relatives who lived outside of South Korea. I knew next to nothing of her, but that she was the only person my mother spoke to with some regularity. Yet my mother wished to share nothing of my father’s pending departure from Colorado for South Korea.
“Why would we tell her anything?” my mother responded. “What business is it of hers?”
Later my mother instructed me in what to say to those who asked. My mother liked to manage things—to come up with scripts for how we should interact with outsiders, strangers. She instructed me in what to say when I answered the phone, how to talk to “Americans.” She kept them at arm’s length with politeness. It was a lesson I learned early—not to trust others with the truth.
“He moved for work,” I parroted to my best friend and her parents. I could feel its lack of truthfulness, even as I repeated this line often. I could feel the way the excuse skimmed over the chaos of my parents’ marriage, decaying like atomic particles decomposing and skidding off each other. “His English wasn’t good enough to work here.”
When I visited their calm house, in the years after he departed the country, my best friend’s mother often asked me, “How’s your father?”
And I pretended that I had an actual relationship with my father after he left, rather than occasional strained phone conversations, when we spoke for a few minutes. I pretended I knew, as though I, too, came from a stable family.
“How are you?” he would ask.
“I’m okay, how are you?” I would respond.
“I’m fine. Hand me back to your mother,” he’d say, and then I could run off again, to whatever I had been doing before the phone rang.
My parents communicated based on needs. He’d request something, “I need you to send me two pairs of Levi’s, in this size,” that sort of thing, and then he’d disappear again.
My father reappeared sporadically, for short periods during academic breaks, but he didn’t interact with us anymore. He would come downstairs from where he holed up in the master bedroom, where he perched himself in front of a small black-and-white TV. I saw him only in the kitchen, getting food, and then he would disappear upstairs into the master bedroom. He didn’t speak to me, except to complain about something or other.
My father didn’t like Korean food, preferred steak seasoned with just salt, potatoes, McDonald’s burgers and fries. But at home he still ate things like tofu, seasoned very simply and grilled, or miso soup. He chided me for cutting the tofu smaller than he liked, once as I cooked, for overcomplicating something that he wanted done just so.
He left cooking to my mother, but he preferred simple things. If you add lots of water to the leftover rice in a rice cooker, and then you boil it, you end up with a mushy porridge—one that you can eat with sliced pickles or jarred jalapeños, as a meal. This meal tastes like sick food, or like survival food. Much of Korean food seems this way—pickled to preserve, vegetable-based, soups and stews designed to stretch hunks of meat into many meals.
In his short reappearances in my life, I heard complaints and criticisms from my father, either directly or passed along through my oldest sister—about how each of us had achieved less success than our parents, despite all our advantages, about how he’d spoiled us. Then he disappeared again, his sharp comments ringing into the void.
* * *
As a very young child I was sociable and happy—I was always smiling wide in photos, on metal slides and in swings or at picnic tables, always with some kind of food smeared on my cheeks, usually something sweet like cupcake frosting. In one picture I wear red star-shaped sunglasses, my cheeks wide and pinchable, my hair bowl-cut with bangs, and I look like every other child. Innocent.
This image is hard to reconcile with the disarray that ensued after my father departed the country. My father’s presence hadn’t brought stability, happiness, or calm; but it had ensured some form of adult capability, even if erratic in form. Once my father departed, what remained was the progression of my mother’s undiagnosed illness, as well as that of my middle sister, the two forms often warring with each other.
My father’s temper had infected the house—it had been unendurable. I often fled the house, staying in the driveway in the middle hours of the night, because any escape was preferable to being around him. After he left, this departure of temper meant an improvement, in some ways. But the residue remained, in my middle sister, whom he’d beaten with abandon, who’d learned from him how to abuse. Her anger surpassed his.
“You’re her sister?” teachers often said to me at school, of my middle sister. They spoke of her admiringly. They saw her brilliance, as ferocious as that of my father’s. They saw a polite, quiet person who was somehow much more likeable than me. They didn’t see who she became at home, where she sat stewing in rage.
At home she alternated days in which she refused to acknowledge my existence, going without eye contact or saying anything, with days and nights when she flew into furies. She would erupt in fits of screaming, berating my mother for the slightest of perceived wrongs, dinging the wood floors my mother loved so much by tossing heavy items with abandon. In these fits she would destroy as much as she physically could, like a Tasmanian Devil cartoon whirlwinding through the house, throwing anything where it didn’t belong, for the sheer purpose of causing distress.
And it worked. I often found my mother crying alone in her closet, a small room lined with ugly brown carpet where she retreated in times of stress. “It’s bad for my heart,” my mother told me repeatedly, about dealing with my middle sister. “I’m so scared, and my heart. It just pounds, pounds, poun
ds.” She mimicked the gesture on her chest, while saying, again, “I’m afraid.”
I felt the need to protect my mother, but I didn’t know how to do so. The only thing I knew to do was to serve as witness, to keep a watchful eye at home, to prevent my sister from preying too much on my mother’s fearful nature, from getting too out of control. At times I made tape recordings of my sister’s outbursts, thinking that this way I had proof of her behavior, before realizing I had no adult figure to whom I could appeal for help, regardless.
And then there were times, too, when my sister frightened me, when I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom for the night, trying to sleep in the hard white porcelain tub, just as my mother locked herself in her master bedroom, as my sister raged. In the days after, my mother would pick up after my sister’s mess, restoring the house to some semblance of what it had been before, as though she’d done something wrong and needed to pay penance.
“You’re the nice one,” my mother told me. Her understanding of the world, and her way of expressing herself in English, were simple. I was the nice one. My middle sister was the smart one. I was the good one. My middle sister was the bad one. Even at the time I realized these designations were harmful ones, to both my middle sister and me, but it was how my mother saw the world.
“You’ll see,” my mother told me. “It’s better to be nice than smart. It’ll catch up to her one day. She’ll be her own biggest source of unhappiness, her own worst enemy.”
My mother had a strange mix of childishness and wisdom that I’ve never fully understood. She confided in me often, whether I wanted the closeness or not. Her words, though hurtful to my own intelligence, weren’t necessarily wrong, in that my sister’s behavior seemed destructive to everyone involved, including herself. Where before my family had been undone by my father’s temper, in the years after he left, my sister became that figure of fear. My mother lacked the capacity to do anything about the situation.
* * *
After my father departed, my mother seemed focused on survival day to day, on staying afloat with her job responsibilities. We rarely had food at home in the years after my father left, the fridge nearly empty but for, at best, milk, orange juice, and fruit. She raised us as though we were tiny adults, already fully capable of figuring out what we needed to know. She did this out of necessity, I think, lacking the bandwidth to do more than try to survive the requirements of her work, so she could provide for us monetarily. Her struggle was more than that of any single parent tasked with raising children—because of her undiagnosed decline, it cost her extra effort to pass at work, to pass as functional in everyday life.
We ate daily from the box of ramen, or “lahmyen,” as my mother considered the correct pronunciation, kept in our living room closet. I used to eat it raw, breaking it into chunks in a metal bowl after school. My father, on brief visits home, would get angry over this nutritional choice, even as he’d always left the feeding of us to my mother, before disappearing to Korea again.
My sister often started screaming at my mother over the lack of necessities like food, to which my mother would try cooking something, which she would always ruin. My sister seemed to lack any empathy for my mother, in displaying any understanding of the difficulties she faced.
* * *
There was no constancy to my mother’s behavior. She was reliably unreliable, even if the ways in which she couldn’t be depended on fluctuated over time. I often got stranded in places from which she’d promised to pick me up. She didn’t attend any aspect of my life, school-related or social, unless it was related to music—she’d been denied music lessons when she was young, and so, even though I didn’t want to play piano or classical instruments, she insisted on music for me. Once I could drive, she occasionally attended my music concerts with me, even as she was reliably absent from any other parentally attended events. I wasn’t surprised later in life, when I read that music alleviates symptoms for those with neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s—I saw this play out in real time with my mother, as she calmed down whenever she sat nearby as I played piano, often specifically because she asked me to play for her. “Play for me, play for me,” she asked me, as she sat expectantly on the floor.
She didn’t care for sports, and so sports faded from my life. After my father left, I missed his encouragement of my athletics. My mother couldn’t care less about sports, and so I stopped going out for them, became sedentary, as she was. My vision was changing, too, and since no one else noticed anything was wrong, I didn’t question why I failed to recognize peers’ faces until they were within arm’s length, or why I couldn’t read the names, written in black marker, on white strips of tape on others’ shorts.
“Call out the name of the player you’re passing to,” our coaches told us, in summertime basketball practice in middle school, but squint though I might, I only saw a blur. I had no one I could talk to about such things—my mother didn’t listen when I tried to talk to her about my life, distracted by some facet of surviving her own—and so time went by when I couldn’t see, during which I thought life simply was this blurry.
* * *
With neurocognitive disorders and mental illness, someone often does need to stand in, in terms of capability, and to pretend otherwise is to diminish caretaking, as well as the real tolls of an individual’s impaired abilities. Growing up I became accustomed to standing in for my mother, as much as possible—to anticipating her needs, and trying to fulfill them. She would make mistakes at all times, meaning my constant alertness was needed, due to their unpredictable nature.
In the King Soopers parking lot she began panicking as the car kept skidding forward, seemingly of its own volition, after she parked. I reached over and slid the gearshift into Park, quickly, quickly. In the moment she failed to understand why the car wasn’t cooperating and she froze, helpless—she didn’t realize she’d forgotten to put the car in Park before turning off the engine. These sorts of tiny mistakes translated into a feeling that haunted me. I felt a responsibility to my mother, to help look out for her, to maintain constant vigilance over all the small details of everyday life. These sorts of moments led to her increasingly turning to me, in lockstep with my age, from middle school to high school and on. She relied on me to take over for as much as I could on her behalf, so she could be absolved of the responsibility.
* * *
Unhealthy as their marriage was, as badly as they both spoke of each other, my mother seemed to fall apart in my father’s absence. My father’s departure meant that my mother juggled her work as a professor with raising two children, one of whom was capable of scaring her. More damaging, perhaps, was that with his departure came loneliness. The isolation of their shared lives was mirrored in my mother’s isolation as a single parent. When her decline began, she had no close relationships with adults who could notice and assist. Her isolation seemed to hasten her descent. She had only her children to turn to, and herself.
In my father’s absence, my mother turned to me in ways that retrospectively seemed unhealthy. Even at the time, I didn’t appreciate many of my mother’s behaviors, but I had no normal against which to compare. I saw my best friend’s family, but her household resembled mine not at all.
My mother often slept in my bed, either to use me as a sort of shield when fighting with my father before his departure, or to ward off loneliness. I wanted my own space, but I could never predict when she or my sister might come bursting into my room, unannounced.
She needed help in nearly everything, or so it felt at the time. Some things sound normal, perhaps, such as her paying me a dollar for a household task she needed completed. But they didn’t feel normal. It felt as though she needed me to step in and take care of the tasks that her husband would’ve managed.
She needed me to be strong, when she was fearful. She needed me to take care of her. Gradually I took on more and more of her responsibilities, as she became increasingly unable to manage. In high school I refiled three years of ta
x returns, after realizing that she’d done them all wrong. Shortly after, I helped her remortgage her house, when I realized errors in the paperwork were set to cost her tens of thousands of dollars. Once I turned sixteen, she turned driving over to me as much as possible.
After she came to me late at night, in a panic over my middle sister’s Ivy League tuition bills, I began managing her bank accounts and bills. I began managing her retirement savings. When I was twenty-one, after she’d been finally diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, I returned home to file her Social Security disability application.
* * *
I knew only bits and pieces of my mother’s life growing up. So much of my mother’s history was lost to me, because she herself could no longer remember the answers to otherwise basic questions, such as what her parents had done for work. I knew she worked on the first computers in Korea, big boxes that filled entire rooms. I knew she worked with the 0-1 punch cards. That she worked in chemistry for some time, too.
That when she was growing up, her father hid, to avoid conscription into the army. And that her mother used her as her safeguard—taking her along when sneaking in to check on her father. I wondered if that’s where she learned to do the same with me, to make me into her shield, when things weren’t going well with her husband. I knew her by her bitterness toward my father—that characterized their relationship, from both sides.
If I learned unhealthy behaviors from anyone, it was quite possibly from her. I had once enjoyed taking care of her, enjoyed being the “good daughter” whom she praised. But as she continued declining, I felt the fruitlessness of my efforts. I was tired of feeling like her caretaker. I wished she could see my needs and appreciate me for myself, too, rather than as some sort of extension of herself. So much of my identity was built around trying to please her. I failed to imagine a future or life of my own.