by Laura Lee
* * *
To say that my middle sister absented herself from any caretaking responsibilities in relation to my mother, over her decades-long illness, is an understatement. I’d never had anything resembling a positive relationship with my middle sister. Our relationship was fraught. When I was in college and after I graduated, my middle sister appealed to me often when dealing with her mental health issues, in all-hours phone calls that pulled me off balance, that ignored my own life as irrelevant, that I never quite knew what to do with. I was ill-equipped for this onslaught of personal emergencies. There’s illness, and then there’s also personality, and it often felt to me it was the latter that caused conflict.
Until my own health emergency struck in my early thirties, I was treated, perceived, and I thought of myself as one of the “healthy” ones in my family, with all the accompanying caretaking burden, and resentment, of a healthy person in an unhealthy family. Resources are not shared equally when not all are capable of, or interested in, fighting in the same way. I’d grown up with this expectation: my middle sister would be excused from responsibility, while I would be expected to shoulder it.
One afternoon when I was young, in my last year of middle school or first year of high school, I heard my mother on the phone. She sat on the white carpet of the living room, clutching the receiver in one hand and her skull in the other. “Hi, yes, I threw up,” I heard her say in a weak voice. “My head hurts, too. I must have fallen off the sofa while I was sleeping, and hit it on the side of the coffee table.”
I listened as my mother described her urine flow and whether there was blood in her stool. I heard her shout weakly upstairs, past me, past the banister, to my middle sister. “I need you to drive me to the hospital. After I take a shower.”
By the time my mother had finished her shower, my middle sister had conveniently “fallen asleep,” her response to my mother’s urgent request for help. She’d shut her bedroom door, which my mother and I both knew meant we could not disturb her for fear of inciting her violence. Even as my mother continued pleading for help, she continued pretending she’d fallen so solidly asleep that she couldn’t hear a thing. So my mother took me with her to the hospital, instead, in a cab. I spent all day waiting at the hospital, and then into the night. Nurses took my mother away to run tests on her. She didn’t say anything as they led her away, and there was nothing to do but to wait and worry. I had brought my geometry textbook with me, tried to study for school, but failed to concentrate. I began hating hospitals at that point in my life, the cold feel of them, big, pale, overly lit shells of buildings. During that time my only comfort was the hot chocolate vending machine, putting in coins, pressing buttons, and watching the machine spurt out two streams of liquid into a paper cup.
When my mother finally emerged, after we transferred to another hospital and then got in a cab to go home, she still didn’t tell me anything of what had happened. The cabdriver looked at her and asked if she was going to get sick on the drive home, if she needed a plastic bag, to which she shook her head. I felt as though I were sitting next to a child.
Only when my mother called my oldest sister, her own sister, and my father, did I learn what had happened. “It was a mini-seizure, they think. Or maybe a mini-stroke. They’re not sure. But they say I’m fine now.”
At home my sister stared straight past us. My middle sister and I lived in different worlds when it came to my mother. For my middle sister, my mother was responsible for her happiness. I, on the other hand, felt I had to look out for my mother’s happiness, because clearly no one else was doing it, and my mother was not happy.
* * *
Mothers have historically been cultural transmitters. We look to our mothers to teach us how to be.
“Mothers will do anything for their children,” someone once told me. My ex-boyfriend’s mother, I think. I wanted to argue, but what was the point? If there’s anything people assume to be universal, it’s a mother’s love. That hadn’t been my experience. Culpability is one thing—erased, in the delayed recognition of illness. Aftereffect is another.
When you’re young, you look to your mother for future possibilities, and in her case, I saw decline. I hungered for the accumulation of memories, because I saw my mother gradually stripped of it. I imagined myself following the same trajectory as her. I wanted to fill myself up to the brim with experience first. I learned later that, as with water from a cup, experiences spill over, displaced by more recent and more vivid moments. I’ve already forgotten so much.
My parents seemed to believe in the myth of education—that armed with one of sufficient quality, somehow one will arrive at having utility to society. They gave little advice on how to be a good person, or how to move through the world. They were confident that with good enough schooling, we would all figure out the rest. It’s hard to overcome the effect of one’s socialization at home, though, which is more primal and more fundamental than any lessons learned in the outside world.
7 BUBBLE WRAPS
Money existed in an odd orbit in our household. On the one hand, there was money for things we didn’t necessarily want, like private music lessons, and always for school necessities, like AP exams or college application fees. On the other hand, I was always hungry at home, from our lack of food. We didn’t buy clothes, forever wearing the same baggy, ill-fitting attire. In retrospect I recognize the sorts of neglect my middle sister and I grew up with as a sign of my mother’s illness, more than an element of class. Whether we had money was a different question than whether there was an adult able to spend it as a parent might usually.
There was no constancy or logic to how money was handled in my household. We had it for pet projects of my parents’, the random tennis lesson or the music lessons my mother insisted on for us. Education costs were always seen as essential, not optional, regardless of subject matter. But we often didn’t have money for basics that others readily spent money on, such as stocking the kitchen with food, buying clothes, eating out, or entertainment.
* * *
I brought my girlfriend a present once: leftover packaging material from a box I received in the mail, carried with me on the Greyhound to Chicago.
“So relaxing, don’t you think?” she asked the first time I saw her fingers kneading air sacs, elbows out at her sides, rat-tats issuing forth, busy as she was massaging the guts of a small padded manila envelope. “Ooh!” she said with glee.
In my childhood household, fixated as we were on conserving, both for the environment’s sake, and financially, such things would be saved for reuse, but never enjoyed. In hers bursting bubbles was a special, and rare, form of pleasure.
“Thank you for bringing me bubble wraps,” she said. “Thank you.”
And she means it—that’s the best part of all. She is that innocent. She is that unmaterialistic. She is, in that way, completely different from those I’ve loved before.
“It’s fancy,” I tell her, because it’s sticky on one side, so she can wrap herself in it, if she wants to, and it will adhere. Later we find the fancier: a clear double-sided pouch we can grab and pinch with both hands, four layers of bubbles rubbing up, twice the rat-tats issuing at once.
“There’s something childlike about her,” my friend says. My friend means this in a disapproving way. But I like that things are still simple, unspoiled. That life’s logic is clear. She is, somehow, undamaged.
* * *
For my mother, safety came in the form of toilet rolls and office supplies. She stuffed the closets and the basements with paper goods, as though such things would ward off danger.
I cleaned the house periodically, filling our driveway with black bags of projector slides and permanent markers and other office supplies she’d hoarded from work, leaving them for Goodwill to pick up. It felt cyclic, where she brought in goods, and I cleaned up after her. She, too, had her own cycle of purging the house—oftentimes throwing away things that I valued, breaking them. Nothing was stable, with her.
Joy came in small forms, too. One of these was coupons. During one stretch of time, she got stacks of coupons for free greeting cards from King Soopers. I accompanied her to the store a bit farther from our house, where the greeting card selection was better. We could only redeem a certain number of coupons each day, so we made repeated trips to peruse and gather. We stockpiled greeting cards, white envelopes and cards cascading from one of the drawers of the wooden chest in our living room. These cards weren’t meant to be used, and in fact we never did use them—it was the act of collecting them that my mother enjoyed so much, simply because it was a luxury she could afford.
It was an early lesson that commerce can mean happiness, and that when money concerns loom, there are always ways to while away hours buying things for free. I learned, young, the joys of clipping free coupons from the weekend flier, creating shopping lists based on these free coupons, sometimes filling an entire basket and paying only tax. It was from my mother and her extreme worries about money, worries I couldn’t calm by showing her figures or facts. Coupons allowed me to feel as though I, too young to work, could still contribute.
* * *
My family was similar to other immigrant families in that daily life wasn’t about pleasure or the pursuit of happiness but, more simply, survival. This feeling of survival was separate from practical realities, such as figures on bank statements. It was more of an overriding principle about how to make decisions, day to day, and it changed, over time.
Regardless of bank balances, my family always seemed to live in a different era, one decades behind whatever the norm was in America. When anything broke in the house, at any point over the years, it didn’t get fixed, certainly not by a professional. Our house felt like something alive, something in constant need of maintenance. I replaced the interior parts of each of the toilets in our house more times than I can recall, changed the coils in the leaky faucets until they leaked again. When we had electrical issues in the kitchen, my father attempted to fix the wires without turning off the power, resulting in a melted screwdriver and shorted fuses. When the upstairs toilet flooded, a square hole remained in our living room ceiling afterward, where the plaster had been cut out and not replaced. Time and again the plumbing would fail and our basement would flood, and nothing would be done to prevent it from happening again.
Two of the three entryways into our house had broken locks, which could be locked from the interior, but couldn’t be unlocked from outside. As a teen I often got locked out of the house, and I’d resort to hoisting my body through the kitchen window, grabbing the chest-height sill and launching myself into the house. There was no one at home, besides me, who was willing to fix things when they broke, or to maintain things, and I was limited in my skill set.
It felt, in our household, as though no one was running it—not the sheer physical space, much less the more spiritual idea of a family unit. In leadership, neither of my parents gave advice socially, on how to be successful in communities or in society. My father gave warnings, instead, on what not to do, or what was corrupt and tainted in South Korea, or, most of all, that I needed to study for my SATs. Education had been his escape route to a better life, and my parents saw education as the one essential, the primary vehicle to a solid life. My father had thought about physiological needs, the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid: food, water, warmth, rest. Everything beyond the basic essentials of survival, the bare minimum of financial security—belonging and love, esteem, self-actualization—were completely beyond him.
My mother, on the other hand, was too preoccupied being the breadwinner to take on additional responsibilities. She kept crisp twenty-dollar bills, fresh from the ATM, in a cheap vinyl toiletry bag, a black-and-white patterned thing that looked like a flattened cow, free from the Estée Lauder makeup counter at the mall, in a drawer in the wet bar in our living room. She didn’t track how much money was in the bag, only refilled it when it was running low. Her expectation was that when my middle sister or I needed something, we would take money from the drawer and get it for ourselves. It was somehow understood that this was a system of convenience, and that we were being entrusted with responsibility. My best friend growing up envied this system, but I envied hers, in which she got an allowance to spend, rather than access to a resource, without guidance in how to be.
Having access to cash didn’t make money feel real. As a child I still undertook tasks around the house for the arbitrary amounts my mother assigned: a dollar to mow the back lawn, a dollar to clean the toilets, a dollar to vacuum the house, a dollar to rake up the leaves. And soon the dollar amounts fell away, as she needed help to keep up with maintaining a household.
My middle sister and I were locked in a strange battle, in which I would do something to help my mother—clean the living room, stack up blankets—and she would undo precisely what I had just done—knock over the blankets I had stacked, purposely create a mess directly after I’d cleaned—simply to antagonize.
My mother assumed certain things about us—that we were a family unit, that our resources were communal, in a way Americans wouldn’t understand. My mother’s conception of family differed from the more individualistic model of the U.S. She assumed that we would interact and engage in ways similar to her model of family life, that we would each work toward the family’s best interests rather than our own individual ones, that fairness would rule.
“I want to buy you your houses one day,” she told me with pleasure when I was growing up, because this was how she thought things should be. In Korea most of her family, wives and sons and her parents, remained living in one household.
Emotionally our family didn’t play out that way, though. Instead we tug-of-warred over resources, over who spent more where and how. In later years, when my middle sister racked up tens of thousands of dollars in bills routinely, attending college and then dropping out, insisting on enrolling for a second arts degree, then dropping out again, fights were the norm, as we, as a family unit, tried to determine how to pay for these large emergency bills. My mother’s model of family didn’t take into account the sicknesses that would plague us.
* * *
“Does she talk about Malala?” my friend asks.
She and I laugh privately at this innocent question. This is how American media covers Pakistan. This is what we hear. She likes to laugh at how here the script calls for her, as a Muslim woman, as a bisexual Pakistani, to play a certain role—the role of “victim,” as she sees it. But it doesn’t resemble who she is, not really, not at all.
She is Pakistani, proudly. “Brown is beautiful,” she says, with those big eyes, after giving me shit about dating white people nearly exclusively.
She is Muslim. “I didn’t think of myself as Muslim until I came here,” she says. And I understand precisely what she means. We don’t feel of something, protective of it, until others who don’t have grounds to speak—who aren’t of it—attack.
“Inshallah,” she says, at times. “Mashallah,” I respond, or vice versa. “God willing,” and “God has willed it,” in turn. Or “Haram, haram!” when we do something forbidden.
We joke, but her religion runs deep. When faced with serious troubles, her first response is to pray.
And she’s bisexual. She dislikes engaging with queerness as a community, for the way it brings out “types” rather than individuals, but she doesn’t mind rainbows. She gives me a bright rainbow monkey T-shirt and delights when women compliment me on it—she knows of my discomfort with rainbows, after all. Her playfulness at work, her refusal to take anything seriously.
To those who don’t know her, these are the outward ways in which she’s meant to identify. And yet there are the more important ways, both large and small. That she still joys in bubble wrap, despite being well on her way to a PhD. Or her sense of wholeness, derived from the family she loves.
“Your amma is so graceful,” I tell her once, after studying a photograph of her mother. Her amma is more reserved than her daugh
ter, I can tell, yet she glows with a quiet, calm happiness, her face unlined.
“Buy Laura a present for me,” her amma says back, after the comment is passed on.
Her amma could’ve had a career, trained as she was as a doctor, but she made a different choice. She’s cooked nearly every meal for her five children over the past three decades, slapping out chapati daily and boiling black tea leaves in milk for chai, and she cares for two grandchildren similarly now.
Commonplace as these acts of devotion might be in Pakistan, I can’t imagine. Love, I think. What it means to grow up in a loving household, with a happy family. What an amulet it provides.
To her amma I am just her daughter’s very good friend, the one whom she buses down to Indiana to see every other week, the one who buses to Chicago every alternate week. Who learns bits of Urdu for fun. Who asks for recipes to make for her daughter. Whose daughter is learning to cook, too, and even, despite her disinterest in such things, to drive.
When she spends December in Pakistan, we FaceTime nearly every day. Her large family talks in the background, and they usually know we’re chatting.
“Assalam aleikum,” I tell her mother, through her daughter.
“Wailakum salaam,” I hear back. And more, too—other blessings in Urdu. Her mother is so earnest in her kindness.
“Don’t your sisters know?” I ask. “Don’t your parents, on some level?”
“No way,” she tells me.
I feel guilty at our deception. No matter what we do, back home we will be nothing more than very good friends.