I’ve been wanting to write an article for my mom, but never know where to start. An anecdote would be reductionist. A compliment would feel flattening. Any rendering would be static — and maybe that’s at the heart of it, that writing commits something to paper and necessarily asks us to draw pieces together into a neat picture. But people are not neat pictures, least of all those we know well.
Let’s start small: my mom is a whole lot of fun. At the beach this past summer, she was the one who would turn to me every sunset without fail, when the sky was a migration of cawing bats, and ask, Happy hour? It wasn’t really a question.
Who raises their child on Madonna and the Black Eyed Peas, Bruno Mars and Tears for Fears instead of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?” I ask this sometimes, and then remember the boxes of postcards of animal body art in the drawers of my grandfather’s study (leftovers from a joint exhibition with a body painter from the Netherlands) and I think — ah, a child of that household would. At her high school, she dressed up as Boy George and did the Karma Chameleon dance on stage in front of the whole school — allegedly, a hit.
The other month, I called her and asked what she'd been up to. My mother was casually bar hopping with her friends in Hong Kong long past midnight. That same evening, I’d attended a 6 p.m. poetry reading at Gilman and was promptly in my pajamas with a cup of tea ready for a quick meditation before 8 p.m.
I came home after my first semester at college worried about how things would be to find that my mom had only become more fit and flexible with near daily yoga classes. She had also found Jungle and L’Imperatice, and was ecstatic to learn that I could indeed hook her French soul-funk up to my Bluetooth speaker. Her absolute anthem two summers ago was Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” another classic to her long list of iconic summer faves, including Shaggy’s quintessential “It Wasn’t Me.”
How lucky I’ve been that my mother cares more than nearly anyone I know about being a good mother. She was the person my entire K-12 knew on sight, and by banana bread recipe, because she showed up. She was there so often and formed such close bonds with my classmates that new teachers would think numerous of us were her children and not just me.
She read to me every night until I could hold a book on my own. I remember a version of Cinderella, where, drowsy toward the middle of it, her desperate, sleep-addled mind ad-libbed her way out of finishing the story with, “They got into the carriage… and then they all died!” She startled awake to the sound of my laughter and swore she didn’t remember saying anything odd. Do I have this to blame for my morbid sense of humor?
When I was a baby, she said I’d cry when she put me down — and so she didn’t. Not until I was fast asleep, and if I woke, she’d pick me right back up. She said this like it was simple and easy. Like there’d been only one option.
My mom has always been a friend. She’s been the one to trust in my instincts, even and especially when I don't. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I can remember, but skirted around it for the stability of other careers — from research to law to journalism. I've bounced around with what I want to do with my gap year, and my life. After lengthy negotiations with myself, I arrived back at the realization that all I want to do is write. And I felt immediately guilty. What if it didn’t work? What if I dragged us down a path I couldn’t dig us out from? None of this, it seemed, mattered to my mom, whose response to my shame-ridden declaration that I wanted to spend my gap year writing a novel was: It’s about time.
What I admire the most in my mother is the way she trusts people and holds hope. What a great ability. What immense strength it must take. Whenever I spend time with her, I’m reminded of how unserious life is, how little anything big really is and how much present feeling matters. Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from her is to walk away from anything that doesn’t align with my joy. Another is how that better version of myself, however idealized or far-fetched she may seem, is always worth fighting for.
What I love is how I can hear “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” out in a mall a thousand miles away and feel suddenly at home. How I can spend hours lost in a museum and always find it worthwhile to stop for live music. How I can find myself up against a wall and know that I don’t have to face it alone, how I can be whoever I want and know that I will be loved. Thank you, mom, for these many shades of joy. Mahal kita.
Kaitlin Tan is a senior from Manila, Philippines, majoring in Writing Seminars and Cognitive Science. She is the Voices Editor for The News-Letter. In her column, she tries to parse through the everyday static for something to hold onto.
