Mom, it’s so difficult, almost agonizing, to write about you. I have not the slightest idea what this will turn out to be, these feeble words you will never read. A reconciliation? A self-deception? A bitter-tasting love story? I do not know. But words are my only salvation, so I will write on.
Your love for me when I was still very small was inscrutable. You loved me profusely, showered me with stylish little clothes that matched yours in color, shelves of Barbie dolls that sparked envy in my friends, piles of picture books promising fantastical worlds that I could visit any time. Your love was measured by material abundance.
Dad was away, and when he occasionally came back, he got drunk and then hit you. I used to hide every bottle in the house. I learned at too young an age how that pungent liquid turns his sober reticence into intoxicated violence, liberating the monstrosity in his repressed subconscious. I remember the shattered TV table and bedroom door. On many Kindergarten nights, those fights smothered by a frenzied, dipsomaniac heat were the waking nightmare before I could submit myself to sleep. I now understand how you must have felt, Mom. Your dear, familiar life was fast disintegrating like shreds of paper caught in a whirlwind while you sat crying at the void in its center, the black rivers of ruined make-up running down your pretty face.
And so your anger welled up in you. You had to redirect it or you would have exploded. And there I was, only three, a willful, vulnerable existence. Me spilling a small spoon of porridge onto my white, exquisite little top would infuriate you so that the air in the living room would congeal like clotted blood. I would wake up with bruises, and you would be sorry all over again. In fact, so sorry you would seem a little lost, as if you had not yet been acquainted with the maternal facet of your fragile being. Sharing a bed with you, my nights were overshadowed by your volatile moods. On your jovial days you would hold me, but sometimes when I had trouble falling asleep late at night, I could once again smell the blood clotting in you, despite subduing my breathing and minimizing my bodily movements. There I lay, like a miniature corpse beside you, so you would be tricked into thinking that I had fallen asleep, so you would not start waging wars against me.
As I grew up, I read voraciously, became the best in school, and retreated into my inner, private space. I stopped being that ebullient child you did not know how to love. I scarcely talked to you, fleeing instead to faraway realities in books and music. The impenetrable wall between us started growing then, while our realities fast became two separate, detached realms veiled from one another.
You did not care for my reticence – you said it was cold heartlessness. Maybe it was. You said I felt ashamed of you for not knowing as much as I did. Maybe I did. You said I wished you dead so I could get rid of you for good. Maybe the thought flickered for an instant before extinguishing itself, but I had long lost the desire to defend myself against your irrational temper and your incomplete heart.
Yet you were much placated by the taming passage of years. Seeing your wrinkled face in the mirror, you felt melancholic for my lost childhood which had soundlessly slipped through your fingers, no longer to be grasped, impossible to be rewritten. So you redeveloped your language of love into a continuous, substantial presence in my life. In those deep, nightly hours when my only salvation was soaking my mind in the melancholic waters of gentle rock songs, you would always, always break that spell, bringing with you the reality that I was running away from. You seemed intimidated by my ruminative nature, as if it were my deep thoughts, inaccessible to you, that sundered our unity. You feared that I would study literature and become a writer, using my weaponised pen against you, writing words you couldn’t decipher. How ironic. You don’t know English, yet here I am, documenting us. You will never read it, Mom, this is a letter that drowns in its unsent, rotting solitude.
Perhaps you already know this too well — when I went abroad for high school, I was also running away from you. As I left, my silent absence at home became a final statement of our failed relationship. Yet in those first months when even a glimpse of strange families dining or walking on the street would make me break into tears, pained as I was by my rootless state, I would call you at night. Calls interspersed with silences that neither of us knew how to fill. I tried to get to know you, the person you were. But you uttered sweet nothings that reverberated feebly in my mind before dissolving away. You sounded hollow, lost, as if words evaded you. So I realized, with sadness, that I could not know you. You were a stranger even to yourself.
How could you love me properly, then?
But what defines love, multi-dimensional as it is?
Our love is more genetic than learned. It is the bond of heredity and unconditionality that bridges our chasmic disparateness. On those quiet afternoons at home where neither of us spoke much except for some innocuous small talk – under that spell of banal stillness – we are restored to being, simply, mother and daughter.
Perhaps someday, just perhaps, I will see your brokenness in a loving light, understand you without judging you, and we can bridge that chasm between us by doing something we both love. Gardening, perhaps? In the glow of floral radiance and the refreshing smell of rain-washed soil, maybe we’ll understand our flawed nature. Maybe I can even help you find the pieces of you that you don’t know are lost. Maybe.
Jingyi is in her last year of high school in Singapore. She is a lover of stream-of-consciousness narratives, particularly To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. She can often be found dreaming of a parallel reality, caught in minor existential crises, or wondering what movie to watch on Friday night. She aspires to be a nonfiction writer in the future.