About A Woman, My Mother

we have to learn Amy Tan's short story for our literature class. amy tan is apparently a 2nd generation chinese-american who often incoporates the complicated relationship between a traditional mother and modern daughter in her writings.

wait! 'complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter?'

is it just me or it sounds awfully familiar?

haha. mothers. mak-mak sekalian. i still remember the old times during my childhood where we were injected with this mindset that our mothers are everything. they are supposed to be our soul, our life, our greatest inner spirit etc, etc, our best friend, our best everything. etc etc etc. 

i love my mother terribly when i was child. not sure if that love stemmed from within or social conformity. she's the one to send me n pick me up from school. upon reaching home, lunch was already served. we would eat and she would wait for us to finish our homework. then we went out to play for two hours. 8pm, time for tuitions. arghh, my most-detested period of the day... then we watched tv and went to bed. applies to all of my siblings. our school lives are filled with tuitions, many many friends, many many stuffs we wanted but couldn't afford, almost-absentee father and always-there mother...

but my father is a good enough father at that time of the day. he's always busy. but he's home for at least two hours per day before we went to bed. he is responsible for the more expensive venture of the family - toys, books, KFC, walkmans... and he solved the bigger stuffs like which boarding school should they send us to, who to contact and decide whether our exam results are good enough. he'd try really hard. he'd dig up the necessary connections, call the necessary people he doesn't even like for our sake even though we never ask for it anyway. 

now back to my mother. umi, we call her. as i grew up, began to live further away from home - boarding school, then university where i rent a room for myself. abah takes care of my expenses, i take care about all the other stuffs in my life. my dependency on her faded. it ceased. i relied on her no more. she is just my mother.

do i look up to her? no. to be honest, not really. she's not well-educated [except when it comes to politics and gossips], she's emotional, loves to nag and worries excessively, especially when i'm out at night with my friends. she's great as a mother, wife and housewife but she's not what i aspire to be. i almost felt like i wouldn't want to be her in the future. living life as a woman who depends financially on her man.

i suspect it is the main reason why i don't really believe in the institution of marriage. what if i end up stuck in an unhappy marriage and a not-so-loyal husband like her? a cautious tragic fairytale happening right in front of my eyes. 

the guilt of feeling such unfillial thing - it burdens me. makes me feel like i'm an 'anak derhaka'. i keep saying to myself, "i'm sorry umi, for not wanting to be like you. still, i love you."

do i respect her? tremendously. ardently. not being able to look up to her doesn't mean i am not amazed to see what a strong and persevered woman she is. she holds everything back.

so what if your husband cheated on you and bought the other woman a house less than a kilometer away from you? you need to send your children to their math & science classes anyway. so what if your husband doesn't return home for two days and is not even bothered to at least ring you up to tell you his wherebouts? you still have to prepare dinner, do the laundry, scrub the toilet and supervise your children's homework. she does all that without a drop of tear displayed in front of us. she is sad but she is realistic.

and she knew that if only she had crumbled when she discovered her husband's betrayal, then her children would crumble alongside her as well.

but i noticed it. and i think she realized it, too. from my perspective, she is not living a happy life. it may be a comfortable life - she has a big house, a big car, stable income from my father, educated children - but other than family matters, i can hardly relate her to anything. it really makes me wonder. if she had not met my father, what would she become? most probably a national athlete. or a successful lawyer. she told me she was really good at sports. and she used to work part-time in a law firm somewhere in kelantan. but all those possibilities were cut short when she began dating my father and married him when she was merely nineteen. she adapted the role of a housewife with no obstacles at all. fast-forward 25 years later, nothing has changed in her role except for my father's loyalty and his financial standing.

so i guess that's why i promised myself that i will give her everything i can in the future. well, everything i can afford, that is. a house with her name on its land title, a car [she wants an SUV for god's sake!] and yearly trip overseas and perhaps, a once-in-two-months shopping trip around KL. okie, that should cost me at least rm5000 per month on her ALONE. haha, now i'm scared plus worried.

but i'll work my best on it. i want to make sure that she never regrets entering the marriage she shared with my father. that at least, there's something to look forward to at the end of the road. she has five children. one of us would be very very freakingly rich at the very least. and the rest would be adequately stable in their finances as well. in the future, i want her to feel that the sacrifices she has made to stay in an unhappy marriage has finally paid off. it was worth the wait. the husband may fail you but not the children. the husband may come and go as he pleases but the children would come and go as she pleases.  with something as mere as a phone call, we would cancel everything in our schedule and rush to her.

i know that for now, i can't really do anything to prove how much i want to take care and protect her since i am a student with little money on but many many troubles. but hopefully, things would be better for us in the future. hopefully fate would be so kind to me as to ensure that my mother's happiness would materialize. it won't be until then that i can call myself a truly filial daughter.

Ruby Jusoh wishes her mother a great HAPPY BIRTHDAY for tomorrow! and a safe plane trip tomorrow from Kota Bharu to Kuala Lumpur, paid by none other than her brother-in-law, Ayah Su, since her husband's supposed attention is displaced elsewhere. hehehehehe [i'm so gonna get killed by abah for this statement. i love u too, abah, and please don't forget my broadband bills! hehe]