The familial sweet sorrows of leaving

It is as if the events of this past week were meant as a counter to the effusive positivity that dominated my attitudes towards my mother and the dysfunctions in my family in the last few months.

I thought being able to finally accept the imperfection of it all was a sign of my growing up, of my increasing maturity if you'd like. Since I came back from Virginia and New York last July and decided to start prepare myself in the likelihood that I leave this year for graduate school in the States, I have gained a new-found acceptance for what I have found to be a bane of my existence all of my teenage years.

I suddenly thought of the implications of being away from my parents. The obligations towards them in their old age, financial or otherwise, began to weigh upon my shoulders. For a while, I even wanted to get my two younger sisters together for a thrash-it-all-out session about all the latent issues we had in the family, but I ultimately decided against it because I realized that forcing the issue just to satisfy my desire for "peace" in the family was actually more selfish than selfless. I realized my good intentions might not manifest in favourable end results.

For the first time in my life, I began to appreciate my mother's nagging as her love language. I started hugging her whenever I bid her farewell before I fly off to my next destination, and I started buying souvenirs for her on my recent trips -- something which I never used to conscientiously do because travelling has become so integral to my academic experience on the USP and therefore my everyday existence.

But her nagging also belie her nervousness and insecurity about my impending move to New York. I sought to placate her insecurities each time she starts nagging. After all, it is perhaps the only way she knows how to show concern for me. Her fussing around me and my two sisters is an extension of how she has led most of her last 26 years since she decided to have children. I have come to realize that we have come to define her existence over the last three decades, and it was always not going to be easy to wean her off the routinized life she had led for most of the last 30 years. I have sought to get her back to church -- if not for anything else, just to get her into a community where she can find something else to occupy her time other than fussing over us; but to no avail.

Because fundamentally, the three of us have all grown up and have our own lives. Whether she likes it or not, she has to let go, trust that the values that she has tried to instill in us when we were growing up can withstand the pressures of the gritty realities of adulthood and perhaps even let God take care of us. The last bit is a tad tricky given her patchy Christian personal history which I realized has a lot to do with her refusal to let go and let God.

At the same time, I am also immensely grateful that she spared me the agony of asking people for money. She was the one who talked my auntie and uncle into loaning me the huge sums of money to fund my year in Columbia. By doing so, she also showed me that my general arrogance would not get me anywhere. I learnt a lot just by observing her over the years, but therein lies also the problem.

It all started a few weeks ago.

I guess after I came back from Siem Reap, the realities of moving so far away finally dawned upon me. My room at home remained a collateral mess, a collection of 10 years of clutter since we moved into this apartment which is the result of my propensity to hoard things out of sentimentality. The immigration administration, housing issues and everything else relating to moving overseas were such a massive chore. I stayed up late to settle things because of the 12-hour time difference.

I also started on a spate of meet-ups with my friends. It became so mechanistic that I got tired of the meetings that typically are lined up one after another. Being out so much however, had my mom thinking I reverted back to type -- always out, never home for dinner, like when I was younger and always found myself overcompensating for what I perceived as a lack of familial warmth by spending way too much time with friends in school and church.

One such outburst last week was precisely about this, but I reminded mom that I am no more the person that I was as a teenager, not entirely anyway. Besides, if being out so much was a sign that I valued my friends more than family, this has to be seen as being a mere remnant of my past. After all, everybody is a product of their own past.

I became more irritable as time past because I was battling many things on different fronts and then two incidents this week triggered an all-out cold war. First, she almost lost my degree scroll after my graduation ceremony on Monday. I told her to wait for me at the spot where I left all my barang-barang which was admittedly a mess (which was why I told her to stay there in the first place), but she felt left out of my photowhoring antics and decided that she neeed to be part of the show as well. She hurriedly packed my stuff and went looking for me.

She not only did not manage to find me, but I found her waiting for me at another part of the foyer -- which begets the question: why couldn't she wait for me where I told her in the first place. I only realized she lost it when I opened my bag. I had found it rather suspicious when I first found her with the bag all neatly packed up because I had tried to squeeze my scroll folder into it earlier without any success, but I ignored it. It turned out she left it on the floor when she went to look for me. She kept protesting that she didn't see anything, but I told her that if she had seen it, she probably wouldn't have left it behind. Thank God somebody returned the folder to the lost and found counter because the school does not do reprints.

Then, yesterday (Saturday), while looking for my warranty card for the new Canon 40D DSLR camera I bought in May, I realized she may have unwittingly threw it away on one of her well-meaning endeavours to clean up the mess in my room. I had left it in that mish-mash of camera equipment with travel notes and unpacked travel bags on the floor and she had to go clear it when I specifically told her not to touch anything. I haven't even registered online and now I might have to pay up to 200 SGD just to get everything serviced and cleaned before I make the move end month. Thankfully, the camera shop where I bought it said they could help do it under the warranty, but I am still doubtful whether it will be in time for me to bring it with me to Brisbane on Wednesday.

The outburst just now was just about the worst in the last five years. Vulgarities were spewed out of my frustration. Friends have told me that I am overreacting, but while I readily acknowledge that to be true, you also got to realize that when I am reacting to my mother, it's not just that one isolated incident I am reacting against, it's the entire historical baggage I am raging against. For me, I was mad because this was one of the "same, same but different".

It's just ironic that I just asked G and P the night before, to pray for my mom, for God to help her let me go and release me in peace and with blessings.

I saw it as being symptomatic of her meddling "intense mothering" and of her massive problem with respecting personal boundaries. It may be her apartment I am staying in, but she assigned this room to be my inner sanctum. The things that she has done to meddle in this physical sanctum is just a metaphor for the various literal interferences in my life that was unwarranted in the last 10 years. Suddenly, I was brought back in time, and reminded of why I wanted so much to move out of my family home all these years.

There was this one time a few years ago, when my mother launched into this massive offensive to paint my room after I left the house early one Sunday morning for church. She mobilised my two sisters and my dad to move my furniture to the centre of my room and repainted it all in a day. I came back only to find everything practically unmoved, except a pungent smell of the coat of fresh paint in my room. Hell, the paint was even dry.

Shortly after, when I was looking for cabinets to replace my old one, she decided one day that I was not going to have any say in it when she said I could have. She called me one fine day to say that she was looking at some nice wooden cupboards and asked me if I wanted to join her at the shop to take a look. I told her that I didn't want expensive ones and would go to Ikea to get cheap nice ones. I thought this was a great time to start living my Ikea Dream.

But no, when she came back, she told me she ordered those cupboards already. All measured up to fit into the space that is available in my room, she proudly announced as if it would be any scant consolation to her latest interference. I remembered being so mad I didn't talk to her for days. I realized as long as I stayed within her mothering range, I really would not ever grow up and experience genuine joy and release as an adult.

It's ironic how she always complains we treat her as our full-time maid -- and when I told her I was planning to move out to a new place with friends even if I didn't get to go to Columbia, she got all riled up and tried to emotionally blackmail me into staying by reminding me how there will nobody to cook and clean for me and all that economic argument about having to pay rent and what not.

You might remark, like Sheela did, that my mom's idiosyncracies are "very cute and somewhat endearing" but trust me, when you are caught in the eye of it, it is anything but that. It gets very difficult for me because I also realize that everything that I find irritating about her interfering ways are also exactly everything that made me into who and what I am today.

Simply put, while her ways might have been largely effective when I was younger, there needs to be a drastic overhaul in her strategy now -- for her own sanity, and mine. Indeed one of the dominant motifs in my life has been my mom and her ways. She has been a very strong presence in my life, and for those who know me inside out, it is also one that is really too strong for my own good most times.

The singular most hurtful thing I said to her was in my late teens when I told her in a fit of anger that I hated myself because I see so much of dad and her in me. Regrettably, the essence of that statement still rings true with me today and I doubt it is one that will ever change. In many ways, I am scared that I will turn out to be just like her. If I ever have my own children, that is the last thing I want to become.

xxx

I feel like I have been brought one full circle. One of my prayers has always been for God to help me resolve the outstanding issues in my life before I go, but I am beginning to see how what I imagined to be "resolving" differs markedly with His probable definition. I wanted to resolve things in a definite way, but I guess with things like that with such a long history, things are a little more dynamic. Perhaps, coming to terms with the reality and being acquainted with the nuances of the situation is a better bet.

But with this, the question from now is how I am going to respond to this situation. I honestly do not know. It takes two to clap and things will never change if I am the only person who sees the need to change and to make concessions.

All I know is that I am beginning to see that it is crucial that I make this move not so much to New York, but out of my mother's range of physical mothering so that I might make that next crucial step in my personal and professional development. If I still had any doubts for the need for me to fly away this July 30, I think the events of the last week have served to dispel them entirely.

I am still asking God a lot of things and questioning in an "unconstructive" existential fashion, like I used to. Why did you give me a mother like that? Why didn't I die, instead of Gerald Ho or Reuben Kee -- both young men I know with better relationships with their mothers instead of me? Why did I become like this, with a notion of family that is so drastically different from my mother's? Why.

But unlike the past, I don't think I care much for the answers anymore. I can wait, but I am not going to wait and do nothing while waiting. The answers will come when they do. Some times, it is better to let things be. After all, pain is caused by an overtly tight grip on things. It is only when you let go that the pain dissipates. It may never go away, but you just got to learn to deal with it.

And oh, please do me a favour -- don't judge me on what I think of my relationship with my mom. Just utter a silent prayer for me, or curse me under your breath.