Provisions

I’ve had a couple of weeks and there is no need to go into details to make my general point, but it was week or two that reminded me, violently and viscerally, of all the ways I can become confused about what my actual job is as a parent, and all the ways I am destined to fail and suffer when I veer off from the job description.

It also reminds me, again painfully, of all the ways that white middle-class culture pressures me to take a course that never works for me, and the ways that I become estranged from what I privately call The Other Mothers. The ones who seem to share comfortable, pre-determined and certain values about what a mother is, of course, supposed to do.

I don’t do most of those things.  

I don’t know why, when I do try, or when the predominant myths of motherhood possess me it messes everything up, and why this doesn’t happen to The Other Mothers (maybe it does). 

I have never been a particularly protective parent.  Maybe this is because I wasn’t particularly well protected, or maybe it is because the adults scant attempt to protect me made me feel lied to and alone.  I always knew better.

And I think my children, and most children, see far more than their parents can dare to admit to themselves.

I began talking to my children about sexuality and bodies, oppression and injustice, death and loss and grief as soon as I held them in my arms. They deserved an explanation, right off the bat, whether they could understand it yet or not, about how they came into this earth, about who their ancestors are, and why they lived with people who did not conceive, gestate, or bear them.

They deserved an explanation that included all the biological, financial, political, misogynistic, colonial forces that had flung their tiny bodies halfway around the earth, and the privileges and oppressions that I am complicit in that put me in a position to raise them up when the mothers who bore them could not and/or were not permitted to.

I knew this would be a story that would be hard for me to learn to tell honestly and simply, so I began practicing as soon as I could.  I learned quickly that The Other Mothers were less invested in learning to tell their children hard but true stories but rather seemed to expend a significant amount of energy in protecting their children from unpleasant and painful realities, constructing a protective bubble of normality around their households, and seemed to feel some parenting success when they had done so successfully.

The normal-bubble never felt like an option for us.

When I was a brand-new mother, I laid down on the couch, and put on Ray, the Ray Charles bio pic while an exquisitely beautiful baby boy snored quietly on my chest. I learned in the first twenty minutes of the film that Ray Charles had a baby brother who drowned upside down, legs in the air, in a bucket of cleaning water. The briefest image on the screen sent terror through every cell in my body.  “Babies can die in buckets?!” my brain screamed. I put the sleeping baby carefully in his crib and snapped off the TV.

When my husband came home a few hours later he called quietly up the stairs: “Hey, why are the mop buckets outside on the curb?”

“We can just use the slop sink and the tub, and they were taking up room.” I replied.

And of course, I guarded my children closely, holding their chubby hands tightly on subway platforms and crossing busy Brooklyn streets.

But I quickly learned there was a whole layer of protectiveness that I was either failing at or rejecting or both.

There was the day in second grade when my daughter told all her classmates that her grandmother was dying and that all their grandmas would die and their parents too, and they themselves would die one day as well, because everybody dies.  I received several parent emails from concerned white parents that made it clear how out of rank and file I had stepped.

A few months later, when my daughter matter-of-factly explained to the same class how they had all been conceived, some via penises and vaginas, other by eggs and sperm put close together in a dish or in a mother’s body by doctors with special tools another round of concerned emails landed in my inbox.

Apparently, there was some assumed consensus about how and when it is “age-appropriate” to tell our children such things. Basic truths, conveyed simply and directly, seemed to me always age appropriate.

I would talk to my children as frankly as I could about living in Korean American adoptee bodies in a racist society. But I could not protect them from pre-school peers calling them “Karate Guy” or “China Girl” or when white parents took their white children for a picnic and an outdoor movie in Brooklyn Bridge Park to laugh at Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s while we stayed home.

I learned very quickly that I couldn’t protect them from the casual racism of the progressive white families who they encountered at school and the playground and on the streets. I could help them unpack their experience, we could debrief, and strategize about how to respond. I could step toward the old white men who would intrusively say “Ni-hao!” to my eight-year-old daughter and tell them to back the fuck up and go away, but I couldn’t protect them from the racialized distortions, objectifications, and erasures of the culture at large.

I could shore them up, making sure they had access to peers and adult role models who were adoptees, people of color, Korean born Koreans as they were, as well as Korean Americans, and specifically Korean American adoptees. But I couldn’t protect them from the children of the Other Mothers pulling their eyes back or ching-chonging at them or calling them dog-eaters.

Nor could I protect my child from the cruelties, unnecessary shaming, and punishments of the neurotypical world either. I could exhaust myself at IEP meetings and teacher-parent conferences and make rights-based demands that my child be accommodated until I was red in the face. But it almost always resulted in my being perceived as That Mother who was demanding “special treatment” for my over-protected child. 

I could never effectively protect my child from all the shame of being told they were irresponsible, or lazy, or indifferent to their studies and all the demoted grades assigned for disabilities instead of capacities. I could not protect myself from the implications that I was somehow simultaneously coddling or neglectful, not allowing my child to “learn from failure” or the suggestions I should be doing much more or much less to make sure assignments were completed in ways that were satisfying and convenient for teachers.

I couldn’t protect my children from broken arms or grand mal seizures, or ruptured appendixes, from reported guns or SWAT teams on their high school campus or bullying by teachers and classmates.

I couldn’t protect my children from simple or compound trauma, even though it had been the goal of my life to do so. Instead, they passed through their most formative school years surrounded by cancer, chemotherapy, death, funerals, grief, and exhaustion.

I thought the last and worst straw was when I was diagnosed, the fact that my very body, became the source of trauma, rubbing salt in the lost-mother-wound that put them in my home to begin with.

Who knew there was so much more to come.

I read aloud to my children into their pre-teens, and there was one story I read over and over, probably mostly to myself, but they liked it too.

The Japanese story of Peach Boy, Momotaro, is the tale of a child, with preternatural strengths, who emerges from a giant peach floating down a river, that ends up in the home of an older childless couple.

His parents regarded him with pride, tempered him with sadness.

They are delighted by him and support his capacities by training him as a samurai: horsemanship, archery, and initiating him into the use of sword and spear. He sat with a sensei in a temple and learned the arts of brush and ink.

One day he challenges them about some dangers he senses but no one has named: “Why is everyone so afraid? Why will none of you answer me?”

And, because he knew better, his unconscious perceptions rise to answer his questions in a dream: Demons sail to shore from a hidden Demon Island in the sea, and plunder and terrorize the villagers.

His parents decide to prepare him for the terrors they know can no longer be avoided. They set to work preparing him kibi dango, millet cakes, as provisions for the journey. They present him with his father’s sharpened sword to carry into battle, and armor him.

And then they let him go. They cannot hold him back or intervene any further in his fate.

Momotaro uses his parental provisions wisely. He tames a small battalion of animal warriors with his millet cakes and sails off to face his demons with a monkey, dog, and pheasant. He defeats the demons with their assistance and his father’s sharp sword and removes the demons’ horns. He gathers all their plundered treasures and returns the loot to the villagers, assuring his parents live in comfort for the rest of their days.

But it was the sight of their son once again that gave them the most profound joy.

I cannot protect my children from the monsters they are destined to face. I can only provision them, train them, and help them sharpen their swords, remembering that there is a time, that arrives sooner than most parents can tolerate or imagine, when you have provided them with all you can. And the dangers of the world, and the monsters that live on hidden islands in their psyches, are theirs to face alone.

The list of things I cannot protect my young adult children from grows longer by the day.

I cannot protect them from repeated Covid 19 infection in a nation that has abandoned all basic public health measures, no matter how many high-quality masks I can buy or how vigilantly they wear them. I cannot protect them from any long-term sequelae or disabilities that may emerge because of these infections.

I have not been able to protect them from the premature deaths of peers and classmates by suicide, by gun violence, by addiction and by Covid.

I cannot protect them from car accidents, or panic attacks or depressive episodes or despair.

I cannot protect them from my own disease process or eventual decline or death.

I can’t protect them from looming fascism, or from the devouring cruelties of late-stage capitalism. I cannot protect them from the mass dissociation from climate realities or from the attendant drought, fires, storms, floods, and scarcity that climate breakdown will carry with it.

I cannot even offer them particularly targeted provisions. They have demons to face that I have never encountered.

I cannot, with the inflation and adrenaline born of motherlove fill the massive holes that a failing society has placed in their path, and I cannot protect them from having to face the darkness alone.

(And I do not know how to talk with parents who think a school rafting trip or a prom, or admission into a first-choice university are expectations that should never be disrupted)

I can only wait now, if my body allows me to, and wait steadfastly. I hope I may someday celebrate if they ever reclaim the treasure that has been stolen from them.

Protection is a cluster of privileges, that millions of parents around the world do not have and have not had for all of history.  I am not alone in this.

I can only love them, whatever happens next. And hope that in times of trial that will sustain them as well as a sturdy sword and millet cakes made from scratch.