Chicken Soup

family life

№: 10

237.2020

I begin to meet with my mother on call each week in the Summer during the pandemic and we decide to talk about anything and everything. As we speak, my intention is to learn more about her and that, eventually, she can learn more about me. She shares stories of how she met my father and studied in America. She tells me of her joyous and happy moments as well as her struggles and mistakes. All the while I am thinking back to my own version of events of the past few years and the parallels I could draw and realize how much more than a mother she is. What these conversations do for me is help me expand my view of my mom to more than just that one-dimensional aspect of being mother. I learn a little more about what she loved doing, her motivations and perspectives.

The stories she tells draw out time in a way by bringing the choices of others to influence my existence at this moment in time stretching as well as into the lives of many of those after me. That life is uneasy, rarely takes the form of a straight line is a recurrent theme in our conversations. Without being explicit, she hints that I will have to brave the unknowable future – with faith – evident in how she herself took on challenges with grace.

With the lot of advice given to me before I left for America – some in passing and most alluded within the jokes, goodbyes and prayers, my mother then and even now in our talks tells me that I am the best. Although she has and always had the best intentions in mind, I begin to wonder how this kind of affirmation translates to knowing how to brave the tough times when things are out of control or when I fail. How will I find the courage to come to speak to her during the difficult moments when she projects a version of me that falls seems flawless? Each time after these conversations that I have had with my mother, I think it is necessary that I do hear the stories of her ambitions, joys as well as the trials in her life as the listening saves me from thinking that my own shortcomings are too big to overcome, that I should as well celebrate each small victory in my life