I'm sure your mum is a lovely woman. But I ain't readin' all that.

I dont mean special as in you ride the special bus

Whatever karmic paths made our souls meet for this lifetime, her stamp on my spiritual path is endearing.

Gratitude does not come easily to those of us privileged enough to be raised American, middle class, and secular. Despite constant reminders from my parents and relatives, and despite experiences in my own life, it wasn’t until I was forced to live with my mother last year that I felt a tinge of gratitude.

My mother was Buddhist and my father was Methodist by upbringing, an agnostic by heart. I grew up hearing my father’s long, labored, and intensely boring stories of the aftermath of the Great Depression—an era in American (indeed World history) under which his eldest sister clearly remembered (my father was much older than my mom, by 14 years). My father’s eldest sister had plastic runners in her house from the front door tracing a zigzagging path to her kitchen where the carpet stopped and the linoleum began. We were required to walk, without shoes only on the designated plastic paths. If it was a dinner visit (and it almost always was unless my mom saw fit to have me show up and rake my aunts 3 acre estate in the rain and cold) then we would certainly be served the cheapest, overcooked canned veggies and ham so laden with fat you’d be surprised it wasn’t Spam. Then over dinner the conversations would invariable drift to my uncle, aunt, and father waxing nastalgia, while my mother, sister, and I feigned the slightest bit of interest. The stories that they would tell seemed so alien to me---them begging neighbors for eggs or sugar. Going days without eating..begging for work…cutting lawns for a meal. And so on and so forth.

But none of these experiences taught me gratitude. I grew up like so many Americans of my generation expecting privilege. Expecting the computer, expecting the phone, cable T.V., …expecting to be treated like an adult. Did I earn this? No, of course not. Not even after having lived through 8 years of the military did I actually earn that right. Nor even standing in front of my flag, after having been sufficiently trained to defend and cherish my country did I feel any gratitude. No, America was lucky to have me I thought.

I won’t go into too much detail about the situation surrounding the circumstances of my moving in with my mother, but suffice it to say, I ran out of options relatively quickly after having been laid off. I want to say that the layoff was unfair, but I really didn’t put in terribly much effort the year that I was laid off. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted someone like me working for my company—that’s for sure. But I wasn’t any worse than my peers, and actually quite a bit more affective than some of the ones who survived the initial rift (but were later laid off anyways). But here I was, on the upper end of my mid 30’s without a job, without any leeds, and with a mortgage to pay.
Unbeknownst to me, though I had suspected it despite, my fiancé at the time was looking for a way out of our relationship and chose a path of avoidance and ‘making things difficult’ rather than just squaring with me—I’m a simple creature prone to direct communication and straight talk. So the option of going to him was out of the question as I would soon find out.

So I moved in with my mother. I left my home in Florida after renting my master suite to somebody (to help pay my mortgage), packed all my things, and drove up to Alabama. Now let me say without going in to too much detail that this was psychologically more damaging to me than anything I had gone through in the last 10 years. I felt stripped of my manhood, stripped of my titles, stripped of purpose. I was completely raped. The only thing I had going for me was the possibility of a job in the DOD in Europe, and my relationship at the time which I had already sensed slipping away.

On Feb 14th, I received a text message from my significant other thanking me for the roses I had sent. A text message!!! Less than 2 weeks later, I was essentially “dumped” for being selfish and unresponsive to my fiancé’s emotional needs . The next day, I was volunteered by my mother to help set up her friend’s new computer, a process that ended up taking all day and resulting in a lengthy, protracted dinner at a swank Chinese restaurant in town. Now this ‘friend’ of my mother’s holds a rather ‘high’ type of social status—which is important to Thais, so I was obligated to be very respectful and not make her ‘lose face’ while showing her how to use her computer. I was showered with pats on the back, and hugs, and all manner of kind gestures---but I didn’t want to be touched. I felt as if I was made of glass and would shatter into a million pieces.

The next week, my mother asked me to take her to Washington D.C., so I did. I drove up to D.C. not having slept the week before. Not feeling ANY emotion in me. It didn’t help that my ex posted pictures of himself wearing my shirts, the watch I bought him, etc. etc. and hanging out and having a good time at the pub with friends on the Internet. Nor did it help that he was frequenting my favorite websites and posting when he had never done so before. Now I don’t want to get into a lengthy smear campaign here—the purpose of what I’m trying to convey is the level of misery I was going through at that time last year. I felt absolutely abandoned. Absolutely trampled upon. I was indeed a broken frame.
One day in Washing D.C. with the Washington Monument as our backdrop, I asked my mom if she ever thought she would get to see Washington D.C. She said, “sure.” I said, “No mom.. I mean, when you were growing up in Thailand. When you were in the village. Did you think you would see it then?”
She paused for second and looked at me rather amused. She knew that something was wrong with me that week, but didn’t really put her finger on it---you see when I suffer. When I have my emotional breakdowns…I do it completely internally. I kill myself behind a mask.
She then answered me by saying, “When I was growing up, I was just lucky to have food to eat. I didn’t think I’d ever get to see Bangkok.” I think asked her, “Do you feel lucky now? Do you feel like life is o.k.?” The reason I ask this is that my mother lives a lonely life. She was very happy to have me move in with her not because she wanted to help (indeed, she wanted to help), but because she’d have company. She’d have someone to take care of.
She looked at me again, and answered without hesitation, “of course I’m lucky. I go where I want. I do whatever I want. I have what I need. And I don’t have to answer to anybody. I’m free to live my life.”

Now, let me explain to you just a tiny bit about my mother’s life.

She grew up in a very poor rural part of Thailand. The houses did not have electricity, the showers were all cold, and she’d never seen a foreigner until her mid teens. She never made it past the 6th grade, because at that time in Thailand, you needed money to go to school after grade 6, and her family could barely afford to eat.
She ran away from home in her teenage years and a job at the American Embassy cleaning living quarters. Somehow, she managed to teach herself English in the midst of all this.

My father met her when he was teaching electrical engineering in Korat Air Base, in Thailand and they quickly got married. I was born no more than 2 years after that. Although I was very young, I remember him mistreating her in many ways. He would hurl racial insults at her and her younger sister (who lived with us for a short while), and he would threaten and scare the living daylights out of me (mind you, I was only 3 at the time and I still remember this).
In every way…In every manner, my father tried and mostly managed to isolate her. She was reduced to sneaking around to have a social life with friends. She was reduced to quiet afternoons talking to herself in strange little whispers , echoing down the halls and perplexing me and my sister out. She was forbidden to speak Thai to my sister and I, and she was discouraged (to say it lightly) from cooking us ‘smelly chink food’. For 25 years, she lived in a marriage in which she was made to feel the lesser. She made to feel small. Now, over the course of years, she managed to gain many freedoms, one of which was to get part-time work at cheap retail companies, which I’m convinced kept her sane because at that time, my sister and I were not supportive nor appreciative of her sacrifices.

Would I have chosen her life? Would I have spent 25 years with a man waiting for him to die? Would I have contemplated wasting the best years of my life in solitude?

My answer is a smug, Americanized, privileged class “no”. But my mum was not a smug, Americanized, privileged class woman. The idea of sitting around and feeling sorry for herself was a luxury in which she could never contemplate. The idea of thinking that the world was picking on her just because her fiancé left her and she was laid off…that very notion that somehow that was going to stop her or impeed her own happiness---those ideas would have been silly to her.
I had ascended to a self-ish, smug, perch on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that I’ve fooled myself into thinking self-actualization was what I needed at that point in my life.
And after years of resenting her. After years of being so, so, sooooo angry at her. So hurt, and so broken by what I felt she did, I no longer think that way. I no longer view her choices as selfish nor immoral.
Aravind Adiga writes in his book, The White Tiger of having killed his boss and ascended out of what is called in India “The darkness” into the “light”, :
…I’ll never say I made a mistake that night in Dehli when I slit my master’s throat. I’ll say it was worth it to know just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servent…
For those of you who find harsh those words, I implore you to read his book. You’ll understand his point of view—you may not support it, but you’ll understand it.

Likewise, I can no longer judge my mother. I can only praise her.
She has been amazing to me this year. She has paid my way out of personal debts, out of misery. She has sent me to Germany to help cheer me up. She has sent me to Thailand to give me a new perspective on life. She has been my savior. And I have been nothing but a fool.

I have thank her so many times this last couple of months, and my greatest fear is that she will never know the debts of the gratitude I truly, absolutely feel now. I have never felt anything this profoundly.

Whatever karmic paths made our souls meet for this lifetime, her stamp on my spiritual path is endearing.



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[Edited 5/4/10 1:21am]