In honor of February, being famously known as the month of my mother’s birthday (at least in my household) and LOVE, I wanted to write a love letter to THE MOST IMPORTANT WOMAN in my family.
But before I start, I wanted to give a little background: my family is FILLED with strong women; when I tell you, that it’s very much a matriarchy in this house, I am not joking.
The women in my family are the glue that holds us all together. They’re determined, selfless, strong, smart, and high-achieving, and I have to say that without them I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
While all the women in my family are amazing in their own unique ways, the focus of this letter will be on the one who has had the most monumental influence on my life: my mother
Dear Mom,
Let me just start off by saying Happy Birthday! I know you feel like you’re entering that period of slow middle age where life seems to be moving too fast for you, but like we always say: age is just a mentality and you’re only ** years young (her age is a family secret).
I know we’ve had our disagreements and arguments, with you throwing up your hands in exasperation at my childhood follies and me storming away in a huff because it feels like “you just don’t understand me or what it’s like to be living during my generation”.
We’ve screamed and cried and had periods where one of us doesn’t speak to the other, icing the other out over both the frivolously small and the consumingly big.
We’ve warred with words of poison, sparring with barbed tongues, until it felt like we were nearly consumed with this thing that was “not quite hatred, but not exactly love” a feeling you can only feel when you so desperately want to be understood but don’t know if the other person will listen and accept you for who you are and what you’re doing.
And yet, this is not the whole story. (Truly a dichotomy of man moment (actually woman *haha*)).
I think, the most common trait of all the women in our family, is the desire to do what’s best for the people we love. We’re stubbornly and selflessly devoted to the people we care about, thinking we know what’s best for them, even in the moments when we actually don’t. We want what’s best for the people we love, willing to silently sacrifice ourselves for their happiness, every single time. We love the people around us with every fiber of our being, sometimes smothering them with our desire to help and save and support them.
I think I have a strangely unique perspective on this because I’ve done it and I’ve felt it. I have that ingrained desire to fix and repair things, to take care of other people, and to do what I think is best for them and not understand how or why they push you away, saying you’re wrong for doing what you do. But, I’ve also felt the weight of those crushing expectations the person that loves you has for you, that unintentional rigid suffocating love that seems conditional on you agreeing with them on what’s right for you even though deep down you disagree, that exact one that has you walking on eggshells uncertain of what to do.
I think your childhood shaped you this way, as I’m certain mine did. You grew up in a bustling metropolis in China as a naive middle child who was eager to please those around you. You did as you were told, striving to do your best because you didn’t really know what else to do.
You were the first in your family to leave China, the first to blaze a path for yourself that your siblings followed, and the first to be on your own in a new country with next-to-nothing to your name.
And you built yourself up, beyond your wildest dreams. You created a life for yourself and for your family because you didn’t have a choice. You never stopped achieving and setting high expectations for yourself, tirelessly working so that your kids and parents got to experience the stuff that you never did.
Everything you do is for your family, and you’ve sacrificed so much to get where you are, and knowing you, I understand that you would do it all again for us.
That kind of love is rare.
As I write this, I understand more about you and about me. I understand where that internally selfless but externally overwhelming type of love comes from. I think that with this type of love, there’s always a sort of desperation to it, a desire to be loved like how you love others. An unmet want to be taken care of like how you take care of others. A biological need to create a better life for the future generation.
But, we must have faith that those we care for also know what they’re doing and can also decide what’s best for them. Easy to say but hard to do, I know. We must trust them to approach their life in their own way, for that’s the only way to truly glean anything meaningful out of it and we don’t really have much of a choice, do we? We must give them space to mess up and to fall and to pick themselves back up again, and then to learn and to grow from it all. (You tell me that when I become a parent I’ll understand just how difficult of a process this will be, and I agree it is trivial of me to comment on an experience I do not have). But, from that which I do, I think that you don’t need to worry so much about me mom, “good people make good people” and you’re a great person.
We may not agree on everything, but I know that you’ll always be there to support me, to give me advice and pearls of wisdom, and show me how to navigate the tricky ways of this world without losing compassion for the people in it, and I know that I’ll always be there to take care of you, to show you how to have love and compassion for yourself, and that it’s never too late to figure out who you are.
I love you Mom, thank you for everything.
Emily
