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Category Archives: family

Ginger

08 Sunday May 2016

Posted by K.Lo in family

≈ 7 Comments

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I recently came across this photo as I was cleaning out the closet in my guest room, a project that got far enough to turn said guest room into complete chaos and no further. This glamour shot, taken when my mother was a teenager in the 1950s and displayed on a bookcase in my grandparents’ home, was little more than a curiosity when I was growing up–evidence of a life that I was only minimally interested in because it had nothing to do with me. With the egocentricity typical of a child (or maybe I was just a self-centered little monster), I didn’t think much about my mother being anyone other than my mother—the woman who made me dinner, yelled at me to unload the dishwasher, and kissed me goodnight before bed.

That changed somewhat as I got older, and somewhere in my teens and early 20s, our conversations shifted to include more of her history and the life she had before she became a wife and mother. But I was still fairly self-involved in my 20s, and the maturing process I went through to truly become an adult was her illness and death. Now that another fourteen years have passed and I am (gasp) a middle-aged person with students as old as my mother was in that photograph, I find myself reflecting on the complexity and contradictions of my mother’s life and identity—the fuller picture of a woman who wasn’t just mom, but an individual with a life and traits that defy easy categorization.

Ginger (she hated her given name, “Virginia”) felt everything deeply and intensely—love, anger, empathy, judgment, anxiety, joy—and she expressed it vocally. No one could accuse my mother of repressing her emotions. In our house, we saw them on full display every day. The stress of raising four children and the nearly constant pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia made her yell. A lot. And she could be harsh. But the same woman who could scream, “How could you be so stupid!” could also be incredibly tender and compassionate. I’ll never forget the time I found her standing at the living room window, staring at something in the park across the street from our house. When I asked what she was looking at, she pointed out a mother walking with her two young children. She was holding an infant in her arms and was trying to get a toddler to keep riding his toy tricycle. But the toddler also wanted to be held and refused to pedal the tricycle. The mother was forced to keep walking, carrying the baby in one arm and the tricycle in the other while her toddler ran behind her, sobbing and screaming out, “Mama!” My mother watched this unfold with tears in her eyes, murmuring, “Poor thing, poor thing.” At first I thought her compassion was for the child (and I’m sure some of it was), but then she said, “She can’t carry them both,” and I realized her tears were for the mother.

Motherhood was the be-all and end-all for Ginger, which my siblings and I mostly benefitted from, although there was also a bit of a downside. Her dedication to raising us (reading countless books on the subject, not to mention preparing thousands of healthy—if sometimes unappetizing—meals for us) was absolute, and she raised my sister and me with the ideology that being a wife and mother was the best and most fulfilling role for a woman. Even though my sister and I excelled academically and loved the intellectual life of our college experiences, my mother, who had quit her job upon marrying my father, discouraged us from pursuing graduate school (lest we become “too intimidating” to men) or any career that might be “too demanding” to raise a family. Though I have found deep joy and contentment in a very different kind of life than my mother lived or envisioned for me, it has still made me feel a little alienated from her—or at least my memory of her—to care about and pursue things that are so different from what she cared about and pursued. Or so I’ve thought.

Unearthing this photo reminded me of who and what else my mother was. She was a woman who left her family and home in Minnesota as a teenager to complete a B.S. and, subsequently, nursing degree at the University of Colorado. She was adventurous enough to go to Germany with a friend and work as a student nurse for six weeks in order to earn enough money to travel around Europe. Once she became an R.N., she had the gumption to drive to California in a VW bug and take a position as a public health nurse in the city of Pasadena. She had the nerve to marry a Chinese immigrant in the 1960s, in spite of the fact that both families were adamantly opposed to the marriage and people in her hometown openly stopped, turned around, and stared at her and my father walking down the street because they’d never seen an Asian before. Not in person, at any rate. She gamely went to Taiwan with my father and my one-year-old brother to meet my father’s family for the first time, beaming in every photo I’ve seen of that trip even though she must have been wildly intimidated by her complete ignorance of the language and customs. Not to mention going to the bathroom in a hole in the ground. She also had the strength of character and conviction to recognize that the church we had all been part of for so long–the one she and my father had met and married in–had a number of serious issues, and that we needed to leave it, a conviction that was, in part, inspired by reading the novel 1984 (part of her good mothering was that she kept up with what we were reading in school).

All to say, while my mother was deeply conservative and traditional in many respects, her life and character had its radical components as well. And this daughter, who also feels deeply and tries to live authentically according to her convictions, who loves travel, independence, and a life of the mind, might not be so different from her mother after all. At least not in the ways that matter.

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Grief

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by K.Lo in family, musings

≈ 4 Comments

Years ago, a dear friend of mine’s husband died of brain cancer.  He, along with their two sons when they were growing up, had been actively involved with Boy Scouts, and recently some old scouting friends and their current troops decided to do a walk in his honor and raise funds to fight the cancer he’d had.  I called my friend after the event to hear how it’d gone and see how she was doing.  She wasn’t doing very well.

“When I got there and saw all of them wearing their shirts with his face on them, I don’t know,” she said, “it just hit me.  I wanted to run back out to my car and cry.”  And then she said, “What is wrong with me?  It’s been nine years.”  And we talked about that, particularly her question, what is wrong with me? and the expectations and beliefs driving it–that grief has an expiration date, that the death of someone you love is something you are supposed to “get over” at a certain point (and that point is a final and definitive moment), and that the process of getting over it is a steady, linear progression, like a healing cut or a broken bone reforming itself.

Before I go any further with this, I need to acknowledge that every person’s grief is different, which makes sense given that every person is different, as is every relationship.  Some people seem to genuinely embrace the idea of “moving on” in the straightforward sense we think of when we hear that term, and by all appearances this seems to be working for them.  I might have some doubts about what’s really going on beneath the surface, but I also recognize that I am never in a position to judge someone else’s emotions or experience just because it’s different from my own.

At the same time, the fact that my friend felt bad about being sad about her husband’s death “nine years” later reminded me of how often we put pressure on ourselves and on others to be “better” according to an arbitrary time frame or define it as a once-and-for-all event.  Part of this, I think, stems from an erroneous (and largely subconscious) view of human emotions as some kind of binary system.  In other words, if you’re sad, you aren’t happy.  If you still miss someone, you’re not living a full life.  If some memories still cause you pain, you’re not healthy.  For Christians, you can add that if you’re devastated by loss, you don’t trust God enough or have hope in the resurrection.  You should be glad your loved one is in heaven.

In my experience, this is bullshit.  It’s not an either/or.  It’s an all-of-the-above.  I have a good life full of joy and enjoyment and the mundane.  I get excited about new possibilities.  I enjoy my friends.  I think about what I need to buy the next time I’m at Target.  I delight in eating chocolate and look forward to seeing a movie I’ve read good things about.  Stupid cat videos on Facebook make me laugh.  But even though my mother died over twelve years ago, I still have dreams about her now and then that make me cry.  Or I’ll see a mother and daughter shopping together and, out of the blue, find myself wanting to follow them and ask if I can just hang out with them for a little while because I miss that mother-daughter kind of relating.  I also know that I’m going to get a little sadder than usual every September and October, because that’s when things started to get really bad for my mom.  That’s when the tumors spread to her bones and the pain that neither oxycontin nor morphine could relieve began to torment her day and night.  That’s when my own helplessness began to rise like bile in the back of my throat.

That sadness is part of who I am now, but it’s not the whole me nor is it my whole life, and I don’t think there’s anything strange or unhealthy or un-Christian about it.  I have moved on with my life, and part of my moving on is missing my mom.  Part of my moving on is remembering–years later–things that were too overwhelming and painful to process at the time.  And having a healthy Christian perspective about her death means recognizing that death is the enemy Christ came to defeat.  Anger and devastation are an appropriate response to disease and death because that is not what we were created for.  Relationships with the ones we love were never meant to be severed in such a way.

Time helps, the love of friends and family helps, the grace and comfort of God helps.  But the only thing that will truly and fully heal the pain of that suffering and death is to see her fully alive again in her resurrected body and embrace her. Which hasn’t happened yet.  So no, I’m not “over it” yet.  I’m happy/sad.  I’m content/longing.  My life is full/missing something.  And that’s okay, just as it’s okay for my friend to want to sit in her car and cry nine years after her husband’s death, even though she’s also learned to be happy again and enjoy the many good things in her life.

Love Story

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by K.Lo in family

≈ 13 Comments

This is a story about James and Eleanor.  James is my father, and here are some things about him that are important to this story:  he lost my mother to cancer ten years ago, he has Parkinson’s disease and lives in a Sunrise residence where caregivers help him with the tasks of daily living he can no longer perform for himself, and he is 79 years old.  His formative years in China were full of trauma, first because of the Japanese occupation during World War 2, and then because his family had to leave everything and flee to Taiwan (literally on one of the last boats out of the harbor) once the communists took over.  As a result of that and his family culture and the Chinese culture in general, my father has always had a very difficult time expressing his thoughts and feelings.  He is excellent at communicating information about things, and has always been highly skilled at recalling and telling detailed stories about historical events or about people he’s met.  But ask him how he felt or what he thought about something, and he would typically struggle to articulate a response if he was able to at all.  Often he was not.  When I was growing up, he rarely initiated any expression of emotion.

Of course, an inability to express emotions doesn’t mean a person doesn’t actually feel them, although it’s taken me some time to realize and understand this.  My mother was the expressive parent in our family, the one whose emotions were very visibly on display.  My father’s expressions of love were quieter and far easier to overlook.  The fact that he had 10-hour workdays yet still found time to cut up an orange for me and make me a hard-boiled egg on toast several mornings a week (even when I was in high school and fully capable of making my own breakfast) was something I just took as a given.  In the years since my mother died, I’ve seen my father make a conscious effort to be more expressive, but after decades of habits to the contrary, it hasn’t been easy for him.

And then came Eleanor.  I first remember hearing about Eleanor from my father late last fall.  He told me she’d been put on hospice for ovarian cancer and told by doctors that there was no more they could do for her.  He remarked on her positive attitude and cheerfulness despite her circumstances and said he wanted to talk to her and get to know her better to learn how this was the case.  When the Christmas season rolled around, my father invited Eleanor to his apartment to listen to selections of Handel’s Messiah (one of his favorite choral works) on CD, which he thought she might enjoy.

What started as curiosity and compassion on his part soon deepened.  “We can talk about anything,” my father told me in nearly every conversation we had about her.  They began eating their meals together, playing Rummikub, and practicing ballroom dancing several times a week.  On Valentine’s Day, their residence had a dance and crowned my father and Eleanor king and queen.  During these months, Eleanor’s condition was remarkably stable.  Her family told my father that he made her glow and had given her a reason to live.  In the course of this relationship with Eleanor, I noticed my father becoming more expressive in his relationship with me.  He seemed to converse just a little more easily about his feelings and seemed more comfortable responding whenever I expressed my own.

The week before last, my father e-mailed my siblings and me that Eleanor had taken a sudden turn for the worse.  She had lost her appetite and her legs had begun to swell.  Last weekend, she was moved to the hospice critical care facility, and last Tuesday, she died.  During one of my father’s visits, he sang a song to her that he had learned in a Bible study years ago:

May the Lord, Mighty God,
Bless and keep you forever,
Grant you peace, perfect peace,
Courage in every endeavor.
Lift up your eyes and seek His face
And His grace forever.
May the Lord, Mighty God,
Bless and keep you forever.

Eleanor’s daughter overheard some of this, and as a result, requested that it be sung at Eleanor’s service.  When I called my father on the day she died, he spoke of Eleanor’s kindness and concern for him, and how she was worried for him and his well-being even as she was in her last hours.  He was crying and clearly heartbroken, but he could talk about it, unlike his mute misery after my mother died.  Eleanor was buried on Friday with her framed copy of their photo and a love letter from my father placed in her casket by her request.

In some ways, this is a sad story.  But mostly, I think it is a beautiful and deeply encouraging one.

Demolition

24 Thursday May 2012

Posted by K.Lo in family, home ownership

≈ 10 Comments

When I left my house this morning, my master bathroom looked like this:

When I got home this afternoon, it looked like this:

And thus begins the process of renovation, which has already disrupted my life for the past three weeks as I’ve shuttled back and forth numerous times to Home Depot and Lowe’s to pick out and return materials, and which promises to continue disrupting my life for the next three weeks and drain my bank account in completely unanticipated ways.  For example, the removal of the floor revealed that the toilet flange (I learned a new word!) was broken and has been leaking water, as has my shower basin (or whatever you call it–the floor part you stand on), which led to wet wood, which led to a ready-made, easy to chew feast for the subterranean termites who have subsequently infested it.  So now I have a termite guy coming out tomorrow to assess the situation and probably charge me several hundred dollars or more to kill the little buggers.  Added to that will be the cost of the plumber who will install a new non-leaking flange.  I guess this is all better than falling through my floor one day mid-shower because the termites finally ate their way through and caused my bathroom to cave in, but still.

Faced with this unpleasant revelation, I am now in full practical “let’s just get everything fixed and finished” mode, but last night and this morning, I was surprised by how reluctant I was suddenly feeling about having the bathroom torn up.  In retrospect, however, it’s actually not that surprising.  That bathroom held a lot of memories for me.  Growing up, my bedtime seemed to coincide with my mother’s washing her face, and it became a kind of ritual for me to watch her pat her face dry, dab on some violet & rose toner, and lean towards me so I could kiss her goodnight.

Starting in high school and extending through college, quality time in the master bathroom came about when my mother decided part of the economizing she and my father were practicing in order to pay my siblings’ and my college tuition was to make me her hair colorist.  I complained mightily every time, and my mother hissed and scolded me whenever I applied the product too roughly or combed too vigorously, claiming I was trying to pull out all of her hair; but truthfully, we both enjoyed this forced time together of chatting about whatever was going on in our lives.

In the last several months of her life, this bathroom was where I helped my mother wash and change into her nightgown.  It was where I rubbed lotion into her hands and feet.  It was where I combed her hair and did my best to style it to her liking.  She had stopped worrying about coloring it, and it was growing out in a beautiful silver.

Of course there are all those things that people say, like memories last forever and no one can take your memories away.  But the reality is that many of our memories are rooted in physical locations and are triggered by tangible things we see or smell or hear.  So there is a real loss in this demolition.  And yet for the very same reason, there is also the hope and excitement a fresh start brings.

[The Lo Family Beauty Parlor circa 1995.  It’s okay to laugh.]

A Small History of Mothers

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by K.Lo in family

≈ 8 Comments

I may not be able to call my mother or take her to lunch anymore, but that doesn’t mean that I think of her or love her any less.  On a day like today, I am remembering her and the mothers that came before her with tremendous gratitude.

My great-grandmother with her firstborn (my grandmother):

My grandmother with her firstborn (my mother):

My mother with her firstborn (my brother Ben):

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