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.

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.

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):