Home and Away: Mother
I always think of my mother as ‘special.’ In her 30s, she took up all kinds of hobbies. They were feminine, elaborate, and time-consuming. Like crocheting, which resulted in a catalogue of crochet arts, tote bags and beach sandals she would sell via Facebook, or participating in a school bazaar where she sold toys from the trunk of my car and befriended many young mothers like herself along the way. During those days, I had her keep the cheapest toy from the collections. On top of these productive leisures, she also never missed aerobic class, where she was the prettiest one in the group (and almost all her friend groups).
A decade after her marriage, she was still considered so beautiful that many of her friends envied her for how childbirth did not seemingly affect her petite shape.
She has a lot of friends and is the type of person that can always maintain her relationship with everybody since the first time it took form. But her closest friends know that this attractive, chatty woman is sensitive at heart and not afraid to show it; she would take it personally when her friends didn’t call her back because they were busy keeping up with life, or when they turned down her lunch invitations.
For all her cheery openness, her behaviour towards me, her only daughter, is somewhat distant. As I grew up, I began to see two women in her: a carefree, jovial one outside the home, and one who hurts. I saw her cry when talking on the phone, after reading me to sleep or arguing with my dad—something that escalated to things that have successfully distorted how I see the world.
I also noticed that this caring, extroverted friend never took interest in what I achieved as a child. A stinging realization I never bothered to explore.
For much of our history, the pastime we shared as a mother and daughter never amounted to an invisible bond, but a machine-like routine that just had to be done: taking me to school, feeding me fried rice at our favourite restaurant (she once poured chilli sauce on it when I haven’t finished eating, which led me crying at the mall and my father scorning her for her ‘carelessness’), and reading me stories in bed per my request. It was an extremely simple pattern, but as I grew older this pattern stopped and it felt like parts of her have died with it.
She stopped crocheting, taking pilates and making new friends. The sewing kits and children’s toys—once an everyday view at home—are soon exchanged with broken glasses, or a man and woman shouting on the staircase.
I also remembered how my sleeping schedule deteriorated. Aged at least five years old, my mom would hurriedly shake me awake when it was past midnight, whispering that it was time to leave. She would say, “a trip, just us”, and rush us to the car. Carrying with her an empty water gallon for me to pee on the way. We had a few trip destinations: my grandmother’s house and her friend’s, which was located a little outside of the Jakarta capital where we lived.
It was no summer vacation, but seeing my parents hug each other when my dad picked us up in the morning was always the highlight of our trip. This too became a pattern, along with my regular stay at my grandmother’s when they had to “settle some things at home.”
A loving homemaker and plant lady, my grandmother startled every time words unfamiliar to kids casually rolled out of my tongue, giving way to even more explosions back home. Oblivious to the fact that I have witnessed what many would later call “abuse”, my mother would ask in half-denial and sheer ignorance, “where did you learn to speak this way?”. My dad, knowing full well the answer and too heartbroken to talk it through, kept silent.
I had seen their marriage fall apart many times, but the contrast in my mother’s irrational scorn and my father’s tearing eyes showed me that it was the end. This particular point in life reminded me of what my favourite French-Algerian writer, Albert Camus thought of death in The Myth of Sisyphus: “[Man] admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end.”
When for Camus the finish line was the loss of life, mine was the loss of something greater. A part of life that determines the rest of the curve, and I was fleeting and collapsing somewhere in the middle of this spectrum like a little ball.
The end did not come much later until I was seventeen, which to me was a big relief. This approaching “end of the curve”, as Camus put it, was too clear to go unnoticed. I began to spend weeks at home with my mother, and the absence of my father—who went home only regularly to pick up clean clothes—got her to fall asleep at the couch near the window, waiting for my dad’s vintage Mercy Tiger to fill the garage when the day had given up. My heart broke ten times over when she rushed to the front door only to find out that the passing yellow light which filled our bedroom came from the headlamp of our neighbour’s car.
She would slowly and desperately walk back to the couch, still gazing at our carport. Sleep became unusual for her, and so was life. Love started to seem to me as not more or less than an idea. Family, a concept.
The exposure I had to the poignancy of pain came earlier than almost anyone my age. And until I was 17, I believed that I could take almost anything because I had seen my birth giver resign to long hurtful years. There was nobody in the world that could understand her pain other than I, not even a woman who goes through the same thing because since I was born I had become a punching bag (samsak in Indonesian, what my closest friends jokingly call me) to a woman who was confused by all the hardships life threw at her. The more suffering I take, the more I want to understand her. And it was only after my father left home for good that I stopped believing that her personal pains must be shared.
I am flying 40,000 feet high above the Asian waters as I’m writing, making my way halfway across the world from Indonesia to London via the elite Arabian capital Abu Dhabi, where skyscrapers meet money-making oil companies and people in expensive perfumes. From my hometown of Jakarta, where the killer coronavirus wreaks havoc, I fled through and above my grandparents’ native villages in Sumatra, then the lands of India and Pakistan before I reached the Arab.
I remember going to Mecca for pilgrimage when I was 15 and fell in love. The calmness of the city and sincere prayers struck me as unparalleled to any mundanity in the world. This collective passion to seek God and a little bit of truth warmed even my heart, which was and still is indifferent to things of this nature.
Right now, everything; islands, the ocean, properties, men and women, all gathered below like tiny specks of dust. Bearing little meaning to those who soared above them and had to part with them for a few hours. I looked down there and hoped for a new little life.
Just a month before flying out, I, now 24, was diagnosed with mild depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which frequently resulted in vivid nightmares I can recount in detail—like being in a plane crash that hit the deep waters thinking, “If I survive, I can be anything that I want”, or witnessing a street seller arrived at a bloody death. Two weeks after my unsurprising diagnosis, I woke up in a hospital bed and learned that I overdosed.
I just came back from Bandung, West Java, where my father now lives when my mother threw a tantrum. I was happy that my father and his new wife were willing to tag along to the airport, hoping to part with me before I settle in Britain to study and become a true journalist. “You don’t care about my feelings! Any of my feelings!”, she cried in the car before stopping by the laundromat. I remembered everything awful and downed four antidepressants—almost thrice the recommended dosage—when she picked up our clean mattresses. At that particular moment, I did not think about dying but would be okay if it came. In two hours, all feelings vanished, and desensitization made life much more tolerable: it put me in a place alien to the tangible world, a place of detachment. I was simply a passive observant divorced from what makes a life, and all emotions stopped until the day closed.
My mother’s lament dragged until the next day, two days before her birthday. I wished for us to spend it together, since she mentioned something about a celebratory dinner long before the day approached. Still weary of yesterday’s anger, she denied my wish to reconcile and said something about life “had always been better off” without me in place. Hurt, I soon entered a weird state of submissive anger and self-pity: I was begging for forgiveness while shouting uncontrollably, which to my mom was an act of disobedience only forgivable when the child prostates at, or kisses the feet of the parent whom they hurt (sajdah or sujud in Arabic).
Our past, which pretty much still permeates every aspect of our lives, stormed back when I curled up at her knees—an act of submission true to the Islamic teachings yet contradicts greatly to how I perceive freedom and dignity. If one has felt like her or his respect has been hurt, why does it have to be exchanged for the respect of another?
Every time my mother provokes me into submission, my knowledge and belief of man’s right to retaliate for his own good evaporate into thin air. Sometimes too, I would shout back and hurt her feelings; almost teaching her what a “good mother” is and how she is anything but. That moment, I became the past. And she would drop crazy bombs, like praying for me to “get knocked up outside marriage” or “land in prison” out loud, or lock me outside the house until she sees me on my knees. When we found ourselves in the heat of an argument on our way somewhere, she would take it personally when I got articulate in talking back, and say that I’m “just a face” before she leaves me off the road.
This pattern has structured our days since I was sixteen or seventeen. But there were other things too. When she came back to her senses after the storm(s), she would surprise me with things that I love: Pizza Hut, taking me to the mall, randomly asking me about my friends or cautiously inviting me to the movies—all of which I said yes without a second thought. Those who remain close to me would psychoanalyze her with sympathy, to which we incoherently drop many names and conclusions: “Bipolar disorder”, “near-sociopath”, “depression.” These things made sense. But to me, she’s beyond these boxes. And every time my dear ones mention the word “abusive”, parts of me deny that this was the case. I refused to be the subject of abuse. For, in my eyes, the subject was always her: a young woman who danced and crocheted, constantly abused by life.
Every time I look at her eyes, happy or sad, I see our old empty carport; a silent dining table after I turned 17; an empty gallon for which I used to pee; a dusty crochet art on the wall; a cheerful woman who wears her heart on her sleeve.
Every time I see our house, where only the two of us lived, I see the dysfunctional window which we took turns damaging or the eyes of my late grandmother who made me promise I would turn out well-adjusted. I did.
It was 10 p.m. in Western Indonesian Time when I boarded the plane for the UK to claim my scholarship, and just when I received a short text message under a heartbreaking picture. Translated to English, it wrote: “Tonight is the first night of your absence. On my bed, I laid a pair of outfits you wore yesterday in hopes of easing the silence.” It was a picture of my overworn nightdress, right next to where she would be sleeping.
I turned off my phone and thought of the lovely woman who took pleasure in life, and who had been battered down with pain beyond her perseverance, for the remainder of the flight—Still wishing to get to know her a world away from where she is.
